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Critical Approaches to Shakespeare: Shakespeare for All Time Marta Cerezo Moreno

Filología Inglesa

Marta Cerezo Moreno

CRITICAL APPROACHES TO SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE FOR ALL TIME

UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE EDUCACIÓN A DISTANCIA

CRITICAL APPROACHES TO SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE FOR ALL TIME     Quedan rigurosamente prohibidas, sin la autorización escrita de los titulares del Copyright, bajo las sanciones establecidas en las leyes, la reproducción total o parcial de esta obra por cualquier medio o procedimiento, comprendidos la reprografía y el tratamiento informático, y la distribución de ejemplares de ella mediante alquiler o préstamos públicos. © Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia Madrid, 20 WWWUNEDESPUBLICACIONES © Marta Cerezo Moreno ISBNELECTRÆNICO: 978-84-362-  %diciónDIGITAL:FEBRERo de 20

Mi más sincero agradecimiento a la Dra. Ángeles de la Concha Muñoz por su constante ayuda y acertados consejos durante la realización de este libro.

CONTENTS

GENERAL INTRODUCTION .......................................................................

13

PART 1 SHAKESPEAREAN CRITICAL HISTORY Unit 1 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO SHAKESPEARE. FROM BEN JONSON (1572/3-1637) TO E. M. W. TILLYARD (1889-1962) Introduction ........................................................................................ Aims and Objectives ................................................................... Study Guidelines .........................................................................

19 19 20

1.1. The seventeenth century: Neo-classical criticism .....................

21

1.2. The eighteenth century: Editorial criticism .............................. 1.2.1. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) ..........................................

26 28

1.3. The nineteenth century: The Romantics ................................... 1.3.1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) .............................

30 31

1.4. The nineteenth century: The Victorians .................................... 1.4.1. Edward Dowden (1843-1913) .......................................... 1.4.2. A. C. Bradley (1851-1935) ................................................

33 34 34

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CRITICAL APPROACHES TO SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE FOR ALL TIME

1.5. First half of the twentieth-century ............................................. 1.5.1. The emphasis on poetry and language: Wilson Knight, Caroline Spurgeon, Wolfgang Clemen ............................ 1.5.2. The play as theatrical artifice: Harley Granville-Barker and Muriel C. Bradbrook ................................................. 1.5.3. The Historical Approach: Hardin Craig, Theodore Spencer and E. M. W. Tillyard ....................................................... 1.5.4. New Criticism: Cleanth Brooks (1906-1994) ..................

38

Recommended Bibliography ............................................................. Recommended Websites .................................................................... Key Terms ........................................................................................... Self-Assessment Questions ................................................................. Complementary Exercise ...................................................................

55 55 57 58 58

38 45 48 52

Unit 2 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO SHAKESPEARE. SECOND HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Introduction ........................................................................................ Aims and Objectives ........................................................................... Study Guidelines ................................................................................

61 61 62

2.1. 2.2. 2.3. 2.4.

Structuralism .............................................................................. 65 Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction .................................... 72 New Historicism and Cultural Materialism .............................. 80 Gender Studies ............................................................................ 97 2.4.1. Feminism .......................................................................... 97 2.4.2. Gay Studies ....................................................................... 145 2.5. Post-colonialism ......................................................................... 158 Recommended Bibliography ............................................................. Recommended Websites .................................................................... Key Terms ........................................................................................... Self-Assessment Questions ................................................................. Complementary Exercise ...................................................................

171 172 173 175 176

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CONTENTS

PART 2 THE SHAKESPEAREAN STAGE: HAMLET AND MACBETH Unit 3 HAMLET Introduction ........................................................................................ 181 Aims and Objectives ........................................................................... 181 Study Guidelines ................................................................................ 182 3.1. Hamlet: Historical and Literary Contexts .................................. 185 3.1.1. Date ................................................................................... 185 3.1.2. Main Sources of Hamlet .................................................. 191 3.2. Critical Approaches to Hamlet ................................................... 197 3.2.1. Some critical approaches from the eighteenth to the first half of the twentieth century ........................................... 198 3.2.2. Contemporary Critical Approaches to Hamlet: Catherine Belsey, Leonard Tennenhouse and Elaine Showalter ...... 208 3.3. Textual Analysis .......................................................................... 3.3.1. Hamlet and Metatheatricality ......................................... 3.3.2. The Ghost ......................................................................... 3.3.3. Ophelia and Hamlet ......................................................... 3.3.4. Hamlet’s World .................................................................

224 224 231 238 247

Recommended Bibliography ............................................................. Recommended Websites .................................................................... Key Terms ........................................................................................... Self-Assessment Questions ................................................................. Further Knowledge Exercise .............................................................

255 255 256 256 257

Unit 4 MACBETH Introduction ........................................................................................ 261 Aims and Objectives ........................................................................... 261 Study Guidelines ................................................................................ 262

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CRITICAL APPROACHES TO SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE FOR ALL TIME

4.1. Macbeth: Historical and Literary Contexts ................................ 4.1.1. Date ................................................................................... 4.1.2. The interest in Macbeth’s story during Shakespeare’s time 4.1.3. Main Sources of Macbeth ................................................

265 265 268 270

4.2. Critical Approaches to Macbeth ................................................. 274 4.2.1. Some critical approaches from the seventeenth to the first half of the twentieth century ................................... 275 4.2.2. Contemporary Critical Approaches to Macbeth: Janet Adelman and Alan Sinfield .............................................. 283 4.3. Textual Analysis .......................................................................... 296 Recommended Bibliography ............................................................. Recommended Websites .................................................................... Key Terms ........................................................................................... Self-Assessment Questions ................................................................. Further Knowledge Exercise .............................................................

322 322 323 324 324

GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................... 327

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Critical Approaches to Shakespeare: Shakespeare for All Time is mainly addressed to those students who are interested in the works of William Shakespeare and in Literary Theory applied to Shakespearean Studies, especially to those who have already taken Literatura Inglesa I. This book offers, first, an overview of the main critical approaches to Shakespeare’s work from the seventeenth century to the present, and, second, a detailed analysis of two of the playwright’s most important tragedies: Hamlet and Macbeth. The book is divided into two main parts. The first one is called Shakespearean Critical History. Unit 1 presents critical approaches to Shakespeare from the seventeenth century to the first half of the twentieth century. Unit 2 focuses on Shakespearean critical studies of the second half of the twentieth century. Both units deal with the principal critical lines of study of Shakespeare’s literary production. You will be encouraged to pay attention to the evolution of critical ideas about Shakespeare’s works throughout history. After describing the main tenets of each critical school and their main representatives, a section called Selection of Texts is included. This section presents critical fragments about a certain Shakespearean play, and occassionally a sonnet, written by the most influential critics of each critical approach. We will select the most important critical concepts of each fragment and their application to Shakespeare’s production. These critical fragments deal with plays that you have either already read or studied for the course Literatura Inglesa I. In those cases in which the play is unknown to you, a summary of the plot is given. The second part of this book is called The Shakespearean Stage: Hamlet and Macbeth. Units 3 and 4 concentrate on exhaustive studies of Hamlet and Macbeth respectively. Both units are divided into three sections. The

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CRITICAL APPROACHES TO SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE FOR ALL TIME

first one deals with the historical and literary contexts of the plays and it focuses mainly on the dates of the plays’ composition and their sources. The second section explores the most important critical ideas about each play from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. The third section, called Textual Analysis, offers a close reading of the plays by paying especial attention to the way language is used by Shakespeare. There are several basic recommendations that you should follow in order to assimilate the contents of this book correctly. First, you should revise units VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII and XIII of Literatura inglesa hasta el siglo XVII (2002) that you used for the course Literatura Inglesa I. They are all devoted either to English Renaissance poetry and theatre, to critical approaches to Shakespeare’s production or to the study of Shakespeare’s tragedies, comedies and history plays. Many of the footnotes that you will find in this book will direct you to pages of Literatura inglesa hasta el siglo XVII where you will find complementary information. Remember that the glossary of this book could also be of interest to you at certain points. Second, the editions of Hamlet and Macbeth that are used in Units 3 and 4 are the ones by Philip Edwards and A. R. Braumuller from The New Cambridge Shakespeare. You will find all the information about these editions either in the sections of Recommended Bibliography after each unit or in the section on General Bibliography. Third, read carefully the introduction to each unit. It is essential for its correct study. Fourth, pay attention to all the footnotes in this book. Their information, in many cases, is as important as that which you find in the main text. Fifth, the section called Key Terms gives you a list of the main concepts, themes, critical approaches, critics and/or images studied in each unit. If you are able to give a brief and concise account of what these terms refer to, you have properly assimilated the contents of the unit. Finally, the section on evaluation is not compulsory. If you decide to answer the questions, remember that you have to answer one of the three questions in the section called Self-Assessment Questions. You can also answer the one in the section called Complementary Exercise in Units 1 and 2. In Units 3 and 4 there is also a section called Further Knowledge Exercise. You have to choose either to comment on the text of Hamlet or the one of Macbeth, not both. Though this evaluation is not obligatory, you are expected to read the answers to these questions which will be provided in due course since they will show you what type of answers and commentaries will be demanded in the exam.

PART 1 SHAKESPEAREAN CRITICAL HISTORY

Unit 1 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO SHAKESPEARE. FROM BEN JONSON (1572/3-1637) TO E. M. W. TILLYARD (1889-1962)

PROGRAMME 1.1. The seventeenth century: Neo-classical criticism. 1.2. The eighteenth century: Editorial criticism. 1.2.1. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784). 1.3. The nineteenth century: The Romantics. 1.3.1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). 1.4. The nineteenth century: The Victorians. 1.4.1. Edward Dowden (1843-1913). 1.4.2. A. C. Bradley (1851-1935). 1.5. First half of the twentieth-century. 1.5.1. The emphasis on poetry and language: Wilson Knight, Caroline Spurgeon, Wolfgang Clemen. 1.5.2. The play as theatrical artifice: Harley Granville-Barker and Muriel C. Bradbrook. 1.5.3. The Historical Approach: Hardin Craig, Theodore Spencer and E. M. W. Tillyard. 1.5.4. New Criticism: Cleanth Brooks (1906-1994).

INTRODUCTION Aims and Objectives Before focusing our study on the main critical approaches to Shakespeare during the second half of the twentieth century, it is advisable for you to become acquainted with the main lines of study devoted to Shakespeare since the seventeenth century. The familiarity with leading Shakespearean critical figures such as Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bradley or Wilson Knight is essential in order to acquire a necessary overview of the Shakespearean critical world. This unit aims to show you how, since the seventeenth century, Shakespeare’s artistic legacy has been appropriated and adapted according to the conception of literature of each age and of each critic. The multiplicity of critical lines

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CRITICAL APPROACHES TO SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE FOR ALL TIME

shows us, not just the various ways of approaching Shakespeare’s texts, but also how the rich complexity of his art is able to evoke different responses over the centuries.

Study Guidelines Throughout the different sections of this unit there are recurrent themes such as the ideas that the critics have about Shakespearean characterisation, the use of the classical unities or the relevance of imagery. You are encouraged to make constant links between sections and between critics belonging to different periods, or even to the same critical view, in order to establish as many differences and similarities as possible. By doing so, you will acquire a more general and adequate sense of the development of critical views on Shakespeare. The Selection of Texts section is essential in order to complement the explanations about each critical line and to help us to make those links more easily. The book by D. F. Bratchell, Shakespearean Tragedy (1990), is strongly recommended. In it you can find very useful introductions to all the critical approaches analysed in this unit. Also, you can find additional information about most of the critics and texts mentioned in the unit in the Recommended Websites section.

1.1. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: NEO-CLASSICAL CRITICISM The seventeenth century does not offer many critical writings on Shakespeare’s works. However, it is necessary to know the Critical stance of authors and critics such as Ben Jonson (1572/3-1637), John Dryden (16311700) or Thomas Rymer (1641-1713), since they constitute the critical basis from which the more prolific eighteenth-century Shakespearean criticism would arise. These critics abide by neo-classical norms against which drama is measured during that century. Neo-classicism revered the Classics and the tradition and put value on literary rules, conventions and decorum. These critics describe the prescriptions of what poetry should be by implementing Aristotelian and Horatian dramatic rules. In 1623, Ben Jonson wrote “To the memory of my beloved, The Author Mr. William Shakespeare, and what he left us.” 1 In this poem, prefixed to the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s works, Jonson defines Shakespeare as a poet “not of an age, but for all time.” At the same time, he also declares that the playwright’s work clearly shows how he knew “Small Latin and less Greek.” Jonson’s famous statement turned into the starting point of a scholarly debate about Shakespeare’s cultural background that has lasted till nowadays. In Discoveries (1640) Jonson clarifies his view about Shakespeare’s work. On the one hand, he denounces frequent careless writing and the neglecting of Aristotelian classical dramatic rules, a fact that would be widely debated during the eighteenth century. On the other hand, he finally admits that, despite all his irregularities, Shakespeare’s literary virtues surpassed his vices. The playwright is described by Jonson as “indeed, Honest, and of an open and free Nature, had an Excellent Fancy, brave Notions, and gentle Expressions; wherein he flow’d with that Facility, that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopp’d” (in Rowe 1709: vol. I, 1

See Selection of Texts 1.

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CRITICAL APPROACHES TO SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE FOR ALL TIME

xxxix). As we can see, in describing the Shakespearean universe, Jonson already uses terms such as “Nature” and “Fancy”, which were closely related to concepts such as verisimilitude, inspiration, intuition and knowledge of the human condition.2 Such terms will be central in the critical evaluations of the eighteenth century, as we will see in the next section. John Dryden’s criticism is clearly influenced by the social and theatrical changes of its time. After the civil war, the closing of the theatres and the Restoration, Dryden is immersed in a literary period greatly inclined towards French and classical theatre.3 In Of Dramatick Poesie (1668), Dryden also sets the basis for the central critical positions during the eighteenth century. First of all he mentions Shakespeare’s “Images of Nature”, that is, “when he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too” (1985: 197). As regards Shakespeare’s reading of the Classics, Dryden points out that “he needed not the spectacles of Books to read Nature; he look’d inwards, and found her there” (197).4 But in Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy (1679), Dryden also finds flaws in the playwright’s works, which are motivated by “the fury of his fancy [that] often transported him, beyond the bounds of Judgment” (in Bratchell 1990: 28). Dryden locates these blemishes mainly in Shakespeare’s sometimes obscure, unintelligible and over-metaphorical rhetoric and considers the language used by the Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights as of an inferior quality to that of his age. Such an intellectual superiority would also be asserted by Shakespearean critics during the eighteenth century. But his interest in Shakespearean drama led him to adapt three of his plays: The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island (1670), Troilus and Cressida or Truth Found too Late (1679) and All For Love (1678), a new version of Antony and Cleopatra, acclaimed as his best play. 5 Last of all, Thomas Rymer’s Short View of Tragedy (1693) is conceived as an attack against Shakespeare’s writings.6 According to Rymer, whose critical work presents a mixture of obtuseness and perceptiveness, the correctness of a piece of work hinges on the presence of classical rules: The English want neither genius nor language for so great a work. And, certainly, had our Authors began with Tragedy, as Sophocles and Euripides left it; had they either built on the same foundation, or after their model; we might e’re this day have seen Poetry in greater perfection, 2 3 4 5 6

The concept “Nature” is more explicitly defined in section 1.2. See Selection of Texts 3. See Selection of Texts 2. See Recommended Bibliography and Recommended Web Sites. See Selection of Texts 4.

CRITICAL APPROACHES TO SHAKESPEARE...

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and boasted such Monuments of wit as Greece or Rome never knew in all their glory. (in Smith 1928: 9-10)7

Rymer is constantly alluding to Shakespeare’s dramatic incompetence. Accordingly, he harshly censures the fact that Shakespeare does not follow the classical unities of time, action and place.8 He also condemns the absence of a moral scope in certain Shakespearean characters. Rymer rejects the blending of comical and tragic elements in his plays. And finally he censures the linguistic irregularities that he often finds when analysing the texts. Though in a softer tone, all these characteristics will be highlighted by the eighteenth-century criticism.

SELECTION OF TEXTS Observe in text 1 how Ben Jonson’s commendatory verse for the First Folio reveres Shakespeare’s art. The playwright’s genius will eternally survive in his works. Despite his deficient classical background, Shakespeare’s talent is said to exceed the artistic abilities of his contemporaries. Even ancient authors would admire his work. Shakespeare is portrayed as a symbol of national pride. In text 2 John Dryden also argues that, despite his narrow education and his literary flaws, Shakespeare’s innate literary greatness is evident. In text 3 the critic follows the Aristotelian definition of tragedy. He approves the use of classical unities and, as an example of Shakespeare’s abandonment of classical rules, makes reference to the absence of the unity of action in Shakespeare’s history plays. Dryden also rejects Shakespeare’s use of both tragic and comic elements in one play. In text 4 Thomas Rymer dismissively comments on the inconsistency of Shakespeare’s characters in Othello. Following the Aristotelian division of tragedy into six parts: plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle and melody, Rymer concludes that the deficient traits of characters such as Iago or Desdemona result in the absence of noble thoughts and of an appropriate diction, that is, the expression of such thoughts, in the play.

7 8

“Want” in this context means “lack”. With the exception of The Tempest.

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CRITICAL APPROACHES TO SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE FOR ALL TIME

1. Ben Jonson, “To the memory of my beloved, The Author Mr. William Shakespeare, and what he left us” (1623) I therefore will begin. Soul of the age! The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage! My Shakespeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie A little further, to make thee a room: Thou art a monument without a tomb, And art alive still while thy book doth live And we have wits to read and praise to give. That I not mix thee so, my brain excuses, I mean with great, but disproportion’d Muses, For if I thought my judgment were of years, I should commit thee surely with thy peers, And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine, Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe’s mighty line. And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek, From thence to honour thee, I would not seek For names; but call forth thund’ring {AE}schylus, Euripides and Sophocles to us; Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,9 To life again, to hear thy buskin tread,10 And shake a stage; or, when thy socks were on,11 Leave thee alone for the comparison Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come. Triumph, my Britain! Thou hast one to show To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe. He was not of an age, but for all time! (17-43) 2. John Dryden, Of Dramatick Poesie (1668) To begin then with Shakespeare. He was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously but luckily; when he describes anything, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards and found her there. I cannot say he is everywhere alike; were he so, I 9

“Him of Cordova dead” is Seneca. “Buskin” is a high-heeled boot, worn by classical actors of tragedy. 11 “Socks” refers to comedies. A “soccus” was the low shoe worn by the Roman comedian. 10

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should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great when some great occasion is presented to him. No man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets. (1985: 197-98) 3. John Dryden, Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy (1679) Tragedy is thus defined by Aristotle ... It is an imitation of one entire, great and probable action; not told, but represented; which, by moving in us fear and pity, is conducive to the purging of those two passions in our minds. More largely thus: tragedy describes or paints an action, which action must have all the properties named above. First, it must be one or single; that is, it must not be a history of one man’s life, suppose of Alexander the Great, or Julius Caesar, but one single action of theirs. This condemns all Shakespeare’s historical plays, which are rather chronicles represented, than tragedies; and all double action of plays ... The natural reason of this rule is plain; for two different independent actions distract the attention and concernment of the audience, and consequently destroy the intention of the poet; if his business be to move terror and pity, and one of his actions be comical, the other tragical, the former will divert the people, and utterly make void his greater purpose. Therefore, as in perspective, so in tragedy, here must be a point of sight in which all the lines terminate; otherwise the eye wanders, and the work is false. (in Bratchell 1990: 24) 4. Thomas Rymer’s, Short View of Tragedy (1693) Shakespeare knew his Character of Iago was inconsistent. In this very play he pronounces: If thou dost deliver more or less than Truth, / Thou art no Souldier. This he knew; but to entertain the Audience with something new he would pass upon us a close, dissembling, false, insinuating rascal instead of an open-hearted, frank, plaindealing Souldier, a character constantly worn by them for some thousand of years in the World ... Nor is our Poet more discreet in his Desdemona. He had chosen a Souldier for his Knave; And a Venetian Lady is to be the Fool. This Senators Daughter runs away to a Carriers Inn, the Sagittary, with a Black-amoor; is so sooner wedded to him, but the very night she Beds him is importuning and teizing him for a young smockfac’d Lieutenant, Cassio. And tho’ she perceives the Moor Jealous of Cassio, yet will she not forbear, but still rings Cassio, Cassio, in both his Ears ... So there can be nothing in the characters, either for the profit or to delight an Audience. The third thing to be consider’d is the Thoughts. But from such characters we need not expect many that are either true, or fine, or noble. And without these, that is, without sense or meaning, the fourth part of the Tragedy, which is the expression, can hardly deserve to be treated on distinctly. The verse rumbling in our Ears are of good use to help off the action. In the Neighing of an Horse, or in the growling of a Mastiff, there is a meaning, there is as lively expression, and, may I say, more humanity, than many times in the Tragical flights of Shakespear. (1956: 135-36)

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CRITICAL APPROACHES TO SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE FOR ALL TIME

1.2. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: EDITORIAL CRITICISM The eighteenth century is the age of the major editions of Shakespeare’s complete works. The main editors and the dates of their editions are: Nicholas Rowe (1709, 2nd 1709, 3rd 1714). Alexander Pope (1723, 2nd 1728). Lewis Theobald (1733, 2nd 1740). Sir Thomas Hanmer (1744). William Warburton (1747). Samuel Johnson (1765). Edward Capell (1768). Edmund Malone (1790). George Steevens (1793). They were the founders of Shakespeare textual criticism. Even now we can see their names mentioned in annotated editions of Shakespeare’s plays. Their work consisted of organizing the playwright’s texts by establishing what words were actually Shakespeare’s and by finding out textual mistakes and how these could have been made. When a play was being printed, compositors were writing from manuscripts that were difficult to understand. They could have been reading the copy very rapidly and a word might have slipped in. Sometimes they could have also misread the punctuation. The editor had to detect those mistakes in the texts. Act and scene division also derive from the early editions since, in the Quartos and the Folios, some acts are not divided into scenes.12 Additionally, sometimes the editor had to decide who said certain lines in the play since some of them appeared erroneously assigned. The same was the case with the stage directions.13 During the eighteenth century textual analysis is intimately intermingled with literary criticism since the editors also analyse the dramatic constituents of the play. Their critical approaches to Shakespearean tragedy present a mixture of reverence and condemnation. Shakespeare’s plays are considered as products of literary inspiration and intuition. It is believed that his genius, and not his cultural background, 12 See the difference between Folio edition and Quarto edition in Literatura inglesa hasta el siglo XVII (2002: 285). 13 In The Drama Handbook. A Guide to Reading Plays, Johan Lennard and Mary Luckhurst explain what a stage direction is in these terms: “in printed dramatic texts an instruction for action or delivery. Explicit stage-directions are distinguished from dialogue by italics and/or brackets; embedded stage-directions are implicit in an actor’s part, as ‘They kneel’ is when Volumnia says ‘Down Ladies: let us shame him with our knees’ (Coriolanus 5.3.169)” (2002: 364). The translation into Spanish would be “acotación”.

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propels him to write plays that faithfully reflect the outer world. The eighteenth century observes in Shakespeare’s works a clear association between art and life. The major feature in the playwright’s stagecraft is their close relationship to what these critics call “Nature”, namely, the real world as it is. “Nature” turns into an important term in the eighteenthcentury critical thought since it referred to the entire divinely ordered universe. It invoked concepts that alluded to the knowledge of human nature, to common humanity, to common thoughts and feelings, that is, to a common core of shared human experience. For these critics, the greatness of Shakespeare’s genius is such that it exceeds nature’s power through an exceptional imitation of reality that turns Shakespearean characters into human beings with whom the audience intimately identify. Alexander Pope (1688-1744), a major poet of the age, states: If ever any Author deserved the name of Original, it was Shakespeare. Homer itself drew not his art so immediately from the fountains of Nature ... The Poetry of Shakespeare was Inspiration indeed: he is not so much an Imitator as an Instrument of Nature; and ’tis not so just to say that he speaks from her as that she speaks thro’ him. (in Vickers Vol. II 1995: 403)

But on the contrary, and following Jonson, Dryden and Rymer’s neoclassical position, some of these critics find errors in Shakespeare’s plays that, in their opinion, infringe the literary decorum observed at the time. In reference to Aristotelian and Horatian dramatic rules, they once more condemn the absence of the three unities; they attack the intermingling of comic and tragic scenes; they frequently observe a lack of moral purpose in the plays; and they do not find a clear correspondence between language and state of affairs in certain scenes. To most eighteenth-century critics these literary flaws were the indication of Shakespeare’s ignorance of the Classics and the Aristotelian definition of tragedy. For example, in 1747, Farmer publishes An Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare, an all-embracing study of Shakespeare’s classical education. Farmer concludes that Shakespeare’s sources were mainly translations. Critics such as Rowe, Theobald or Johnson defended such a posture. On the other hand, Gildon, Pope or Capell considered that Shakespeare was trained to read the Classics. But they all boasted about their intellectual superiority by pointing out the dramatic ignorance shown by Elizabethan and Jacobean actors, audience and playwrights. To Pope, for example, this lack of cultural background turned the actors into “meer Players, not Gentleman of the stage” that “were intirely depriv’d of those advantages they now enjoy in the familiar conversation of our Nobility, and an intimacy (not to say dearness) with people of the first condition” (in Vickers Vol. II 1995: 412-13).

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CRITICAL APPROACHES TO SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE FOR ALL TIME

1.2.1. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) As a poet, novelist, critic and biographer, Samuel Johnson was the major literary figure of his time. In 1765 he wrote a Preface to The Plays of William Shakespeare. Like most critics of his age, he denounces the fact that Shakespeare “sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct, that he seems to write without any moral purpose” (1998: 105). He also censures the playwright’s pompous diction which hinders the development of the action as a whole. His frequent use of puns is considered as one of Shakespeare’s central literary errors that Johnson defines in his famous statement as “the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world and was content to lose it” (107). Also, as most critics during that century pointed out, Johnson considers that Shakespearean characters are “the genuine progeny of common humanity” (98). To Johnson, Shakespeare “has no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men, who act and speak as the reader thinks he should himself have spoken or acted on the same occasion” (98).14 But though Johnson follows certain neo-classical rules, he clearly questions some of them. His attitude towards the use of the classical unities, and the mixture of tragic and comic elements in the same play, differs from the general position of many critics that closely followed neoclassical directions. Johnson’s unorthodox position rejects the idea that dramatic unities are essential in a play in order to make it plausible to the spectator. He believes that drama is not synonymous with reality and that “the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage and the players are only players .... The delight of tragedy proceeds from our consciousness of fiction; if we thought murders and treasons real, they would please no more” (110-11). To Johnson, Shakespeare’s genius lies mainly in his literary openmindedness and the abandonment of such rules.15 Johnson also opposes the general criticism of his time by accepting the Shakespearean confluence of genres. According to the neo-classic view, the change of dramatic tone within a play, from tragic to comic and viceversa, blocks the natural development of human passions that drama should trigger in the audience. It also delays the development of the action as a whole and its final dramatic effect. But to Johnson, the combination of tragic and comic elements helps to make the play instructing and entertaining. As he states, “all pleasure consists in variety” (102).16 Also, 14 15 16

See Selection of Texts 1. See Selection of Texts 2. See Selection of Texts 3.

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Johnson observes how, through the scenic manipulation and variety of dramatic situations, Shakespeare makes the spectator feel a multifarious range of feelings, but never indifference. SELECTION OF TEXTS In text 1, Johnson describes Shakespeare’s works as truthful reflections of real life. Notice Johnson’s description of Shakespearean characters as holding the essence of humankind. In text 2, Johnson ponders on the use of classical unities. Though he acknowledges his ideas would trigger off critical attacks on the part of his contemporaries, he argues that the unities of time and place are not basic to enhance the artistic value of a play. Indeed, their absence offers variety and instruction to the text. In text 3, Johnson once more alludes to the instructive quality of art and reflects on the mixture of comic and tragic elements in a single play. He accepts the artistic interest of what he calls “mingled drama” since the fusion of laughter and sorrow makes the play more faithful to life.

Samuel Johnson, Preface to The Plays of William Shakespeare (1765)

Text 1 Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature, the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life. His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions: they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find. His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species. (1998: 98) Text 2 Whether Shakespeare knew the unities, and rejected them by design, or deviated from them by happy ignorance, it is, I think, impossible to decide, and useless to inquire. We may reasonably suppose, that, when he rose to notice, he did not want

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the counsels and admonitions of scholars and critics, and that he at last deliberately persisted in a practice, which he might have begun by chance. As nothing is essential to the fable, but unity of action, and as the unities of time and place arise evidently from false assumptions, and by circumscribing the extent of the drama, lessen its variety, I cannot think it much to be lamented, that they were not known by him, or not observed ... Such violations of rules merely positive, become the comprehensive genius of Shakespeare ... Yet when I speak thus slightly of dramatic rules, I cannot but recollect how much wit and learning may be produced against me ... the result of my inquiries, in which it would be ludicrous to boast of impartiality, is that the unitites of time and place are not essential to a just drama, that, though they may sometimes conduce to pleasure, they are always to be sacrificed to the nobler beauties of variety and instruction. (1998: 111-12) Text 3 Shakespeare has united the powers of exciting laughter and sorrow not only in one mind but in one composition. Almost all his plays are divided between serious and ludicrous characters, and in the successive evolutions of the design, sometimes produce seriousness and sorrow, and sometimes levity and laughter. That this is a practice contrary to the rules of criticism will be readily allowed; but there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature. The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing. That the mingled drama may convey all the instruction of tragedy or comedy cannot be denied, because it includes both in its alternations of exhibitions, and approaches nearer than either to the appearance of life, by showing how great machinations and slender designs may promote or obviate one another, and the high and the low co-operate in the general system by unavoidable concatenation. (1998: 101-102)

1.3. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: THE ROMANTICS By the end of the eighteenth century several critical essays indicated that Shakespeare’s genius was primarily made evident in his superb characterisation. Two of those essays were Maurice Morgann’s “An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff” (1777) and Thomas Whately’s “Remarks of Some of the Characters of Shakespeare” (1785). Both critics forget about the absence of neo-classical rules in Shakespeare’s plays and they develop an idea that critics such as Pope, Guthrie, Theobald, Gildon or Johnson had already pointed out. That is, that Shakespeare’s characters, as Whately remarks, “are masterly copies from nature; differing each from the other, and animated as the originals though correct to a scrupulous precision” (in Bratchell 1990: 42). Essays, such as Whately’s and Morgann’s, set the basis for a critical approach to Shakespearean tragedy that would be fully developed by the Romantics during the nineteenth century. The character would turn into the central element of

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the critical analysis and would be envisioned as a real human being with whom the spectator could easily identify. The main Shakespearean Romantic critics are A.W. Schlegel and his On Dramatic Art and Literature (1815); William Hazlitt and his work Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) and his Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare (1818).

1.3.1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the most excellent British poets of the Romantic era, was also an insightful critic. “The stage in Shakespeare’s time was a naked room with a blanket for a curtain; but he made it a field for monarchs” (1985: 232). This statement, from his influential Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare (1818), exemplifies Coleridge’s reverence for Shakespeare’s works. Coleridge rejects the neo-classical idea that Shakespeare’s work was the product of mere inspiration, intuition and ignorance of rules. He opposes those who describe Shakespeare as “‘wild’, ‘irregular’, ‘pure child of nature’” (236) since he does not imitate the Classics. To Coleridge, only reverential criticism is valid. As an obvious response to the eighteenth-century emphasis on classical unities and attacks against Shakespeare’s use of them, Coleridge observes in Shakespeare’s works what he considers a more important law of unity. He calls it a unity of feeling, which “has its foundations, not in the factitious necessity of custom, but in nature itself” (232). Coleridge argues that this unity pervades Shakespeare’s works. The critic also describes these works as organic. Coleridge compares poetry with a living body that “must of necessity circumscribe itself by rules” and “is of necessity an organised one; and what is organization but the connection of parts in and for a whole, so that each part is at once end and means?” (239). Coleridge concludes that Shakespeare’s works have their own form and are not lawless. But he distinguishes between organic and mechanic form. The form is mechanic when a “pre-determined form” is given to the work. The form is organic when the work is generated by the poet’s “Imagination.” This form is drawn from within. It “is innate; it shapes as it develops from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form” (239). That is, the organic form is governed by the essence, the intrinsic quality of a thing and all its parts grow according to an internal law. Coleridge observes in the playwright’s plays and poems a clear intellectual work, so close to human nature that he compares Shakespeare’s creative process with the working of the human mind. For Coleridge

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“Imagination” in Shakespeare is the way the playwright manipulates images in the plays in order to modify and create new images, ideas and emotions. The fusion of such concepts is always aimed to provoke a certain effect. Coleridge compares such blending of images with the functioning of human mental operations provoked by certain stimuli, feelings and emotions. Coleridge describes the playwright’s characters “like those in life, to be inferred by the reader, not told to him” (235).17 His works and characters are the result not of mere observation but also of the playwright’s meditation. The immediate consequence of meditation is the creation of characters that are “at once true to nature” (231) and reflections of the playwright’s wisdom, intuition and, as Coleridge remarks, “oceanic mind” (230). The plot is interesting when it affects characterisation. Therefore, characters are, according to Coleridge, crucial to the play whereas plot is “a mere canvas, no more” (234). Greatly influenced by A.W. Schlegel, Coleridge considers that the reader must analyse the characters’ psychological conflicts in order to find the real motive of such disorder. To Coleridge, Shakespeare’s poetry is, at the same time, philosophical since it reflects the constituents of the entire human universe and of the human mind.18 The critic believes that Shakespeare’s poetry provokes an emotional and, at the same time, psychological effect that helps the reader to discover his or her real self and helps us all to observe our inward nature. As opposed to the ancient stage and its use of the classical unities, which, according to Coleridge, are mainly addressed to the senses, Shakespearean drama excites the imagination, the reason and the passions.

SELECTION OF TEXTS As Johnson already argued, in Text 1, Coleridge asserts that Shakespeare’s genius lies on his ability to reflect nature, human passions and affections. Characters resemble real human beings. In Text 2, Hamlet is analysed following what Coleridge terms as mental philosophy. He analyses Hamlet’s behaviour according to the mechanisms of the human mind. To Coleridge, mental health depends on an equilibrium between impressions from outward objects and the inner workings of the mind. In Hamlet, this balance is disturbed.

17 18

See Selection of Texts 1. See Selection of Texts 2.

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare (1818)

Text 1 Lastly, in Shakespeare the heterogeneous is united, as it is in nature. You must not suppose a pressure or passion always acting on or in the character; – passion in Shakespeare is that by which the individual is distinguished from others, not that which makes a different kind of him. Shakespeare followed the main march of the human affections. He entered into no analysis of the passions or faiths of men, but assured himself that such and such passions and faiths were grounded in our common nature, and not in the mere accidents of ignorance or disease. This is an important consideration, and constitutes our Shakespeare the morning star, the guide and the pioneer, of true philosophy. (1985: 235) Text 2 I believe the character of Hamlet may be traced to Shakespeare’s deep and accurate science in mental philosophy. Indeed, that this character must have some connection with the common fundamental laws of our nature may be assumed from the fact, that Hamlet has been the darling of every country in which the literature of England has been fostered. In order to understand him, it is essential that we should reflect on the constitution of our minds. Man is distinguished from the brute animals in proportion as thought prevails over sense: but in the healthy processes of the mind, a balance is constantly maintained between the impressions from outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect; – for if there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty, man thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action ... In Hamlet he seems to have wished to exemplify the moral necessity of a due balance between our attention to the objects of our senses, and our meditation on the workings of our minds, – an equilibrium between the real and the imaginary worlds. In Hamlet this balance is disturbed: his thoughts, and the images of his fancy, are far more vivid than his actual perceptions, and his very perceptions, instantly passing through the medium of his contemplations, acquire, as they pass, a form and a colour not naturally their own. Hence we see a great, an almost enormous, intellectually activity, and a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it, with all its symptoms and accompanying qualities. (1985: 272)

1.4. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: THE VICTORIANS The most important landmarks in Shakespearean criticism written during the Victorian age were: Edward Dowden’s Shakespeare: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art (1875) and A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy (1904).

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1.4.1. Edward Dowden (1843-1913) As well as being a biographer and poet, Edward Dowden was also an influential Irish critic. Shakespeare: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art (1875) is the product of a reconsideration of several lectures turned into the first study of Shakespeare’s artistic development that used a chronological and biographical method of analysis. In his examination, Dowden links Shakespeare’s personality and his evolution as a writer and considers 1590, 1600 and 1610 as crucial dates in the playwright’s life and, consequently, dramatic career. Like the Romantics, Dowden continues to explore characters’ feelings and thoughts as real human traits and his examinations have a clear biographical touch.

1.4.2. A. C. Bradley (1851-1935) A. C. Bradley was considered the foremost British Shakespeare academic of his age and Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) the most notable piece of critical study about Shakespearean tragedy from the end of the Victorian time. In the first chapter of his critical analysis, “The Substance of Shakespearean Tragedy”, Bradley elucidates his definition of tragedy in Shakespeare. According to the critic, Shakespeare initially presents in his plays a moral order in which there can be found a clear struggle between good and evil. Shakespearean heroes are originally presented as essential and positive constituents of such order. However, the fall of these heroes, due to their own errors and not to external forces such as the intervention of Fortune or Fate, bring about the hegemony of evil, chaos and disorder in the play described by Bradley as “an intestinal struggle” (1992: 29).19 Such struggle will conclude after a period of “self-torture and self-waste” (30). That is, the restoration of the initial order will come about after the destruction of evil but also after the death of the hero who is at first depicted as the image of steadiness and control. According to Bradley, “there is no tragedy in its expulsion of evil: the tragedy is that this involves the waste of good” (29). Bradley perceives an intimate union between these tragical disorders, these “intestinal struggles”, and the inward struggles of the characters. To him, the action is “essentially the expression of character” (13). When developing the inner tensions of the characters, Shakespeare, according to Bradley, “shows his most extraordinary power” (12). Consequently, Bradley centres a great deal of his analysis on the construction of the 19

See Selection of Texts 2.2.

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Shakespearean characters, whom he considers as “made of the stuff we find within ourselves and within the persons who surround them” (14). Bradley endeavours to analyse the obscure workings of the characters’ minds and strives to find the psychological motives and consequences of their actions as if he were analysing the behaviour of real human beings. It is interesting to mention that Bradley writes in an age during which there was also a scientific interest in psychology. In fact, in 1904 Sigmund Freud published Psychopatology of Everyday Life. Bradley follows the character-criticism tradition that critics such as Morgann and Whately initiated at the end of the eighteenth century and that was continued subsequently by the Romantics. Bradley intends to find out and describe the atmosphere and the unity of the plays by analysing the imagery and pointing out the whole effect of the dramas. However, despite the critical value of many of his assertions, Bradley’s analysis of Shakespeare’s tragedies has been widely and, on many occasions, unjustly rejected during the twentieth century due to his critical insistence on the application of psychological realism to the analysis of characters and his refusal to examine other relevant facets of Shakespeare’s work. The character-study carried out by critics such as Coleridge or Bradley is based on very particular assumptions about human nature. They follow an essentialist and humanist concept of “man” as a unified and autonomous self and observe in “men” a pre-social, permanent and universal essence that is what makes them human and that transcends history and society. This idea of what “man” is claims the individual’s independence from the social and political realms. Critical approaches of the end of the twentieth-century such as new historicism and cultural materialism are anti-humanist and anti-essentialist lines of studies. That is, they follow the Marxist axiom that states: “the essence of man is not an abstraction inherent in each particular individual. The real nature of man is the totality of social relations” (Dollimore 1989: 154). Accordingly, they reject the notion of the universal essence of human beings as independent from the political and social realms. On the contrary, they observe an intimate link between the subject and the society since they consider men as cultural constructs. We are not free and autonomous entities for new historicists and cultural materialists; we are social artefacts. Shakespearean characters are analysed according to such precepts by these new critical approaches. As we will study in section 2.3, these critics do not look for the human essence of the dramatic heroes; they are more interested in the construction of these characters as social beings.

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SELECTION OF TEXTS In Dowden’s introduction to his analysis of Shakespeare’s History Plays in Text 1, the critic shows his interest, not in Shakespeare as an artist but as a man. He focuses on the playwright’s life, not the material one, but his inner life. According to Dowden, the effects of the writing of the History Plays are not mainly political but moral. To the critic, Shakespeare’s inner life was enriched by the study of English history. In text 2.1 Bradley establishes the difference between outer and inner struggle. To Bradley Shakespearean drama presents human forces at work in the characters’ souls, which generate discord between them, such as the one between Macbeth and Macduff. That would be the outer conflict. The conflict of human forces could also take place within the hero’s inner being, as in the case of Macbeth’s tribulations. That would be the inner struggle. Both are necessary in the construction of the tragedy. Bradley also presents the interdependent relation between action and character. Text 2.2 analyses King Lear’s error - the origin of his fall and the foundation for the inner and outer conflicts of the play - and the development of the spectator’s response to King Lear’s initial actions. Our early feeling of pity for Lear as an old man precedes our rejection of the protagonist’s selfishness, moral blindness, authoritarianism and unrestrained fury.

1. Edward Dowden, Shakespeare: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art (1875) The historical plays of Shakspere may be approached from many sides. It would be interesting to endeavour to ascertain from them what was Shakspere’s political creed. It would be interesting to compare his method as artist when handling historical matter with that of some other great dramatist ... Shakspere’s opinions, however, and Shakspere’s method as artist are less than Shakspere himself. It is the man we are still seeking to discover – behind his works, behind his opinions, behind his artistic process. Shakspere’s life, we must believe, ran on below his art, and was to himself of deeper import than his work as artist. Not perhaps his material life, though to this also he contrived to make his art contribute, but the life of his inmost being ... The main question therefore which it is desirable to put in the case of the historical plays now to be considered is this – What was Shakspere gaining for himself of wisdom or of strength while these were the organs through which his faculties of thought and imagination nourished themselves, inhaling and exhaling their breath of life? That Shakspere should have accomplished so great an achievement towards the interpreting of history is much, - that he should have grasped in thought the national life of England during a century and upwards, in

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her periods of disaster and collapse, of civil embroilment, and of heroic union and exaltation, - this is much. But that by his study of history Shakspere should have built up his own moral nature, and have fortified himself for the conduct of life, was, we may surmise, to Shakspere the chief outcome of his toil. (1892: 162-63)

2. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904)

Text 1 If we are to include the outer and the inner struggle in a conception more definite than that of conflict in general, we must employ some such phrase as ‘spiritual force.’ This will mean whatever forces act in the human spirit, whether good or evil, whether personal passion or impersonal principle; doubts, desires, scruples, ideas – whatever can animate, shake, possess, and drive a man’s soul. In a Shakespearean tragedy some such forces are shown in conflict. They are shown acting in men and generating strife between them. They are also shown, less universally, but quite as characteristically, generating disturbance and even conflict in the soul of the hero. Treasonous ambition in Macbeth collides with loyalty and patriotism in Macduff and Malcolm: here is the outward conflict. But these powers of principles equally collide in the soul of Macbeth himself: here is the inner. And neither by itself could make the tragedy. We shall see later the importance of this idea. Here we need only observe that the notion of tragedy as a conflict emphasizes the fact that action is the centre of the story, while the concentration of interest, in the greater plays, on the inward struggle emphasizes the fact that this action is essentially the expression of character. (1992: 12-13)

Text 2 At the very beginning, it is true, we are inclined to feel merely pity and misgivings. The first lines tell us that Lear’s mind is beginning to fail with age. Formerly he had perceived how different were the characters of Albany and Cornwall, but now he seems either to have lost this perception or to be unwisely ignoring it. The rashness of his division of the kingdom troubles us, and we cannot but see with concern that its motive is mainly selfish. The absurdity of pretence of making the division depend on protestations of love from his daughters, his complete blindness to the hypocrisy which is patent to us at a glance, his piteous delight in these protestations, the openness of his expressions of preference for his youngest daughter – all make us smile, but all pain us. But pity begins to give way to another feeling when we witness the precipitance, the despotism, the uncontrolled anger of his injustice to Cordelia and Kent, and the ‘hideous rashness’ of his persistence in dividing the kingdom after the rejection of his one dutiful child. We feel now the presence of force as well as weakness, but we feel

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also the presence of the tragic υ’ βριζ (hubris).20 Lear, we see, is generous and unsuspicious, of an open and free nature, like Hamlet and Othello, and indeed most of Shakespeare’s heroes, who in this, according to Ben Jonson, resemble the poet who made them. Lear, we see, is also choleric by temperament – the first of Shakespeare’s heroes who is so. And a long life of absolute power, in which he has been flattered to the top of his bent, has produced in him that blindness to human limitations, and that presumptuous self-will, which in Greek tragedy we have so often seen stumbling against the altar of Nemesis. Our consciousness that the decay of old age contributes to this condition deepens our pity and our sense of human infirmity, but certainly does not lead us to regard the old King as irresponsible, and so to sever the tragic nexus which blinds together his error and his calamities. (1992: 243-244)

1.5. FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 1.5.1. The emphasis on poetry and language: Wilson Knight, Caroline Spurgeon, Wolfgang Clemen During the first half of the twentieth century, and as a reaction to approaches based mainly on character-study, there is a group of critics whose works are primarily focused on the study of Shakespeare’s style. The language of his plays has been studied in detail from various points of view, but the most productive linguistic approach to tragedy has been the analysis of imagery.

1.5.1.1. G. Wilson Knight (1897-1939) G. Wilson Knight is one of the most important scholars in this field. His main works are: The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy (1930), The Imperial Theme: Further Interpretations of Shakespeare’s Tragedies Including the Roman Plays (1931) and The Crown of Life (1947). In the opening chapter of The Wheel of Fire, “On the Principles of Shakespeare Interpretation”, Knight defines his interpretative method. He draws a clear distinction between criticism and interpretation. Criticism objectifies the work, decides what should be considered as its “good” and “bad” elements so as to finally pass judgement on the work. Interpretation, however, does not put value on the evaluation of the work. It endeavours, as Knight states, “to merge into the work it analyses ... to understand its subject in the light of its own nature” (1). This merging takes place through the analysis of patterns of images and symbols that help the interpreter to find out the central theme, unity 20

“Hubris” refers to an exaggerated pride or self-confidence.

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and dominating atmosphere of the play, what he calls, “the burning core of mental or spiritual reality from which each play derives its nature and meaning” (14).21 Knight focuses on the spatial dimension of the play as opposed to the temporal one and considers as constituents of the “spatial dimension” “a set of correspondences which relate to each other independently of the time-sequence which is the story” (3). The interplay of such correspondences between images and symbols in each play constitutes what he terms as the play’s dominating “atmosphere.” Knight observes then a close inter-penetration between the action of the play and the symbolic patterns that construct an “omnipresent and mysterious reality brooding motionless over and within the play’s movement” (5). Knight criticises the analysis of the play as a theatrical artifice, as we will see in 1.5.2, since “it does not render up its imaginative secret” (13) and he also dismisses the notion that the author’s intentions and the sources of the work are relevant to its nature. They have no value for the interpreter that must abandon the analysis of facts and be receptive to the essence of the poetic work. As to the analysis of characters, Knights reproves psychological realism by setting up a distinction between artistic and normal ethics.22 To the critic, the actions of the characters cannot be analysed in accordance with the rules of human behaviour, with the set of laws of normal ethics, but with the laws of artistic ethics. Characters must be studied as dramatic constructions and not as human beings. According to Knight, literary interpretation should never be founded on analogies with human affairs since plays, as artistic expressions, have their own set of close-knit and self-imposed laws.

1.5.1.2. Caroline Spurgeon (1886-1942) Spurgeon’s Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (1935) is also a ground-breaking analysis of Shakespearean imagery. In the introductory chapter of her book, “The Aim and Method Explained”, Spurgeon declares her interest in the content rather than in the form of images that are defined as: the little word-picture used by a poet or prose writer to illustrate, illuminate and embellish his thought. It is a description or an idea, which by comparison or analogy, stated or understood, with something else, transmits to us through the emotions and associations it arouses, something of the ‘wholeness’, the depth and richness of the way the writer views, conceives or has felt what he is telling us. (9) 21 22

See Selection of Texts 1.2. See Selection of Texts 1.1.

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Spurgeon elucidates the idea that one can find out the writer’s personality through the analysis of his or her work. In the case of a poet, she believes that the images reveal his “likes and dislikes, observations and interests, associations of thoughts, attitudes of mind and beliefs” (4).23 To Spurgeon, the correspondence between the author’s temperament and his images is even more evident, spontaneous and natural in drama than in poetry since in the latter the images are used more consciously than in the former. She explains how the theme of each particular play generated a certain type of mental picture in Shakespeare’s imagination and consequently a very specific type of imagery. For Spurgeon, spontaneity and nature were crucial elements of the creative process, since the critic believes the playwright was probably unconscious about how strongly the imagery evoked by his imagination was revealing his symbolic vision. Such convictions led Spurgeon to attempt to classify all Shakespeare’s images in order to discover the playwright’s inner self in the first part of her work “The Revelation of the Man.” Images turn then into documents that help Spurgeon to know more about the author but also about his plays. In the second part of her work, “The Function of the Imagery as Background and Undertone in Shakespeare’s Art”, Spurgeon explains the significance of imagery in the plays. Like Knight, she considers that recurrent imagery helps to create the central theme, atmosphere and emotions of the plays and statistically classifies the images according to the type of play in which they are at work. To Spurgeon, in the earlier plays, the dominating images are more obvious than the more subtle and complex ones that we find in the later plays, especially in the tragedies. She also makes a distinction between images that are common to all plays and those peculiar to each one.

1.5.1.3. Wolfgang Clemen (1909-90) To the German writer Wolfgang Clemen, the general evolution of Shakespeare’s art can only be grasped through the analysis of the development of different dramatic constituents such as imagery, characterisation, plot, atmosphere or dramatic structure. However, according to Clemen, each of these elements is just one part of a whole that cannot work without the rest of dramatic elements.24 In The Development of Shakespeare’s Imagery, originally published in German in 1936, and later translated into English in 1951, Clemen takes a line of 23 24

See Selection of Texts 2.1 and 2.2. See Selection of Texts 3.1.

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study different from Spurgeon’s and Knight’s. Instead of analysing imagery as related merely to the mood, atmosphere or theme of the play, Clemen links Shakespeare’s imagery to other dramatic elements such as character, plot, stage-effect or dramatic situation and examines its specific dramatic function within this wider theatrical background. Though he values some of Knight’s “illuminating insights” (16), Clemen believes that he ignores the dramatic reality of the play by rejecting “such important aspects as dramatic technique, plot, stage conditions, etc.” (16). Also, despite the fact that Clemen asserts his debt to Spurgeon’s work, he also establishes clear differences from it. He does not appreciate the interpretative value of statistical methods, he rejects the correspondence between images and the writer’s personality and above all, in contrast to Spurgeon’s emphasis on the content of the image, Clemen analyses its form. For the critic, the nature and form of an image rely upon diverse factors since the function and meaning of every image always depend on its dramatic context. Images, for example, can draw attention to the feelings of a particular character; they can also subtly inform the audience of a future event in the play; or they can present a line of action different from the central theme of the play.25

SELECTION OF TEXTS As opposed to Johnson and Coleridge’s consideration about Shakespearean characters, in Text 1.1 Wilson Knight argues that they cannot be analysed as if they were human beings. They are dramatic characters, they are part of fiction and not reality. Consequently, our morals and ethics must not be applied when analysing a play. Ethics must then be adapted to the artistic nature of the work. Note how in Text 1.2 Wilson Knight describes the atmosphere in Macbeth as dominated by images of death, terror, evil and darkness. He observes how this general sense of evil is constructed by poetic language. The spatial dimension of the text prevails over the temporal one since constant references to blood, darkness or nightmare can be found throughout the play giving it its unity.

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See Selection of Texts 3.1.

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1. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy (1930) Text 1 We must observe, then, this paradox: the strong protagonist of poetic drama would probably appear a weakling if he were a real man rather than a dramatic person. Ethics are essentially critical when applied to life; but if they hold any place at all in art, they will need to be modified into a new artistic ethic which obeys the peculiar nature of art as surely as a sound morality is based on the nature of man. From a true interpretation centred on the imaginative qualities of Shakespeare, certain facts will certainly emerge which bear relevance to human life, to human morals: but interpretation must come first. And interpretation must be metaphysical rather than ethical. We shall gain nothing by applying to the delicate symbols of the poet’s imagination the rough machinery of an ethical philosophy created to control the turbulences of actual life. (1995: 10-11) Text 2 There is no nearer equivalent, in the experience of a normal mind, to the poetic quality of Macbeth than the consciousness of nightmare or delirium. That is why life is here a ‘tale told by an idiot’ (V. v. 27), a ‘fitful fever’ after which the dead ‘sleep well’ (III. ii. 23); why the earth itself is ‘feverous’ (II. iii. 67). The Weird Sisters are nightmare actualized; Macbeth’s crime nightmare projected into action. Therefore this world is unknownable, hideous, disorderly, and irrational. The very style of the play has a mesmeric, nightmare quality, for in that dreamconsciousness, hateful though it be, there is a nervous tension, a vivid sense of profound significance, an exceptionally rich apprehension of reality electrifying the mind: one is in touch with absolute evil, which, being absolute, has a satanic beauty, a hideous, serpent-like grace and attraction, drawing, paralysing. This quality is in the poetic style: the language is tense, nervous, insubstantial, without anything of the visual clarity of Othello, or the massive solemnity of Timon of Athens. The poetic effect of the whole, though black with an inhuman abysm of darkness, is yet shot through and streaked with vivid colour, with horrors that hold a mesmeric attraction even while they repel; and things of brightness that intensify the enveloping murk. There is constant reference to blood. (1995: 147)

In Text 2.1, Spurgeon alludes to Shakespeare’s interest in the countryside and points out his delight in plants. Shakespeare’s leisure activity is then translated into dramatic terms when Spurgeon alludes to his constant references to human life as a growing plant. In her analysis, the critic observes how these images are used in moments of stress and emotion and points out that Shakespeare is especially concerned about

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the processes of growth and decay. On some occasions he compares the force of uncontrolled weeds to destroy everything around them with the faults of human character. Also, for example, diseases in plants are compared with evil passions or repressions. In Text 2.2, Spurgeon gives some examples of Shakespeare’s use of images related to gardening and life in the countryside in As You Like It.

2. Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (1935)

Text 1 We saw that one interest, above all others, stands out in Shakespeare’s imagery. This is the life of the country-side and its varying aspects; the winds, the weather and seasons, the sky and clouds, birds and animals. One occupation, one point of view, above all others, is naturally his, that of a gardener; watching, preserving, tending and caring for growing things, especially flowers and fruit. All through his plays he thinks most easily and readily of human life and action in the terms of a gardener. This tendency to think of matters human as of growing plants and trees expresses itself in fullest details in the central gardening scene in Richard II (3.4), but it is ever present in Shakespeare’s thought and imagination. (1999: 86) Text 2 Of nature and animals together are more in As You Like It than in any other comedy and these play their part in the general atmosphere ... there are, as in Much Ado, continual touches which keep ever before the audience the background of nature, such as the opening scene in the orchard, the duke’s references to winter’s wind and trees, running brooks, the stag hunt, the shepherd’s cot, Amien’s song, Orlando’s verses, the meal under the shade of melancholy boughs, Corin’s shepherd’s talk, the foresters and their song, and the exquisite ‘foolish song’ at the end, to which Touchstone counted it but time lost to listen ... We are constantly reminded of Shakespeare’s favourite haunts of garden and orchard in the many similes from grafting, pruning and weeding, as in Rosalind’s chaff with Touchstone about ‘graffing’ with the medlar, Orlando’s warning to Adam that in staying with him he prunes ‘a rotten tree’, Touchstone’s metaphor of fruit ripening and rotting, or Jaques’ suggestion that the duke should weed his ‘better judgements of all opinion that grows rank in them’; and it would be hard to say how strongly and yet how subtly our feeling of being out of doors, of wind and weather, is increased or reinforced by such remarks as Adam’s comparison of his age to “a lusty winter, /Frosty, but kindly.” (1999: 278-280)

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In Text 3.1 Clemen points out the interconnection of all the elements that constitute a play and the need always to study images in relation to plot, character or atmosphere. He also refers to the multifarious nature of images, their various functions and forms. In Text 3.2, and as a response to Knight and Spurgeon’s idea about imagery, Clemen remarks that images do not only create atmosphere or highlight the play’s main theme. In The Tempest, supernatural powers are given shape through imagery. The deeper significance of the enchanted island and the tempest are expressed in the play through patterns of images. As he would argue later on in his analysis, one of the main streams of imagery is constituted by the constant references to sea-storm. Through a detailed analysis of the play, Clemen relates such pattern to themes such as guilt, redemption, nature as “a hostile force which threatens man’s existence” (1987: 185) or even degradation. Clemen also refers to the recurrence of images of animals and plants, to the “intense earthy atmosphere” (187) of the play. These images are related to “physical pain, threats of punishment, trouble and distress” (189). Again, nature is set against man. These natural images serve two other purposes. They depict the island as haunted and “act upon our sense; our hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling are appealed to” (191). According to Clemen, the force of imagery in the play makes us feel as actual participants in the magic experience on the island.

3. Wolfgang Clemen, The Development of Shakespeare’s Imagery (1936)

Text 1 It must be remembered, to be sure, that every investigation of an individual development carries with it the danger of overlooking the connection of this element with the play as an organic whole. Only too easily do we forget that the distinction which we make between different elements of dramatic art is at bottom an artificial one. Delineation of character, plot, atmosphere and dramatic structures of a play do not, in fact, exist as independent spheres, distinct one from the other. Only one thing really exists: the play as a whole, as a totality ... Hence it must be our aim to reduce to the minimum errors due to isolating the “imagery” from the other elements of the dramatic work. This study seeks to show how manifold and various are the conditions and qualifications determining the form and nature of each image, and how many factors are to be considered in order to grasp fully the real character of the imagery of a play. (1987: 2)

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Text 2 In reading or watching The Tempest we feel that there is more at stake in this play than man and man’s fate; nature and the elements seem to be included in the action which thus extends beyond the characters on the stage. In a play of this kind, as was shown by the example of King Lear, the imagery is to give expression to these accompanying superhuman powers and realms. The imagery is therefore more than a means of creating atmosphere and background, or of emphasizing the main theme of the play. Besides, The Tempest is one of the plays were the supernatural plays a considerable role. These plays have strong resemblances as regards the imagery. For the imagery is an essential mediator of these supernatural powers which do not enter the play only through certain characters, as e.g. Ariel. In The Tempest, the natural scene of action also has a deeper significance. The enchanted island which becomes vivid through such a wealth of single features and of concrete touches is more than merely a well-chosen locality for the play. And to say that the tempest has a meaning beyond that of being a mere background is a commonplace. It is, however, through imagery that we are made to see these deeper significances. (1987: 182)

1.5.2. The play as theatrical artifice: Harley Granville-Barker and Muriel C. Bradbrook A new critical and scholarly approach based on the study of the plays from a scenic perspective is also born during the first half of the twentieth century as a response to psychological realism. Critics such as Harley Granville-Barker (1877-1946) or Muriel C. Bradbrook (1909-1993) focus their analysis on Elizabethan theatrical conventions and stage techniques. Theatrical conditions such as the structure of the theatres or the composition of the audience become crucial elements to the analysis of the plays and their performances. As key contributions to twentieth-century Shakespeare studies, Granville-Barker’s famous Prefaces to Shakespeare (1927-1946) and On Dramatic Method (1931) examine the plays from the point of view of a producer and not a critic and his productions of Shakespeare’s works follow the Elizabethan stage practices. His theatrical experience - he was not just a Shakespearean scholar but also an actor, producer, director and dramatist – leads him to study the characters on performance and view the verse of the plays as naturally spoken speech.26 He considers the actors’ input as a major element in the creation of plays and he pays attention to stage practices such as the absence of actresses on the Elizabethan stage, intermissions or the use of custom. 26

See Selection of Texts 1.

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In Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy (1935), Bradbrook points out the fact that Elizabethan conventions were never defined but widely used on stage. Bradbrook formulates such conventions as she studies the ones related to characterisation, presentation, acting or action such as the appearance of the Machiavellian villain,27 the use of disguise, the dumb show, the clown, the emblematic grouping of characters, the absence of psychological motivation, the soliloquy, the asides, the spectator’s awareness of the artificiality of the performance, the play-within-the-play, etc. Bradbrook develops the idea that “the essential structure of Elizabethan drama lies below the level of narrative or character, in the words. The greatest poets are also the greatest dramatists” (1990: 6). She examines the peculiarities of the Elizabethan audience by studying their habits of reading, writing and listening. She shows how the plays were also adapted to the theatrical expectations of an audience that was primarily interested in the moral instruction of drama and in the play of words and images. Bradbrook also bears in mind during her study that the origin of such conventions lies in classical, proverbial, medieval, biblical, rhetorical or historical sources.

SELECTION OF TEXTS Observe the terms in which Granville-Barker describes Shakespeare’s dramatic achievement in Text 1. His main interest lies in the extent to which Shakespeare uses theatrical devices in a natural and imperceptible way. Although Granville-Barker acknowledges Shakespeare’s awareness of theatrical conventions of the time, he observes in Shakespeare’s works an awesome mingling of dramatic rules and devices that could in the first place seem unmethodical but that brilliantly serves dramatic purposes. By a magnificent adaptation of theatrical rules and verse to his own art, Shakespeare makes the spectator focus his or her attention on the matter rather than on the dramatic form of the play. Note how in his argument he includes the important role of the actor’s reception of the play-script. Text 2 is an interesting example of how Elizabethan characters are considered as dramatic stereotypes. Consequently, they are not analysed as if they were real human beings. Bradbrook rejects in this text psychological realism. Due to his wit, his complicity with the audience and his superb control of the other characters’ actions, the Machiavellian villain is one of 27

See Selection of Texts 2.

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the most appealing type characters at the time. Bradbrook considers the study of the Elizabethan audience’s expectations, attitudes and daily life experiences as central in order to reach a correct analysis of a play. In her view, the Shakespearean audience was not interested in the character’s motivations but in his actions, his rhetoric and his achievements. The victim’s suffering was not the centre of attention for a spectator that was much more attracted to the villain’s machinations. By applying her profound knowledge of the Elizabethan theatrical conventions, Bradbrook clearly opposes the Romantic view of character as true to life. They are mere theatrical constructions that mainly offer what the playgoer longed to see on stage.

1. Harley Granville-Barker, On Dramatic Method (1931) At this full stretch of his powers, mustering all his resources, he reaches no perfection of method – far from it, he arrives at a transcendent imperfection. He has set himself a task beyond all reason, and he magnificently improvises the means to fulfil it. On a basis of a profound knowledge of his craft, it is true; but any sort of device, old or new, will serve, so long as it is effective. He is like a general who cuts himself off from his base, turns his camp-followers into cavalry, since it happens they can ride, fire howitzers point-blank, leaves his flank in the air – and wins the battle. As to his verse, it runs smoothly or roughly, into rhymed couplet or lyric, imperceptible into prose and out again, yet always with such direct dramatic purpose that the question of form seems negligible. From the beginning he has been moving towards this, towards the making of his verse a dramatic language which he will speak uncalculatingly. And this, I suppose, is the great artist’s final achievement, to absorb his medium into the purpose of his art. Nor, perhaps, is any quite satisfying till the medium is so transparent that we are not conscious of it at all, but only of the matter itself. Take the storm scene in King Lear. Shakespeare runs the gamut of prose, verse, rhyme and jingle too for the Fool and Poor Tom, yet the whole effect is one of unity and of the most perfect clarity ... The actor, certainly, must be able to discern why it is written as it is; but a trainer ear should tell him this without much questioning. (106-108)

2. Muriel Clara Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy (1935) A character who is behaving ‘according to type’ will need no motivation at all. In the same way, the ‘motiveless malignity’ of Iago is not proof that he was a

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monster.28 The Elizabethans did not expect every character to produce one rational explanation for every given action; consequently they did not think that characters who offered ‘inadequate’ explanations were monstrous ... To return to Iago: he is plainly a villain, as he is at pains to expound in soliloquy. Villains are villains; there is no need to ask why. ‘They are as they are.’ Besides, he is an Italian, and therefore it goes without saying that he is treacherous, jealous and Machiavellian. If, in addition, he likes to explain that he is jealous of Othello and Cassio, that he resents losing the lieutenancy, and that he is in love with Desdemona himself, his explanations must plainly be accepted; for what matters is not in the very least why he feels as he does, but how he behaves, what he says, and what he accomplishes. The villains are particularly difficult to motivate, because the heroes are always so blameless that only natural malignance could attack them. That was why the Machiavel was so particularly useful. In Elizabethan tragedy the villain is usually the most important figure; and tragedies of the villain hero are as common as tragedies of the virtuous hero. The villain hero grew out of the conqueror, whose cruelties were a necessary part of his triumph and were hardly judged by moral standards at all. Tamburlaine is the culmination (as well as the starting-point) for the conqueror plays, and in Marlowe’s plays the feelings towards the conquered are completely anaesthetised, so that they only serve as material to demonstrate the power of the hero. The triumph is not spoilt by any consciousness of the pain on which it is built. This attitude was partly helped, of course, by the extreme callousness of the audience. They were used to seeing atrocities in daily life, and their senses seem to have been so blunted that, like Barabas, they ‘had no feeling of another’s pain.’ It was not deliberate cruelty, but lack of the development of sympathetic powers, which is found sometimes among highly cultivated and sensitive races (e.g. the Chinese). (1990: 59-62)

1.5.3. The Historical Approach: Hardin Craig, Spencer and Tillyard A different critical approach to Shakespearean drama is the one that centres on historical research about the political, social and intellectual history of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. In The Enchanted Glass: The Elizabethan Mind in Literature (1935), Hardin Craig (1875-1968) examines Elizabethan thoughts about education, science, religion, politics, 28

Bradbrook is here responding to Coleridge’s endlessly quoted commentary in Lectures and Notes on Iago’s soliloquy at the end of the first act of Othello that you can find in Literatura inglesa hasta el siglo XVII (2002: 308): “Iago’s soliloquy – the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity – how awful it is! Yea, whilst he is still allowed to bear the divine image, it is too fiendish for his own steady view, – for the lonely gaze of a being next to devil, and only not quite devil, – and yet a character which Shakespeare has attempted and executed, without disgust and without scandal!” (1985: 283).

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logic, rhetoric, and literature and considers that, since Shakespeare is deeply influenced by these ideas, he adapts them in his plays. For Craig, the author’s views about life are more important than his artistic merits and, consequently, the playwright’s greatness lies in his greatness of thought. In Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (1942), Theodore Spencer broods over Renaissance notions about the cosmos, the world of nature and the state. Spencer considers the description of an innate conflict to human beings between dignity and wretchedness a central trait of Shakespeare’s characters. Spencer regards this Shakespearean theme as a reflection of a reality of an age worried about such concepts. To the critic, the age of Shakespeare presented a clear opposition between positive ideas from Plato, Aristotle and Christianity that stressed human dignity and the order of the universe and a more pessimistic and divergent Christian view also subscribed by Machiavelli, Copernicus and Montaigne.

1.5.3.1. E. M. W. Tillyard (1889-1962) E. M. W. Tillyard’s influential Elizabethan World Picture (1943) presents the Elizabethan conception about the nature of the universe.29 Tillyard describes how the cosmos was considered as perfectly ordered by God. The order and harmony of the universe were viewed and described as a perpetual and synchronised dance to music, but above all, such order and unity were pictured in two other different ways: as a chain and as a group of corresponding planes. The Great Chain of Being was the vertical picture of the world. The universe was portrayed as hierarchical. Creation appeared metaphorically as a chain where everything –inanimate, animate, vegetative, sensitive, rational and angelic– had its own place and function. As Tillyard remarks, “the chain stretched from the foot of God’s throne to the meanest of inanimate objects. Every speck of creation was a link in the chain, and every link except those at the two extremities was simultaneously bigger and smaller than another: there could be no gap” (1990: 33). The corresponding planes constituted the horizontal picture of the world. The world was also made of a group of planes, one below another, but connected by a net of correspondences. Such planes were: God and the angels, the physical universe or macrocosm, the state or body politic, man or the microcosm and the lower creation (animals and plants). There was, for example, a clear correspondence between man and the macrocosm since it was believed that man’s heat corresponded to the subterranean fire, his veins to rivers, his sighs to winds and his passions 29

See Literatura inglesa hasta el siglo XVII (2002: 327-30).

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to storms and earthquakes.30 But, above all, in political terms the notion of correspondences was crucial for the social stability. The correspondences between different planes led to the idea that the social structure was as hierarchical, ordered and, above all, immutable as the natural and cosmic ones. The prerogative of the monarch, situated at the top of the social ladder and appointed by God, had to be accepted by the rest of the subjects. Tillyard’s notion that “the conception of order is so taken for granted, so much part of the collective mind of the people, that it is hardly mentioned except in explicitly didactic passages” (17) was the origin of continuous critical attacks by materialists and new historicists at the end of the twentieth century.31 Tillyard describes a series of assumptions that, in his opinion, were subscribed by the entire population. To Tillyard, the Elizabethan idea of a closely hierarchical, ordered, stable and unified society with a divinely sanctioned monarch on top of the social ladder was accepted by what he calls the “collective mind of the people” (17). Tillyard seems to portray such view of society as the only valid and legitimate one and discards the fact that there could be some other sectors of society against such conceptions. For new historicists such as Stephen Greenblatt or cultural materialists such as Jonathan Dollimore, the emphasis on order at the time was a reality that could not be denied but it was also a political mechanism used to fight against “emergent and insubordinate social forces which were perceived as threatening” (1996: 5). As opposed to the orthodoxy claimed by Tillyard, these critics assert the existence of “subordinate, repressed and marginal aspects of culture” (6) that are substantial elements of an Elizabethan world picture quite different from the one described by Tillyard. As to the relation between social order and literature, Tillyard admits only as worthy of study those works which follow the dominant ideology of the age. Tillyard considers Spenser, Sidney, Raleigh, Hooker, Shakespeare and Jonson the most eminent writers of the time. He states that “all these are united in holding with earnestness passion and assurance to the main outlines of the medieval world picture as modified by the Tudor régime” (115). Tillyard’s assumption that Shakespeare unequivocally supported the orthodox Tudor view of a divinely sanctioned political order is also criticised specially by materialists that observe in his plays elements of subversion and resistance to the established order and put value on those works that do not legitimate the dominant forms of power.32 30

See Selection of Texts. See chapter 2.3. on new historicism and cultural materialism. 32 See Literatura inglesa hasta el siglo XVII (2002: 292, 295) and chapter 2.3. on new historicism and cultural materialism and their notions of “subversion” and “resistance.” 31

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SELECTION OF TEXTS In Shakespeare’s History Plays (1944), Tillyard analyses Shakespeare’s history plays in accordance with the Elizabethan conception of order. This text belongs to Chapter 1, “The Cosmic Background”, inserted within the first part of the book in which he examines the cosmic, historical and literary background of these plays. By following the governing ideology of the age, Tillyard shows how Shakespeare’s plays such as King Lear, Julius Caesar or Troilus & Cressida reflect the Elizabethan idea of natural and political order. Observe how he gives us dramatic examples where Shakespeare is reflecting the correspondence between the cosmic and human planes, between the macrocosm and the body politic and between the microcosm and the political plane. He also alludes to Shakespeare’s depiction of the Elizabethan conception of the universe as harmony or a dance to music.

E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays (1944) Of all the correspondences between two planes, that between the cosmic and the human was the commonest. Not only did man constitute in himself one of the planes of creation, but he was the microcosm, the sum in little of the great world itself. He was composed materially of the four elements and contained within himself, as well as his rational soul, vegetative and sensitive souls after the manners of plants and animals. The constitution of his body duplicated the constitution of the earth. His vital heat corresponded to the subterranean fire; his veins to rivers; his sighs to winds; the outbursts of his passions to storms and earthquakes. There is a whole complex body of doctrine behind the account of how Lear Strives in his little world of man to outscorn The to and fro conflicting wind and rain.

Storms were also frequent in another correspondence, that between macrocosm and body politic. Storms and perturbations in the heavens were duplicated by commotions and disasters in the state. The portents that marked the death of Caesar were more than portents; they were the heavenly enactment of the commotions that shook the Roman Empire after that event. Irregularities of the heavenly bodies duplicate the loss of order in the state. In the words of Ulysses, But when the planets In evil mixture to disorder wander, What plagues and what portents, what mutiny, What raging of the sea, shaking of earth, Commotions in the winds, frights changes horrors, Divert and crack, rend and deracinate The unity and married calm of states Quite from their fixture!

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Last may be cited the correspondence between microcosm and body politic. It can take the form of Brutus in his agony of doubt comparing his own little world to a city in insurrection. But its most persistent form was an elaborate analogy between the various ranks in the state with different parts of the human body. The picture of the universe as harmony or a dance to music is met with less often than the other two, but Shakespeare knew it as he shows by Ulysses’ words once again: Take but degree away, untune that string; 33 And hark what discord follows.

(1991: 24-25)

1.5.4. New Criticism: Cleanth Brooks (1906-1994) New criticism was a critical theory developed by a group of American critics. It was very influential from the ’40s to the ’60s. This approach can be classified as Formalist since it concentrated on the analysis of the form and structure of the work, that is, the organisation of its meaning. The new critics put emphasis on the text, which was considered as an autonomous entity. The text was analysed in isolation since they believed historical or social contexts were irrelevant to its meaning. The meaning, for the new critics, is within the text itself. New criticism held two central theories that support such a view: the so-called “intentional fallacy” and “affective fallacy.” The former sustains that the author’s intention must be disentangled from the meaning of the text. The latter proclaims that we should not interpret a text according to its readers’ responses. That is, new criticism was against biographical and subjective analyses of the texts. For the new critics, each text has a central organic unity. They become heirs to Coleridge’s idea of the text as a unified, organic whole able to resolve the oppositions among its different constituents and reach a final harmony. The aim of the critic is to find such unity and notice the way each element functions as an essential part of such accord. The method they used was known as “close reading.” It entailed a thorough examination of structural and stylistic elements such as words, syntax, symbolism, metaphors, characterisation, argument, setting, tone, rhythm, meter, diction, etc. These critics were determined to find out in what ways all these elements related to each other and how, as a whole, they fashioned the organic unity of the work giving it its meaning. The new critics observe in the texts opposing forces that are finally reconciled. Opposition is necessary to create what they call the tension of 33

See Literatura inglesa hasta el siglo XVII (2002: 328-29).

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the text. Textual tension is the product of thematic oppositions, oppositions in imagery or oppositions in words. Also, ambiguity, irony and paradox are central concepts since they help to create internal conflicts within the text that make it more complex. For these critics the main characteristic of poetry is coherence, that is, the integration of conflicting elements. But such coherence is closely linked to complexity. The meaning of the text results from the connection of all its parts that, at the same time, depend not only on their resemblances but on their discrepancies. The textual tension is finally dissolved and turned into reconciliation since all the oppositions are finally subordinated to a single meaning, to a governing unity.

1.5.4.1. Cleanth Brooks (1906-1994) Cleanth Brooks (1906-1994), a leading American new critic, illustrates the methods and principles of new criticism in The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947). In “‘The Naked Babe’ and the Cloak of Manliness”, an essay included in that book, he applies his critical ideas to Macbeth. Brook closely analyses two passages of the play whose internal contradictions had traditionally presented difficulties to the critics. The first passage portrays pity for Duncan as “a naked newborn babe, / Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin” (1.7.21-22). The second describes the daggers held by Duncan’s guardians, falsely accused of murder by Macbeth, as “unmannerly breeched with gore” (2.3.109). As Unit 3 will analyse in detail, through a close reading of the language of the whole play, Brooks discovers how the images presented by both texts, frequently ignored by many critics, are part of two main chains of imagery in the play, one related to children and the other related to clothing. Though already analysed by Caroline Spurgeon, such chains of imagery acquire new and central meanings in Brooks’s study. Brooks attaches the image of clothing to duplicity, deception and the theme of unearned titles. The image of the babe is related to Macbeth’s desire for descendants so as to establish a new dynasty. These two images join together at the end of the play when Birnam wood appears as a masquerade, as the soldiers’ clothing, and Macduff discloses that he was born through a Caesarean section. The critic demonstrates how these patterns of images and their meanings are essential constituents of the whole organic unity of Macbeth. Brooks shows how the internal contradictions, paradoxes and oppositions presented by such passages, frequently considered as textual errors and inconsistencies, finally reconcile and strengthen the textual coherence of the play. Also, he proves that there are connections among

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different patterns of images that also help to reinforce the close unity of the text.

SELECTION OF TEXTS In this text, Brooks is referring to the image of clothing and the image of the babe alluded to above. We will analyse this article in detail in our study of Macbeth. Note now how, through the method of close reading, Brook emphasises the fact that the understanding of the meaning of these images, which apparently are not necessary for the development of the whole play, is essential for its comprehension. The relationship between the connotations of such images to the rest of the play makes evident that every single line, and every single metaphor must be closely analysed. Everything in Shakespeare’s plays is interconnected.

Cleanth Brooks, “‘The Naked Babe’ and the Cloak of Manliness” (1947) Yet I think that Shakespeare’s daggers attired in their bloody breeches can be defended as poetry, and as characteristically Shakespearian poetry. Furthermore, both this passage and that about the newborn babe, it seems to me, are far more than excrescences, mere extravagances of detail: each it seems to me, contains a central symbol of the play, and symbols which we must understand if we are to understand either the detailed passage or the play as a whole. If this be true, then more is at stake than the merit of the quoted lines taken as lines. (The lines as constituting mere details of a larger structure could, of course, be omitted in the acting of the play without seriously damaging the total effect of the tragedy – though this argument obviously cuts two ways. Whole scenes, and admittedly fine scenes, might also be omitted – have in fact been omitted – without quite destroying the massive structure of the tragedy.) What is at stake is the whole matter of the relation of Shakespeare’s imagery to the total structures of the plays themselves. I should like to use the passages as convenient points of entry into the larger symbols which dominate the play. They are convenient because, even if we judge them to be faulty, they demonstrate how obsessive for Shakespeare the symbols were – they demonstrate how far the conscious (or unconscious) symbolism could take him. If we see how the passages are related to these symbols, and they to the tragedy as a whole, the main matter is achieved; and having seen this, if we still prefer ‘to wish the lines away’, that, of course, is our privilege. In the meantime, we may have learned something about Shakespeare’s methods – not merely of building metaphors – but of encompassing his larger meanings. (1980: 186-187)

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RECOMMENDED BIBLIOGRAPHY BRADBROOK, Muriel C. 1990 (1935): Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. BRADLEY, A. C. 1992 (1904) Shakespearean Tragedy. London: MacMillan Press Ltd. BRATCHELL. D. F. 1990: Shakespearean Tragedy. London and New York: Routledge. (In the first part of this book we find a selection of and a commentary on critical texts on Shakespeare from 1679 to 1950. The second part is devoted to the critical views on Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and King Lear) CLEMEN, Wolfgang 1987 (1951): The Development of Shakespeare’s Imagery. London and New York: Methuen. COLERIDGE, Samuel Taylor 1985 (1818): Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare. Poems and Prose. Ed. Kathleen Raine. London: Penguin Books. DOWDEN, Edward 1892 (1875): Shakespeare: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd. DRYDEN, John 1985 (1668): Of Dramatick Poesie. Poems and Prose. Eds. Douglas Grant and Gamini Salgado. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 147-225. JOHNSON, Samuel 1998 (1765): Preface to The Plays of William Shakespeare. Johnson on Shakespeare. Ed. R.W. Desai. London: Sangam Books. 96-137. KNIGHT, G. Wilson 1995 (1930). The Wheel of Fire. Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy. London and New York: Routledge. SPURGEON, Caroline 1999 (1935): Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. TILLYARD, E. M. W. 1990 (1943): Elizabethan World Picture. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. —— 1991 (1944): Shakespeare’s History Plays. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. VICKERS, Brian 1974-1981: Shakespeare. The Critical Heritage. London and New York: Routledge. (Six volumes on Shakespearean criticism from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century)

RECOMMENDED WEBSITES 1. “To the memory of my beloved, The Author Mr. William Shakespeare, and what he left us.” Prefatory Material to the First Folio, 1623: http://shakespeare.palomar.edu/Folio1.htm 2. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21). Volume VI. The Drama to 1642, Part Two. Ben Jonson. Ben Jonson’s character and friendships: http://www.bartleby.com/216/0101.html

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3. Of Dramatick Poesie: Prose and Verse Criticism of Poetry: http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display_rpo/indexcriticism.cfm 4. Comments on John Dryden’s “An Essay of Dramatick Poesy”: http://www.clarkson.edu/~dkain/crit/drydtext.html 5. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21). Volume VIII. The Age of Dryden. Dryden’s Adaptation of Shakespearean Plays and Themes: http://www.bartleby.com/218/0114.html 6. The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001. Thomas Rymer: http://www.bartleby.com/65/ry/Rymer-Th.html 7. Rymer on Othello: http://www.angelfire.com/oh5/spycee/rymer.html 8. Samuel Johnson. Preface to The Plays of William Shakespeare. Prose and Verse Criticism of Poetry: http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display_rpo/indexcriticism.cfm 9. Samuel Johnson’s “Shakespeare”: http://home.comcast.net/~cjh5801/Shakespearejohnson.htm#2 10. Coleridge. Hamlet Essay: http://absoluteshakespeare.com/guides/essays/hamlet_essay.htm 11. Nineteenth-century Shakespeare: http://www.americansymphony.org/dialogues_extensions/ 93_94season/1st_concert/shakespeare.cfm 12. A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy (online edition): http://www.clicknotes.com/bradley/welcome.html 13. G. Wilson Knight on Shakespeare: http://www.ljhammond.com/phlit/2003-07.htm 14. Wolfgang Clemen. The Development of Shakespeare’s Imagery: http://www.kollos.com/fridayshakespeare/annotations/ clemendevelopment.html 15. The Chain of Being: Tillyard in a Nutshell: http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/Tillyard01.html 16. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. New criticism: http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/ new_criticism.html

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KEY TERMS These are the main concepts and authors analysed in this Unit. Ask yourself whether you are able to give a brief and concise account of what these concepts refer to and of the main ideas presented by each critic. Neo-classical criticism Ben Jonson John Dryden Thomas Rymer Editorial criticism Samuel Johnson Opposition to certain neo-classic rules Shakespeare and the Romantics Coleridge Shakespeare’s characters as true to nature Psychological Realism Bradley Shakespeare and Language Wilson Knight Caroline Spurgeon Wolfgang Clemen Shakespeare and Theatrical Conventions Granville-Barker M. C. Bradbrook Shakespeare and History E. M. W. Tillyard The Great Chain of Being New Criticism Cleanth Brooks Intentional fallacy Affective fallacy Close Reading

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SELF-ASSESSMENT QUESTIONS* Answer ONE of the following questions: 1. Describe the interrelation that Bradley establishes between “inner” and “outer” struggle in his definition of Shakespearean tragedy. 2. How is Shakespearean characterisation analysed by critics such as Johnson, Coleridge, Bradley, Wilson Knight and Bradbrook? 3. How does E. M. W. Tillyard describe the Elizabethan conception of order? How does he apply it to the study of Shakespeare’s works?

COMPLEMENTARY EXERCISE 1. Samuel Johnson, Preface to The Plays of William Shakespeare: Perhaps it would not be easy to find any author, except Homer, who invented so much as Shakespeare, who so much advanced the studies which he cultivated or effused so much novelty upon his age or country. The form, the characters, the language, and the shows of the English drama are his. (1998: 119)

According to the information you have in 1.2. and the selection of texts devoted to Samuel Johnson, in what way do the critic’s opinions about Shakespeare’s art differ from the neo-classic conception of literature?

* Please, read the General Introduction before you answer the questions.

Unit 2 CRITICAL APROACHES TO SHAKESPEARE. SECOND HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

PROGRAMME SECTION 2.1 2.1. Structuralism. SECTION 2.2 2.2. Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction. SECTION 2.3 2.3. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. SECTION 2.4 2.4. Gender Studies. 2.4.1. Feminism. 2.4.2. Gay Studies. SECTION 2.5 2.5. Post-colonialism.

INTRODUCTION Aims and Objectives The following unit presents an overview of the most important critical approaches to Shakespeare during the second half of the twentieth century. We will mainly centre our attention on post-structuralist critical lines such as new historicism, cultural materialism, gender studies, psychoanalysis and post-colonialism. Section 2.1. on structuralism is necessary in order to offer the context which post-structuralist analysis will stand against. Section 2.2. on poststructuralism and deconstruction presents the new definitions of structure, text, author or reader that you need to have in mind in order to understand the critical mechanisms used by new historicists, materialists, critics working on gender studies, psychoanalysts or post-colonialists. It is essential to assimilate the different conceptions of language that

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structuralism and post-structuralism offer since both critical approaches apply their linguistic views to the analysis of texts. The post-structuralist defines language, not as a stable and enclosed structure of meaning as structuralism regarded it, but as a locus without a centre, without a fixed meaning. Therefore, the post-structuralist text is open to multiple interpretations. This unit will develop this idea in detail. The post-structuralist idea of subjectivity, explained in section 2.3., as opposed to the humanist definition of the human being as the recipient of a trans-historical essence, is central for a correct assimilation of poststructuralist analyses of Shakespeare’s works. The characters are no longer analysed as human beings that share qualities supposedly common to all humankind. Post-structuralists analyse human identity as fashioned by the social, historical or political context of the time. The subject is considered as a cultural artefact. The concept of cultural difference is also vital to understanding these lines of approach. There is not a human essence that links all human beings since our social, religious, political and economic environments make us all different from each other according to post-structuralists. Therefore, the term “difference” in relation to subjectivity is also to be taken into account when studying this unit. These critical approaches will also relate the literary discourse with social, political, historical or religious discourses current during Shakespeare’s time. His works will sometimes be considered as strengthening Elizabethan and Jacobean social and political discourses. Sometimes, on the contrary, they will be viewed as challenges to authority. But these critics, especially the materialists, will also point out the contemporary relevance of the analysis of the playwright’s work. Shakespeare is then appropriated, and sometimes manipulated, in order to strengthen or defy certain twentieth-century discourses.

Study Guidelines Certain concepts analysed in this unit may be difficult to assimilate for their complexity. For a correct study of the unit, you should go back to the book Literatura inglesa hasta el siglo XVII and carefully re-read chapter 9 “El Teatro de Shakespeare (1): Introducción.” There you will find useful introductions to new historicism, cultural materialism and gender studies. The selected texts used in this unit will also clarify many of the concepts and will illustrate how post-structuralist ideas are applied to Shakespeare’s texts. Many of the selected texts include footnotes that invite you to relate them to other texts in other sections. By doing so, you will observe how

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critical commentaries on certain texts complement or oppose each other. This will help you to have a clear idea of how Shakespeare’s works can be subjected to a multiplicity of interpretations that not only enrich the texts but also give a prominent role to the reader. On contemporary literary theory you are recommended to consult Raman Selden and Peter Widdowson’s A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (1993) and Vincent B. Leitch’s The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2001). On Shakespearean criticism we also recommend Russ McDonald’s Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1945-2000 (2003). It is a collection of the most important critical essays on Shakespeare’s works of the second half of the twentieth century. It could be of great help to those students interested in reading the whole extension of some of the articles referred to in Unit 1 and Unit 2 such as Cleanth Brooks’s “‘The Naked Babe’ and the Cloak of Manliness”, Tillyard’s “Cosmic Background” in Shakespeare’s History Plays, Stephen Greenblatt’s “Invisible Bullets”, Jonathan Dollimore’s “Radical Tragedy”, Catherine Belsey’s “Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies” and Francis Barker and Peter Hulme’s “‘Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish’: The Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest.” Among many others, you can find texts by critics that are referred to in Unit 1 and 2 such as Wolfgang Clemen, Louis Adrian Montrose, Jean E. Howard, Alan Sinfield, Stephen Orgel, Bruce Smith, Linda Woodbridge and Ania Loomba. You are also strongly recommended the website that offers a glossary of literary theory and the one that presents general information about contemporary critical approaches, in case certain concepts are not clear.

SECTION 2.1

2.1. STRUCTURALISM The French literary philosopher and most famous structuralist critic Roland Barthes defined structuralism as “a certain mode of analysis of cultural artefacts, in so far as this mode originates in the methods of contemporary linguistics” (1970: 412). For structuralists, culture is considered as a group of systems of signs that shares the same organisation and features of language as viewed by the Swiss philologist, professor and founder of modern structural linguistics Ferdinand de Saussure (18571913). Flourishing in the 1960s, structuralism applies linguistics to all aspects of social behaviour. In his Course in General Linguistics (1916), Saussure defines language as a closed and stable system of signs. His concept of the linguistic sign is the foundation of structuralism, not only in linguistic terms but also as a system of thought that considers social and cultural life as ruled by systems of signs equivalent to those of language. For Saussure, each sign is made up of two elements: a sound image or its graphic equivalent, called signifier, and its corresponding concept or signified. The signifier and the signified are then indivisible, like the two sides of a single sheet of paper. The concept of arbitrariness is central for Saussure. Namely, the relation between a signifier, for example the sound-image “tree”, and a signified, the concept “tree”, is merely the result of linguistic convention, and not of any natural link. Additionally, the relation of the whole sign and its referent, that is, the real thing to which it refers is also arbitrary. Consequently, Saussure points out the divergence between language and reality. Language does not reflect reality, it gives form to our experience of things and gives order to what it would otherwise be just a confused mixture of ideas. Referents do not settle on the meaning

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of words but on the contrary, words establish the meaning of things. For example, the signified “chair” is not determined by the existence of the actual objects to which it is arbitrarily linked in English. It is the sign “chair” that makes the real object “chair” distinguishable from other objects such as “tables”, for instance. Therefore, there is not a natural bond between word and thing. Consequently, Saussurean theories imply that language is not transparent to reality. On the contrary, reality, or the way we view reality, is constructed through language. For Saussure, signs are arbitrary but also differential. This idea is essential for Saussure since the meaning of a sign depends on its relation to other signs and more specifically on its difference from them. The sound-image “tree” has significance because it differs from “free”, “try”, etc. The concept “tree” has significance because it differs from concepts such as “bush”, “plant”, etc. Signs do not have a substantial and inherent meaning but a relational one and must be analysed as essential parts of a whole. The arbitrary and differential nature of the linguistic sign and the non-correspondence between language and reality are the linguistic basis of the structuralist idea that all meaning in every sphere of human activity consists of closed systems wholly independent of the material world. Saussure is primarily interested in analysing the organisation of those systems. His research does not focus on what people actually say, or “parole”, that is, the way each one of us speaks as an individual, but in the language-system, or “langue”, that is, the underlying structure of signs that allows us to use language, to speak. Saussure is concerned with structure and not with concrete individual utterances. His aim is to analyse the internal functioning of language. Structuralism is a system of thought that applies Saussure’s linguistic theory to all social and cultural activities. Language turns then into a unique archetype since any form of social behaviour is viewed as a closed system of signs. The principal target of the structuralist is to unearth the fundamental rules by which these signs are combined into meanings. But, whereas the meaning of these signs is not important for structuralists, their internal relations to one another, their structural configuration, are their main concern. Structuralism has a close relationship with semiotics or semiology, that is, the general science of signs. Semiology studies every social and cultural form of expression, like gestures, forms of dress, ways of eating, poems, football matches or traffic lights, as systems of signs whose organisation and meaning, far from being natural or inherent, are just artificial constructs dependent on social and cultural conventions. Developed by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, structural anthropology was the earliest and most relevant example of social

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structural analysis. By using linguistic analysis, Lévi-Strauss intended to discover the cultural and social structures that govern different cultures. His well-known analysis of myths, rituals and kinship relations is grounded on the idea that they can be studied as if they were structured and organised as a language, as a closed system of signs in a differential relation with each other. Lévi-Strauss tried to prove that though every culture has different social and cultural signs, nevertheless there exist basic sets of laws that are common to all cultural organisations and that rule the structure of such systems of signs. For Lévi-Strauss such sets of laws were deep-seated in the structures of the human brain. Literary structuralism was founded on Saussure’s linguistics and followed the structural methods of Lévi-Strauss. It emerged as a new type of structural analysis, since literature, considered as another field of social and cultural expression, was also regarded as a system of signs liable to be examined in semiological terms. However, since language is the very essence of literature, the Saussurean definition and organisation of language is not just used as a mere pattern or tool of cultural analysis in literary structuralism, in the same way as it is used in the studies of structural anthropology. The linguistic pattern now acquires more weight in the analysis of literature since, as Barthes remarks, “language is literature’s Being, its very world” (1970: 411). Literary structuralists are primarily concerned with the language of the texts; explicitly not about what the texts say or their message, but about how the texts say it or their code. That is, they do not analyse the content or meaning of the text but its form or the way this meaning is produced. Like Saussure, literary structuralists refuse to analyse the relationship between the sign and its referent, the word and the external object, the text and its message. They focus instead on the analysis of the text as a self-contained entity standing apart, not only from the external reality, but also from the readers’ response or the author’s intentions. The Humanist and Romantic traditions consider that texts hold an essence, a central meaning that stems from the author’s soul. The author creates his or her own meaning that translates into words, taking the shape of a literary work. For structuralists, the real essence of a literary work is just its linguistic structure since human meaning is merely a construct. The author is unable to control language or use it in order to express his or her feelings and thoughts faithfully. Language, as we have already noted, is not transparent to reality and it is able to control an author whose only way of giving form to what he or she tries to communicate is through a system whose signs do not naturally relate to what they refer to. In some ways, literary structuralism could resemble the formalist methods of new criticism and its rejection of the so-called “intentional”

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and “affective fallacies.” However, we have to bear in mind that whereas new critics intend to find an organic unity, a coherence, a central and single meaning in a text, structuralists disregard the referential dimension, and centre on the analysis of the relationship between signifiers, while rejecting the search for a final and unifying signified or meaning that could relate the text to an external reality. For the structuralist, a literary text is viewed as a closed system of signs organised and structured like language. One of the main aims of structuralists is to bring to light the underlying set of rules that presides over all works of literature. Such a set of rules is viewed as a general science of literature called “poetics”and is based on the Saussurean delineation between “langue” and “parole.” Structuralists regard every literary work as an example of “parole” or individual use of language that holds the underlying and constant rules and structures that belong to a general grammar of literature or general literary “langue.” The structuralist’s purpose is to analyse the way in which such rules take shape in every single literary work. A structural analysis of a text aims to find the laws of parallelism, relations, equivalences, etc. by which the linguistic structures within the literary text work. The most characteristic method of structural analysis is the organisation of texts in “binary oppositions.” The concept of the binary pairs springs from the Saussurean idea that the meaning of a sign depends on its differential relationship with another sign. For structural anthropologists, for instance, binary oppositions such as man/woman, nature/culture, light/dark, reason/passion, etc. give shape to the functioning of every culture and ultimately to the structure of human thought. Within these pairs, the second term is always considered subordinate to the first one. By applying the same methods, the literary structuralist views the text in similar terms and attempts to organise it in structured patterns which are able to show the relation between its hierarchical and opposite units. There are not many structural analyses devoted to Shakespeare’s production. However, as Terence Hawkes remarks in “Shakespeare and New Critical Approaches” (1986): There does exist a bulk of anti-Bradleian Anglo-American criticism which might reasonably be called quasi-structuralist: that is, its commitment lies wholly against Bradleian ‘realism’ and very much in favour of a view of the plays as structures deploying depersonalized ‘themes’ in which opposed concepts (such as appearance and reality, disorder and order, death and life) present a moral or political scheme in general rather than particular psychological terms. (290)

The “quasi-structuralists” Hawkes is referring to are critics such as L.C. Knights or G. Wilson Knight. In section 1.5. we observed how Wilson

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Knight focused on the analysis of patterns of images and symbols in order to find out the central theme and unity of the play. In the case of L.C. Knights, for example, in “How Many Children had Lady Macbeth? An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespeare Criticism” (1933), the critic responds to Bradley’s character criticism.1 He considers this question irrelevant to the analysis of the text since the allusion in Macbeth to Lady Macbeth giving suck is just made for poetic effect.2 It is not intended to make us wonder about her maternal role as if we were facing a real woman. Characters cannot be analysed as human beings according to Knights, who postulates that the structure of the play has to be found in its poetry. His analyses also present a meticulous attention to language. The works of these two critics are just viewed as an anticipation of the pure structuralist analysis in so far as they reject authorial intention and psychological realism. They both consider that authority lies within the text. Hawkes presents Roman Jakobson and Lawrence Jones’s complex analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 in Shakespeare’s Verbal Art in Th’Expence of Spirit (1969) as “the classic ‘structuralist’ reading of a Shakespearian text” (290). According to Hawkes this analysis “stands as a powerful and exhilarating exercise in pushing one kind of structuralism to its virtual limits” (290).3 SELECTION OF TEXTS In an essay about Macbeth in his book Some Shakespearean Themes and An Approach to Hamlet (1960), L. C. Knights states that “the essential structure of Macbeth, as of the other tragedies, is to be sought in the poetry” (1970: 102). In “How Many Children had Lady Macbeth?” (1933), Knights defines Macbeth as “a statement of evil” (2000: 119) and, through a detailed analysis of the poetry of the play he highlights the fact that the play blends three main themes: the reversal of values, the unnatural disorder and the deceitful appearance. Consequently, Knights observes in the whole pattern of the play what could be considered as binary oppositions between order and disorder and between truth and deceit. Text 1 presents the introduction to this essay. In contrast to Bradley’s or Coleridge’s studies of Shakespeare’s plays, Knights rejects psychological realism and argues that criticism should centre on the formal qualities of the text instead. His method is based on a scrupulous attention to language. 1 2 3

See Selection of Texts 1. See The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Macbeth 1.7.54. See Selection of Texts 2.

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Text 2 is Jakobson and Jones’s pure structural analysis of the couplet of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129. Observe their interest in the linguistic configuration of these two lines. Note the obvious difference between this type of analytical interpretation and other studies based on the examination of the language of the plays such as Wilson Knight’s, Caroline Spurgeon’s, Wolfgang Clemen’s or even L. C. Knights’s. Notice the numeric division between lines and quatrains and how the text is literally dissected. Every term is meticulously analysed and related to the rest of the elements in the sonnet. This type of analysis attempts to unearth the hidden linguistic rules and whole structure of the sonnet; its internal functioning. As we can see, this structural analysis is centred on the code of the text and considers its meaning as secondary.

1. L. C. Knights, “How Many Children had Lady Macbeth?” (1933) in A Shakespeare Reader: Sources and Criticism (2000) ... the only profitable approach to Shakespeare is a consideration of his plays as dramatic poems, of his use of language to obtain a total complex emotional response. Yet the bulk of Shakespeare criticism is concerned with his characters, his heroines, his love of Nature of his ‘philosophy’ – with everything in short, except with the words on the page, which it is the main business of the critic to examine ... The habit of regarding Shakespeare’s persons as ‘friends for life’ or, maybe, ‘deceased acquaintances’, is responsible for most of the vagaries that serve as Shakespeare criticism ... It accounts for Dr. Bradley’s Notes. It is responsible for all the irrelevant moral and realistic canons that have been applied to Shakespeare’s plays, for the sentimentalizing of his heroes (Coleridge and Goethe on Hamlet)4 and his heroines. And the loss is incalculable. Losing sight of the whole dramatic pattern of each play, we inhibit the development of that full complex response that makes our experience of a Shakespeare play so very much more than an appreciation of ‘character’ – that is, usually, of somebody else’s ‘character.’ The more complete, more intimate possession can only be obtained by treating Shakespeare primarily as a poet. Since everyone who has written about Shakespeare probably imagines that he has ‘treated him primarily as a poet’, some explanation is called for. How should we read Shakespeare? We start with so many lines of verse on a printed page which we read as we should read any other poem. We have to elucidate the meaning ... and to unravel ambiguities; we have to estimate the kind and quality of imagery and determine the precise degree of evocation of particular figures; we have to allow full weight to each word, exploring its ‘tentacular roots’, and to determine how it controls and 4

See section about Critical Approaches to Hamlet in Unit 3.

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is controlled by the rhythmic movement of the passage in which it occurs. In short, we have to decide exactly why the lines ‘are so and not otherwise.’ (2000: 118) Roman Jakobson and Lawrence Jones, Shakespeare’s Verbal Art in Th’ Expence of Spirit (1969) Sonnet 129 as printed in the 1609 Quarto and as presented by Jakobson and Jones: I

1 2 3 4 II 1 2 3 4 III 1 2 3 4 IV 1 2

Th’expence of Spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action, and till action, lust Is perjurd, murdrous, blouddy full of blame, Savage, extreame, rude, cruel, not to trust, Injoyd no sooner but dispised straight, Past reason hunted, and no sooner had Past reason hated as a swallowed bayt, On purpose layd to make the taker mad. Made in pursut and in possession so, Had, having, and in quest, to have extreame, A blisse in proofe and provd and very wo, Before a joy proposd behind a dreame All this the world well knowes yet none knowes well, 5 To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

The terminal couplet exhibits a considerable number of features alien to the three quatrains. This couplet is devoid of adjectives, participles, indefinite articles (against the fifteen adjectives, eleven participles, and six indefinite articles of the quatrains), and of relational (grammatical) verbs. It is the only strophe with a plural substantive, notional (lexical) finites, substantival and adjectival pronouns and with a relative clause. The four nouns of IV are pure substantives, whereas in the quatrains most of the substantives are deeply related to verbs ... The sonnet has two topics – the lust and the luster – and omits the designation of the former in the final strophe and the designation of the latter in the initial strophe. The abstract appellation of the first topic attracts a string of further abstract nouns. The first strophe characterizes lust in itself; the second launches a set of passive participles with a hint to the yet unnamed dramatis personae and finishes by referring to the taker of the bayt; the third strophe uses active participles to depict the taker’s behavior and brings forward images of lust as objects of his strivings. The adjective extreame applied to lust in the first strophe is transferred to the luster in the third. Mere anaphoric pronouns refer in the terminal couplet to the previous representation of lust, and the notion of the luster grows into a generalized idea of men and their damnation. The final line seems to allude to the ultimate persona, the celestial condemner of mankind. The entire couplet consists of mere monosyllables, partly stressable, partly proclitic; but note Puttenham: “In words monosyllable the accent is indifferent 5

For a detailed analysis of this sonnet see www.shakespeares-sonnets.com.

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and may be used for sharp or flat and heavy at our pleasure” (p.92)! We observe a similar lapidary makeup of the terminal couplet in several other of Shakespeare’s sonnets, e.g. 2,18, and 43. This structure favors a clear-cut duple phrasing of the lines in question: All this / the world / well knowes / yet none / knowes well, To shun / the heaven / that leads / men to / this hell. (26-27)

SECTION 2.2 2.2. POST-STRUCTURALISM AND DECONSTRUCTION Post-structuralism is a system of thought that questions certain key concepts of structuralism such as sign or structure. The internal functioning of language is once more the pattern post-structuralists use in order to analyse the organisation of texts. But this time language is no longer considered as a stable and enclosed structure of meaning, as Saussure pointed out. Language is now viewed as a locus without a centre, without a fixed meaning; on the contrary, meaning is always deferred, always absent. In order to understand the full scope of such assertions it is necessary to become familiar with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and his conclusions after analysing Saussure’s linguistic method. Derrida questions structuralism after exploring the implications of Saussure’s idea of linguistic difference. Derrida uses the term “différance” in order to explain his ideas on language. “Différance” is an ambiguous term. It derives from the French “différer” which means “to defer, postpone, delay”, alluding to the nature of meaning, and “to differ, be different from”, hinting at the nature of signs, and the nature of the signifiers. The duplicity of meaning of the term “différance” refers to the necessary connections among the units of language in a text and at the same time to their distinctive nature. That is, the meaning of an element in a text depends on its correlation with other elements prior and subsequent to it, and its existence depends on its being distinct from these other elements. Let’s analyse these ideas in more detail. Saussure argues that meaning is a matter of difference, that “cat” is “cat” because it is not “cap” or “bat.”6 But this process of difference in 6 You can find these same examples in Terry Eagleton´s Literary Theory. An Introduction (1983: 110).

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language could have no end. That is, “cat” is “cat” also because it is not “cad” or “mat”, and “mat” is what it is because it is not “map”, and so on. Post-structuralism concludes that every sign is what it is because it is not any other sign. Each sigh is different from all others. That infinite multiplicity of differences is what gives them their meaning. Meaning then depends on difference. Saussure also establishes that there is an intimate relationship between the unities of the sign, namely the signifier and signified. But poststructuralism questions such blending. A signified is no longer the outcome of the difference between two signifiers but the result of the differences between an unlimited number of signifiers. For post-structuralism, signifieds and signifiers are no longer the two inseparable sides of a single sheet of paper. That is, the signified “boat” is not just the product of the difference between the signifier “boat” and “moat” but also the product of a complex and infinite interaction of signifiers like “coat”, “boar”, “bolt”, etc. For poststructuralism, this non-stop play of signifiers is what gives origin to meaning. Meaning is again difference and interplay of elements. The idea that the signifier was subordinate and a verbal substitute for an independent and prior signified is also questioned. For poststructuralism, signifieds constantly turn into signifiers that incessantly turn into new signifieds. There are no hierarchical distinctions between signified and signifiers, but a constant play of signifiers in language. Terry Eagleton illustrates such an idea by pointing out that “when we look up the meaning or signified of a signifier in a dictionary, we just find some other signifiers whose meaning can also be looked up, and so on. This circular and infinite process will never let us arrive at a final signified which is not a signifier in itself” (1983: 111). Language then is viewed by post-structuralism as a chain of signifiers always in contact with each other and since there does not exist a signified that does not turn into a signifier, language turns into a variable structure without a signifying centre. Post-structuralists apply these linguistic views to the analysis of a text and conclude that its meaning is always deferred; that there is not a final, fixed meaning in a text. Texts are considered as chains of signifiers that need each other in order to signify since contexts are essential to determine their meaning. Every meaning or signified alluded to by any specific signifier is constantly modified by later ones and vice-versa. Consequently, post-structuralism considers the meaning of a text as always in constant change, never completely present since it is always deferred, always incomplete; a text never presents a fixed meaning, its meaning is always in a perpetual movement, it is always postponed, always delayed. Texts only present a constant interplay of signifiers

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without a final and definite signified. As a consequence, and as Eagleton argues, this system: strikes a serious blow at certain traditional theories of meaning. For such theories, it was the function of signs to reflect inward experiences or objects in the real world, to ‘make present’ one’s thoughts and feelings or to describe how reality was ... nothing is ever fully present in signs: it is an illusion for me to believe that I can ever be fully present to you in what I say or write, because to use signs at all entails that my meaning is always dispersed, divided, and never quite at one with itself. (112)

This theory of the text marks a great difference between structuralism and post-structuralism. The former considers the play, novel or poem as a “work”, as something finished, a product with a unity and an ordered structure. Post-structuralism considers the literary object as a “text” in constant process, plural, open to multiple interpretations as Roland Barthes argues in his essay “From Work to Text” in 1971. Barthes questions his own initial structuralist critical views, especially from the publication in 1970 of his study of Balzac’s story Sarrasine S/Z. Already, in his influential essay “The Death of the Author” (1968), Barthes defines the text not as “a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” (2001: 1468). Barthes is presenting here the intertextuality of texts. All literary texts are made of textual traces already extant in other literary texts.7 The role of the author is just “to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them” (1468). Barthes considers that a correct reading of a text must imply the removal of its author. By taking into account the authorial presence we are giving the text a meaning, a closed explanation, a unity, an origin. Writing must be detached from its immediate context. For post-structuralism, the author turns into a mere scriptor since the origin of the text lies in the language itself. It is language which speaks and performs in the text, not the author. A post-structuralist analysis is not interested in the psychology, life, social or historical context of the author. Barthes argues that “writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the identity of the body writing” (1466). However, to Barthes the death of the author implies the birth of the reader. The multiplicity of the texts is finally focused on the 7

See Literatura inglesa hasta el siglo XVII (2002: 507).

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reader. According to Barthes, the unity of the text is not in its origin, in the author, but in the destination, in the reader: Classic criticism has never paid attention to the reader: for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys: we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author. (1470)

Derrida uses the term “différance” in opposition to the notion of “logocentrism.” He applies his linguistic theory to philosophical interpretations of his own worldview. Derrida bases his analysis of “logocentrism” on the traditional Western idea that language acts as the reflection of external ideas, as opposed to Saussure’s notion that language produces reality and does not reflect it. Derrida considers as “logocentric” those forms of thought whose beliefs and modes of behaviour are ruled by some external point of reference. Using linguistic terms, Derrida metaphorically sees these types of society as languages whose diverse elements are in search of a transcendental, a final signified, namely God, Truth, the Idea, the Self, etc., to which all signifiers are referring. This transcendental signified is considered as “The Meaning”, “The Sign” around which the whole structure of that language, of that system of thought, of that society, is organised. Derrida terms these systems of thoughts, like ours, as “metaphysical.” They are usually social organisations governed by an unquestionable transcendental signified or first principle that rules a whole hierarchy of values. Derrida observes how such values are usually organised in binary opposition with privileged first principles, as for example: reality/appearance, clear/uncertain, self/non-self, speech/writing, soul/body, inside/outside, literal/ metaphorical, masculine/feminine, truth/falsity, sense/nonsense, or reason/madness. According to Derrida, the priority given to the first half of these polarities is due to ideological pressures and needs. That is, out of its need for power or survival, each social organisation, each human group, generates and favours a series of structured patterns of social values generally accepted by the whole community. Consequently, for Derrida, what these metaphysical systems consider as foundational truths or stable first principles are just provisional cultural constructs. Therefore, for Derrida the transcendental or final signified and the privileged halves of the polarities are just ideological fictions. The philosopher establishes a linguistic comparison and views all social concepts and values as signifiers at work in an indefinite play of

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signification. As signifiers, these social concepts depend on each other in order to acquire meaning. The meaning of each signifier depends on the existence of the rest of the signifiers in the signifying chain. Each signifier is defined by its difference from an infinite number of signifiers, that is, every signifier is defined by what it excludes. For Derrida, then, every single signifier, every social value or concept, is closely interrelated with the rest, it is then defined by what it is not. Each signifier at play within this never-ending signifying chain is thus essential for the meaning of the rest. Consequently, since they are assigned the same status within the signifying system, there should not be privileged terms within the binary opposition. Eagleton applies such linguistic theory to the configuration of social values and states: Consider, in our society, Freedom, the Family, Democracy, Independence, Authority, Order and so on. Sometimes such meanings are seen as the origin or the goal of all the others, the source from which they flow or the goal towards which all other meanings are or should be marching; but this, as we have seen, is a curious way of thinking, because for this meaning ever to have been possible other signs must already have existed. (1983: 114)

Derrida opposes this “metaphysical” and “logocentric” view by deconstructing the fictional and ideological binary oppositions, that is, by showing how there is not a clear differentiation between both halves of the polarity. The deconstructive analysis of such pairs will consider their constituents not as being antithetical but, on the contrary, as sharing similar features. By such a dismantling of social binaries, deconstruction can be considered as a social and political practice that breaks up the foundation of ideological systems that favour a certain set of values while bringing others down. Eagleton shows how a deconstructive analysis would define the terms of the binary man/woman: Woman is not just an other in the sense of something beyond his ken, but an other intimately related to him as the image of what he is not, and therefore as an essential reminder of what he is. Man therefore needs this other even as he spurns it, is constrained to give a positive identity to what he regards as no-thing. Not only is his own being parasitically dependent upon the woman, and upon the act of excluding and subordinating her, but one reason why such exclusion is necessary is because she may not be quite so other after all. Perhaps she stands as a sign of something in man himself which he needs to repress, expel beyond his own being, relegate to a securely alien region beyond his own definitive limits. Perhaps what is outside is also somehow inside, what is alien also intimate – so that man needs to police the absolute frontier between the two realms as vigilantly as he does just because it may always be transgressed, has always been transgressed already, and is much less absolute than it appears. (115)

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Derrida applies his philosophical views to textual analysis by using as his main critical tool deconstructive readings as opposed to structuralist methods. As we have already pointed out, structuralist analysis views the text as a structured system organised in binary oppositions such as Culture versus Nature, Order versus Disorder or Man versus Woman. The methodical structuralist analysis systematises the text in ordered structures of meaning and renders it a bearer of a stable and fixed signification. As a post-structuralist critical theory, deconstruction questions and reacts against structuralist analysis by opposing and dismantling the idea of structure and the concept of steady meaning in a text. In order to do so, the main task of a deconstructive reading is to spot the contradictions working within the text that disturb the inner order that the structuralist claims to find. Such contradictions are found through the analysis of paradox, ambiguity, polysemy, metaphor, figurative devices or wordplay within the text. On many occasions such elements are disclosed after the analysis of marginal fragments in the texts-such as footnotes, certain images or allusions-that reverses the logocentric and metaphysical oppositions supposedly at work in the text and shows how the distinction between the two halves of the binaries dissipates. Deconstructive readings try to demonstrate how every single text disrupts the internal logic and structured organisation that the structuralist method attempts to discover. As we have already seen, post-structuralism regards language as no longer a stable structure of meaning but as a signifying chain where none of its elements is definable but in a differential relation to the others. For structuralism, the structure of the text had a centre that imposed certain order and hierarchy of meanings. For post-structruralism such a centre does not exist. Consequently, there is always a continuous displacement of meaning that impedes the critical discovery of a central meaning in a text that would faithfully correspond to an external referent. For poststructuralism, there is not a pure correspondence between language and its object. Since language does not work as a perfectly transparent medium, it is not possible to ascertain the thought of an author who is in turn unable to express through language his or her own intentions. Derrida rejects then the traditional idea that literary texts possess an essential meaning and that literary criticism is able to find out such knowledge. Deconstruction rejects the traditional differentiation between literature and criticism since, for Derrida, no critical work can reach a final reading of a text; there is not an authoritative final analysis. Since the act of reading is expressed through language, criticism turns itself into a new text that can at the same time be analysed and interpreted. For Derrida, all language, not just literary usage, is informed by the play of “différance.”

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Texts then become open and each act of reading is at the same time liable to be reinterpreted, dismantled, undermined, deconstructed. The constant play of signifiers makes language betray itself and turns it into a deceitful, duplicitous and tricky system unable to reach a final knowledge.

SELECTION OF TEXTS In these extracts from Belsey’s influential article, we can observe a deconstructive analysis of sexual difference in Shakespeare’s comedies. She centres on the role of disguise and the way traits assigned to maleness and femaleness are disrupted. Pay close attention to the post-structuralist critical terms that Belsey uses to oppose the structuralist conception of meaning and also to point out Derrida’s concept of the “metaphysical” and his theory of deconstruction as the disruption of binary oppositions. Before her “radical” textual analysis, Belsey examines certain Elizabethan social circumstances that she will later apply to her literary criticism. She describes the two different meanings of the family during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as “dynasty and as private realm of warmth and virtue” (1996: 169). Despite the fact that oppositions never disappeared, Belsey observes how in the sixteenth century the place of women is newly defined within the domestic sphere. Consequently, the meaning of what it was to be a woman was challenged. The relationship between husband and wife became more harmonious and there was a certain sense of equality between both pairs of the binary. Therefore, the opposition man/woman was destabilised as it is in comedies such as As You Like It.

Catherine Belsey, “Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies” in Alternative Shakespeares (1996) A conservative criticism reads in quest of familiar, obvious, common-sense meanings, and thus reaffirms what we already know. A radical criticism, however, is concerned to produce readings which challenge that knowledge by revealing alternative meanings, disrupting the system of differences which legitimates the perpetuation of things as they are. The project of such a criticism is not to replace one authoritative interpretation of a text with another, but to suggest a plurality of ways in which texts might be read in the interests of extending the reach of what is thinkable, imaginable or possible. I want to suggest that Shakespearean comedy can be read as disrupting sexual difference, calling into question that set of relations between terms which proposes

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as inevitable an antithesis between masculine and feminine, men and women. (166-67) Meaning depends on difference, and the fixing of meaning is the fixing of difference as opposition. It is precisely this identification of difference as polarity which Derrida defines as metaphysical. In conjunction with the common-sense belief that language is a nomenclature, a set of labels for what is irrevocably and inevitably there – whether in the world or in our heads – this process of fixing meaning provides us with a series of polarities which define what is. These definitions are also values. In the oppositions ‘I/you’, ‘individual/society’, ‘truth/fiction’, ‘masculine/feminine’ one term is always privileged, and one is always other, always what is not the thing itself. The insistence on meaning as single, fixed and given is thus a way of reaffirming existing values. Conversely, those moments when the plurality of meaning is most insistent are also moments of crisis in the order of existing values. A contest for meaning disrupts the system of differences which we take for granted, throwing into disarray the opposition and the values which structure understanding. The contest for the meaning of the family which took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries disrupted sexual difference, and in the space between the two sets of meanings, the old and the new polarities, there appear in the fiction of the period shapes, phantasms perhaps, that unsettle the opposition defining the feminine as that which is not masculine – not, that is to say, active muscular, rational, authoritative ... powerful. Women are defined precisely as the opposite sex, and the ‘evidence’, the location of this antithesis, is the process of reproduction. The family as the proper source of that process, the place of reproduction, is thus among the major determinants of the meaning of sexual difference itself. A radical discontinuity in the meaning of the family, which is not in any sense an evolution, produces a gap in which definitions of other modes of being for women are momentarily visible. The period of Shakespeare’s plays is also the period of an explosion of interest in Amazon, female warriors, roaring girls (Shepherd 1981) and women disguised as pages. An interest in female transvestism is not, of course, confined to the Renaissance. It stretches at least from Ovid’s story of Iphis and Ianthe (Metamorphoses, IX, lines 666-797) to twentieth-century pantomime. But it is hard to think of any period when the motif is so recurrent. It appears in five of Shakespeare’s comedies of love and marriage. And in turn Rosalind and Viola, Portia, Julia and Imogen8 are the direct descendants of a long line of English and European Renaissance heroines of prose and drama, Neronis, Silla and Gallathea, Lelia, Ginevra, Violetta and Felismena, who are disguised as men in order to escape the constraints and the vulnerability of the feminine. … The effect of this motif of women disguised as men is hard to define. In the first place, of course, it throws into relief the patriarchal assumptions of the period. ‘Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold’ (As You Like It, I.iii.106): that women are vulnerable is seen as obvious and natural. It is not, on the other hand, 8 Viola, in Twelfth Night, Portia, in The Merchant of Venice, Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Imogen in Cymbeline use male disguise as Rosalind does in As You Like It.

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seen as essential or inevitable, but as a matter of appearance. Rape is a consequence not of what women are but of what men believe they are. Rosalind tells Celia, We’ll have a swashing and a martial outside, As many other mannish cowards have That do outface it with their semblances. (As You Like It, I.iii.116-18)

Not all men are equally courageous, but they are all less vulnerable than women because they look as if they can defend themselves ... Even while it reaffirms patriarchy, the tradition of female transvestism challenges it precisely by unsettling the categories which legitimate it. (177-80)

SECTION 2.3 2.3. NEW HISTORICISM AND CULTURAL MATERIALISM By the early 1980s, new historicism, also known as the “return of history”, emerged as a post-structuralist approach that introduced a ground-breaking system of historical analysis of Renaissance literary texts. American new historicists such as Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Adrian Montrose, Jonathan Goldberg, Stephen Orgel or Leonard Tennenhouse, and British new historicists, also known as cultural materialists, such as Jonathan Dollimore, Alan Sinfield, Catherine Belsey, Francis Barker or Raymond Williams, among many others, opposed the historical analysis developed by Tillyard in the 1940s.9 Tillyard viewed history as something that objectively reflected reality, and the literary text as a mere mirror of historical facts and values of the age. Tillyard observed just one divine and monarchic dominant Elizabethan world-picture and considered its culture and history as unified, ordered and stable entities where subversive elements had no place. He saw history and culture in structuralist terms, since they were viewed as ordered structures with a ruling centre or origin engendered by the ruling classes in their own interests. New historicists radically oppose such conclusions. First of all, they point out the textuality of history and, by following the post-structuralist idea that there is never a pure correspondence between language and its external referent, new historicists consider that historical 9

See section 1.5.3.

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accounts are unable to show us the facts of the past objectively. Consequently, literature cannot directly reflect historical reality either. Secondly, new historicists defend a post-structuralist definition of history as a discontinuous structure without a centre. For new historicism, there is not just one but multiple and sometimes even antagonistic histories where everything, including dissenting and challenging voices, has its significant place within the social formation. New historicism points out the discontinuity of reality and not its uniformity. Accordingly, since history is not just one but multiple, the harmonious relationship between the constituents of the traditional binary history/literature or context/text is dismantled by new historicism. In Tillyard’s opinion literature is just a mimetic object that faithfully reflects history, that is, the unified external reality of its age. There is then a hierarchical relationship between the pairs of a binary that privileges history over literature. However, for new historicists hierarchies disappear and the binary is deconstructed since literature is included within the definition of history. For new historicism, history is understood as the multiform result of a convergence of social discourses such as the historical, the religious, the scientific, the political, the educational, as well as the literary. Consequently, the literary text is considered as one of the multiple social discourses that contribute to construct such heterogeneous history. But, at the same time that literature actively participates in the cultural construction of a society, in what the reader or spectator senses as his or her own culture, the literary text is also the passive result of the exchange and interaction of such social discourses. That is, a literary text is a site of intertextuality in which we can identify the presence and interconnection of elements that belong to multiple and diverse cultural discourses. Let’s examine this idea in more detail. In “’Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish’: The Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest” (1996), the new historicists Francis Barker and Peter Hulme point out that the literary work is located: at the intersection of different discourses which are related to each other ... it would be meaningless to talk about the unity of any given text – supposedly the intrinsic quality of all “works of art” ... the text is in fact marked and fissured by the interplay of the discourses that constitute it. (197)

As we see, by mentioning its intertextual nature, the text is described in Derridean terms by alluding to its disruption as a stable and unified structure and its decentring. The idea of the text as a site of intertextuality could be traced back to Michel Foucault’s influential description of the “frontiers of the book” in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) as:

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never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network ... the book is not simply the object that one holds in one’s hands; and it cannot remain within the little parallelepiped that contains it: its unity is variable and relative. As soon as one questions that unity, it loses its self-evidence; it indicates itself, constructs itself, only on the basis of a complex field of discourse. (1997: 23)

In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault describes this new type of text as a historical “monument” whose analysis is essential in order to ascertain the diverse cultural nature of a certain age. Foucault makes a distinction between what he calls a “total” and a “general” history. The former would correspond to the traditional idea of a historical analysis that “seeks to reconstitute the overall form of a civilization, the principle – material or spiritual – of a society, the significance common to all the phenomena of a period ... what is called metaphorically the face of a period” (9). This type of analysis views historical documents as valid sources that reflect a unified historical truth, transparent to real facts. However, what he describes as “general” history turns the documents into “monuments” that have to be carefully analysed in order to discover, not a single truth, cultural essence or the “significance common to all the phenomena of a period”, but the interconnection between the different social and cultural discourses at work in such texts: History has altered its position in relation to the document: it has taken as its primary task, not the interpretation of the document, nor the attempt to decide whether it is telling the truth or what is its expressive value, but to work on it from within and to develop it: history now organizes the document, divides it up, distributes it, orders it, arranges it in levels, establishes series, distinguishes between what is relevant and what is not, discovers elements, defines unities, describes relations. The document, then, is no longer for history an inert material through which it tries to reconstitute what men have done or said, the events of which only the trace remains; history is now trying to define within the documentary material itself unities, totalities, series, relations ... history is that which transforms documents into monuments ... In our time history aspires to the condition of archaeology, to the intrinsic description of the monument. (7)

Deeply influenced by Foucault, in Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), Stephen Greenblatt, founding figure of new historicism, defines the text, and more specifically the Renaissance play, not as “the central, stable locus of theatrical meaning”, but as “the site of institutional and ideological contestation” (1997: 3). Greenblatt views the plays as historical “monuments.” That is, the plays hold a series of collective beliefs inherent

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to different discursive practices that are all interconnected and dependent on each other and participate in the construction of the ideology of a certain social formation. The aim of the critic is to uncover such relations. Such an interpretative practice is defined by Greenblatt as “a poetics of culture” (5). One of the methods of analysis used by new historicists is based on an anthropological method explained by Clifford Geertz in the opening essay of The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) called “Thick Description: Towards an Interpretative Theory of Culture.” Such method is called “thick description”, a detailed analysis of small matters such as social events or human behaviours at work within a certain social formation. Since Geertz considers culture as “an interworked system of construable signs” (14), the thick description of a single event of culture, of one of those signs, can reveal how its social structures work and how they signify. As we have already noted, new historicism considers that any type of cultural discourse or document is closely related to the rest in the sense that they are all a result of the same ideological forces; in Geertz’s terms they are constituents of a collective system of signs in constant relation to each other. Consequently, the thick description of any anecdote or detail included within any social document such as travel, religious, historical or medical treatises shows how the social mechanisms at work within these texts share the same ideological values that we can find after the analysis of the literary text. That is the reason why many new historicist texts begin with a reference to elements at the margins of the text, that is, with a historical anecdote that later on relates to the analysis of the literary text at stake. When Greenblatt refers to his analytical method in the first chapter of Shakespearean Negotiations he states: In the essays that follow I propose something different: to look less at the presumed center of the literary domain than at its borders, to try to track what can only be glimpsed, as it were, at the margins of the text. (1997: 4)

According to Greenblatt, the literary work is one of those cultural practices that are constantly circulating in society and getting in contact with the rest. The diverse discourses that converge in a play and the relationship between them turn it into a faithful reflection of the process that he calls “circulation of social energy” (19).10 To Greenblatt, literary 10 In Shakespearean Negotiations Greenblatt states: “But what is ‘social energy’ ? ... it is manifested in the capacity of certain verbal, aural, and visual traces to produce, shape, and organize collective physical and mental experiences. Hence it is associated with repeatable forms of pleasure and interest, with the capacity to arouse disquiet, pain, fear, the beating of the heart, pity, laughter, tension, relief, wonder” (1997: 6). A few paragraphs later he points out that “the circulation of social energy by and through the stage was not part of a single coherent, totalizing system. Rather it was partial, fragmentary, conflictual; elements were crossed, torn apart, recombined, set against each other; particular social practices were

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works, and more specifically Shakespeare’s plays, are essential constituents of such a social process: Theatrical values do not exist in a realm of privileged literariness, of textual or even institutional self-referentiality. Shakespeare’s theater was not isolated by its wooden walls, nor did it merely reflect social and ideological forces that lay entirely outside it: rather the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater was itself a social event in reciprocal contact with other social events. Drama, and artistic expression in general, is never perfectly self-contained and abstract, nor can it be derived satisfactorily from the subjective consciousness of an isolated creator. Collective actions, ritual gestures, paradigms of relationship, and shared images of authority penetrate the work of art, while conversely the socially overdetermined work of art, along with a multitude of other institutions and utterances, contributes to the formation, realignment and transmission of social practices ... (45)

With these words the founding father of new historicism remarks on the relevance of “the social presence to the world of the literary text and the social presence of the world in the literary text” (1984: 5).11 As we can see, Greenblatt emphasises the importance of the social presence of the world in the literary text over the role of its author. New historicism opposes the humanist idea that considers the work of art as a reflection of the inner self of an author, of his or her thoughts and emotions. Influenced, once again, by Foucault’s observations in his essay “What is an Author?” (1969), these critics consider the author not as the origin of the signifying essence and meaning of his or her work but, as the text, as a mere ideological construction. According to Foucault, We are accustomed ... to saying that the author is the genial creator of a work in which he deposits, with infinite wealth and generosity, an inexhaustible world of significations ... The truth is quite the contrary: the author is not an indefinite source of signification which fills a work; the author does not precede the works, he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction. (1988: 209)

The author precedes his or her work in the sense that it is the result of the interconnection of different social discourses at work in the construction magnified by the stage, others diminished, exalted, evacuated. What then is the social energy that is being circulated? Power, charisma, sexual excitement, collective dreams, wonder, desire, anxiety, religious awe, free-floating intensities of experience: in a sense the question is absurd, for everything produced by the society can circulate unless it is deliberately excluded from circulation. Under such circumstances, there can be no single method, no overall picture, no exhaustive and definitive cultural poetics” (19). 11 See Selection of Texts 5.

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of a certain culture. Such interchange and negotiation of discourses ultimately shape the author’s view of his or her own cultural surroundings that eventually he or she reflects in a piece of work. Authors are not free or autonomous but dependent upon the social forces around them and are, consequently, mere intermediaries between ideology and the literary text. The description of the author as an ideological construction is intimately related to the new historicist definition of culture and man. The American cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz exerted a great influence on new historicism. In The Interpretation of Cultures he defines culture as: a set of control mechanisms – plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call “programs”) – for the governing of behaviour ... man is precisely the animal most desperately dependent upon such extragenetic, outside-the-skin control mechanisms, such cultural programs, for ordering his behavior. (1973: 44)

According to Geertz, we, as human beings, are: incomplete or unfinished animals who complete or finish ourselves through culture ... our ideas, our values, our acts, even our emotions, are, like our nervous system itself, cultural products – products manufactured, indeed, out of tendencies, capacities, and dispositions with which we were born, but manufactured nonetheless ... men; they, too, every last of them, are cultural artifacts. (49-51)

These definitions of culture as a “set of control mechanisms” and man as a “cultural artefact” are first appropriated by Greenblatt in his pioneering work Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) and turn into two of the most significant new historicist maxims. New historicism resists essentialist humanism, that is, the idea that all human beings throughout history share a common, inborn and universal human nature or essence. The image of man as a cultural artefact rejects the existence of such an essence and the definition of man as unified and autonomous. For new historicism, man is controlled, constrained and shaped by social and historical forces and turned into an ideological construction. Consequently, the term “subjectivity” acquires in this context a new meaning. It does not refer to that inherent and transhistorical human essence untouched by external constraints. It now alludes to the process of “subjectification” by means of which man is “subject”, is dependent upon, is subordinate to the social and cultural pressures of his own age. This conception of the human being is closely related to the reason why new historicists choose Renaissance literary texts as their main object of study. In his work Radical Tragedy. Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (1984), Jonathan Dollimore

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describes the early seventeenth century as a transitional period between two different ages and two different notions of the human being, respectively predicated on the Christian essentialism of the Middle Ages and the essentialist humanism of the Enlightenment. The former views the human essence as “metaphysically constituted – i.e. it derives from, and is dependent upon, divine and natural law. At its simplest, man is an effect of God” (xxix). The latter considers such an essence as inherent to man and not dependent on divine intervention; man is considered as an autonomous and unique entity. For Dollimore, during the Renaissance period or what he calls “the early modern England” (xxxi), the decay of Christian essentialism led to a decentring of man, a recognition of the discontinuous nature of the definition of man and an insistence on the relationship between social processes and subjectivity. Renaissance drama was a catalyst of all these ideas: So if on the Renaissance stage the idea that divine and/or natural law informs identity is being interrogated, the result is not man released from medieval shackles, but subjects caught up in a messy, conflictual displacement of the metaphysical (divine/natural law) by the social. The contradictions of history flood the space vacated by metaphysics. Correspondingly the metaphysically constituted subject becomes a decentred, contradictory subjectivity. In the fate of Antony, Coriolanus, Vittoria of Flamineo, we ‘read’ not the working of Fate or God, but a contemporary reality which both creates and destroys them; a reality which asks to be identified in materialist terms – it is manifestly historical, social and political – even though it cannot be exhaustively described by them. (xxxi)

In these lines, dramatic characters are analysed as ideological constructs, as created and shaped by a discontinuous reality made up of fragments belonging to different discourses such as the historical, the social and the political.12 “Ideology” and “discourse” are central concepts in new historicist analyses and are widely examined by Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault. In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970), the influential Marxist thinker Louis Althusser analyses the process by which human subjects are shaped by ideology. Ideology fashions man through the workings of what Althusser calls the ISA (Ideological State Apparatuses), that is “a certain number of realities which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions” (2001:1489). These apparatuses should not be confused, Althusser remarks, with the State apparatuses such as the Government, the Administration, the Army, the Police, the Courts, the 12

See Selection of Texts 1.

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Prisons, etc., which work by repression and violence. The ISA are, according to Althusser, the religious ISA, that is, the system of the different Churches; the educational ISA or the system of the different public and private schools; the family ISA; the legal ISA; the political ISA or the political system including the different Parties; the trade-union ISA; the communications ISA, which include the press, radio, television, etc.; and the cultural ISA such as literature, the Arts, sports, etc. The ISA work, says Althusser, by ideology (1489). The instrument these ISA use in order to shape and control human consciousness is the language at work in the social processes, that is, the ideological discourse. These ideological discourses endeavour to maintain social hierarchies and order while subjecting individuals. The analysis of each discourse reveals the values each ISA desires to communicate and also the ideas that it is determined to silence. The ruling classes control the dominant discursive formations in order to serve their own interests, perpetuate their privileges and preserve social differences. Althusser defines ideology as “the representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (1498). That is, the ideological discourses gradually shape the individual’s consciousness to the extent that the relationship that he or she has with reality is partly an illusion and not real. The controlling force exerted by the discourses makes the subject accept as natural certain values and ideas, that is, a certain reality constructed by language that serves the interests of the influential and controlling classes. As we see, there is a close relationship between “discourse” and “power”. Such a connection is one of Foucault’s main interests, which will be later appropriated by new historicists. Through the manipulation of language, discourse creates a reality that allows certain institutions or classes of each epoch to wield social, political or intellectual power. Such power is exerted by making individuals behave in accordance with a set of artificial but also official and discursively regulated ideas and values that change from one age to another. In History of Sexuality I (1976), Foucault states that power does not come from what he calls “the primary existence of a central point, in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and descendent forms would emanate” (1990: 93). Foucault redefines the traditional idea of power by alluding to the “microphysics of power”, that he defines as the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable. The omnipresence of power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or

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rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere: not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere. (93)

The main implication of such a view is that power is not just located in dominating institutions such as the family, the school, the church, the court or the mass media that help to construct the ruling ideology of each social formation. Since power is everywhere, it is also located in the transgressive and subversive forces of society that are repressed, excluded and silenced. In fact, Foucault considers power as closely linked to resistance and states that: where there is power, there is resistance ... a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations. These points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network ... they too are distributed in irregular fashion: the points, knots, or focuses of resistance are spread over time and space at varying densities. (1990: 95-96)

According to Foucault authority brings about these moments of resistance and engenders social desire in order to contain it and consequently consolidate its supremacy. He points out the bond between power and desire and states that “one should not think that desire is repressed, for the simple reason that the law is what constitutes both desire and the lack on which it is predicated. Where there is desire, the power relation is already present” (81). While admitting the existence of the theory of subversion and containment, Foucault also views these points of resistance as constant sources of power able to prompt what he calls “cleavages in a society that shift about, fracturing unities and effecting regroupings, furrowing across individuals themselves, cutting them up and remoulding them, marking off irreducible regions in their bodies and minds” (96). Consequently, for Foucault, insubordination to the prescribed set of ideological values is powerful as an active participant in the process of social change and not just a mechanism that authority uses in order to strengthen its control. According to Foucault, social defiance is also transmitted by discourse, which at the same time that it produces power, “also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it” (100). Since, as Foucault states, power is everywhere, it is also present in literary texts. For new historicism Elizabethan drama and its theatrical discourse are sites of power that actively participate in the social construction of the early modern period. New historicists consider that Foucault’s theories on subversion and containment were actively performed on the Elizabethan stage, explicitly by those plays whose central theme was political such as the history plays. At this particular point we

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have to draw a dividing line between the views held by the American new historicism and the British new historicism or cultural materialism. For American new historicists, the insubordination reflected by the dramatic texts is allowed to emerge in order to be contained and thus reaffirm the monarchical hegemony. Consequently, theatrical discourse does not challenge but reproduces the ruling ideological construction of reality and reinforces the monarchical discourse. In Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Greenblatt states that the subversive element in society, that is, the alien, the Other, is necessary in order to fashion the identity of those who are submissive to the absolute power or authority. Therefore, the existence of the alien helps to strengthen authority: Self-fashioning is achieved in relation to something perceived as alien, strange, or hostile. This threatening Other – heretic, savage, witch, adulteress, traitor, Antichrist – must be discovered or invented in order to be attacked and destroyed. (1984: 9)

In his well-known article “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V” (1981), that we find in his Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), Greenblatt calls attention to the theatricality, the visibility of the Elizabethan monarchy whose power he defines as “inseparable from a poetics of the theater” (1997: 64). Greenblatt describes Elizabeth I as: a ruler without a standing army, without a highly developed bureaucracy, without an extensive police force, a ruler whose power is constituted in theatrical celebrations of royal glory and theatrical violence visited upon the enemies of that glory ... Elizabethan power ... depends upon its privileged visibility. As in a theater, the audience must be powerfully engaged by this visible presence and at the same time held at a respectful distance from it. “We princes”, Elizabeth told a deputation of Lords and Commons in 1586, “are set on stages in the sight and view of all the world.” (64)

The association between the practices of the monarchical institution and the theatre is a recurrent new historicist conception to which Leonard Tennenhouse alludes in Power on Display (1986) when he states that “stagecraft collaborates with statecraft in producing spectacles of power” (15). Greenblatt points out how “within this theatrical setting” (1997: 65), that is, within the political and royal spheres, “there is a notable insistence upon the paradoxes, ambiguities, and tensions of authority, but this apparent production of subversion is the very condition of power” (1997: 65).13 13

See Selection of Texts 4.

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In an essay called “Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism and the New Historicism”, included in the volume Political Shakespeare. Essays in Cultural Materialism (1985), Dollimore opposes Greenblatt’s last assertion and states that though subversion could be used to strengthen authority, it can also be used against it. For cultural materialists, Elizabethan theatre, at the same time that it reinforced the state power, was also a site of ideological contestation.14 Renaissance plays represented unrepressed moments of subversion that implied ruptures in the dominant set of official values. Following Foucault’s idea that the points of resistance could provoke social breaches, Dollimore emphasises the political role of dissident voices able to transform dominant discourses and thus weaken the ruling ideological structure.15 Such a transformation redefines and reinterprets the power relations between the monarch and the subject, the authority and the alien. By giving an active voice to the oppressed, excluded and exploited, cultural materialism offers a wider view of the complexity of Renaissance society. Culture is considered as a multiplicity of voices, as a site of struggle and contradiction. Some cultural materialists have used Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of “carnival” in order to see in this social phenomenon how popular culture turns into an oppositional voice to authority. This idea of “carnival” reveals the power of popular voices to disrupt official order by mocking it and using parody and the grotesque in order to challenge social rigidity and rules. During “carnival” everything is subverted and turned upside down. It symbolises the unstable nature of official power structures. Raymond Williams coined the term cultural materialism, which Jonathan Dollimore defines in the foreword to the first edition of Political Shakespeare. According to Dollimore, the term culture does not refer to the arts, literature, music etc. but to “a whole system of significations by which a society or a section of it understands itself and its relations with the world” (viii). The term “materialism” implies that such a culture cannot be isolated from the material conditions of society such as politics and economy. As a constituent part of such a culture, of such a signifying system, literature is also embedded within these material ideological forces and, as Dollimore states, for example, a play by Shakespeare is related to the contexts of its production – to the economic and political system of Elizabethan and Jacobean England and to the particular institutions of cultural production (the court, patronage, theatre, education, the church). (viii) 14

See Selection of Texts 2. See Selection of Texts 3 in order to know the differentiation between dominant, residual, emergent, oppositional and alternative discourses. 15

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According to Dollimore, cultural materialism presents “a combination of historical context, theoretical method, political commitment and textual analysis” (vii). Of these four characteristics, the political commitment is what also differentiates American new historicism from cultural materialism. The latter is a much more politically radical movement than the former. When analysing Renaissance drama they deal not just with the material conditions of the seventeenth century but they appropriate the texts in order to denounce political, economic or social issues at work nowadays.16 By condemning, they aim to transform “a social order which exploits people on grounds of race, gender and class” (viii): The relevant history is not just that of four hundred years ago, for culture is made continuously and Shakespeare’s text is reconstructed, re-appraised, reassigned all the time through diverse institutions in specific contexts. What the plays signify, how they signify, depends on the cultural field in which they are situated. (viii)

As we can see, cultural materialists do not transcend their own historical situation. They analyse the texts according to their particular historical concerns. Cultural materialists are more conscious than American new historicists of the impossibility for the historical reader or critic to escape his or her own historical present. The interpretation of the historical past is always determined by the actual circumstances of the interpreter, whose view is always conditioned by his or her relationship with his or her own culture. The reader is, as the author, an ideological construct and consequently unable to see the historical past in its pure form.

SELECTION OF TEXTS In this text, Dollimore applies materialist theories of subjectivity to the analysis of King Lear. He opposes the Christian and humanist analysis of the play’s protagonist. The analysis of Lear’s identity does not find in the character the reflection of a human essence that all human beings share as Christian essentialism and essentialist humanism would claim. The examination of Lear’s tragedy demonstrates that his subjectivity is closely linked to the social and ideological circumstances, that is, the material realities that surround him.

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See Selection of Texts 3.

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1. Jonathan Dollimore, “King Lear (c.1605-6) and Essentialist Humanism” in Radical Tragedy. Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (1984) What follows is an exploration of the political dimension of Lear. It argues that the humanist view of that play is as inappropriate as the Christian alternative which it has generally displaced – inappropriate not least because it shares the essentialism of the latter. ... The principal reason why the humanist view seems equally misguided, and not dissimilar, is this: it mystifies suffering and invests man with a quasi-transcendent identity whereas the play does neither of these things. In fact, the play repudiates the essentialism which the humanist reading of it presupposes. However, I do not intend to replace the humanist reading with one which rehearses yet again all the critical clichés about the nihilistic and chaotic ‘vision’ of Jacobean tragedy. In Lear, as in Troilus, man is decentred not through misanthropy but in order to make visible social process and its forms of ideological misrecognition ... (1989: 190-91) More important than Lear’s pity is his ‘madness’ – less divine furor than a process of collapse which reminds us just how precarious is the psychological equilibrium which we call sanity, and just how dependent upon an identity which is social rather than essential. What makes Lear the person he is – or rather was – is not kingly essence (divine right), but, among other things, his authority and his family ... King Lear is, above all, a play about power, property and inheritance. Referring to Goneril, the distraught Lear cries: ‘Ingratitude thou marblehearted fiend,/More hideous when thou show’st thee in a child/Than the sea-monster’ (I. iv. 259-61). Here, as throughout the play, we see the cherished norms of human kind-ness shown to have no ‘natural’ sanction at all. A catastrophic redistribution of power and property – and, eventually, a civil war – disclose the awful truth that these two things are somehow prior to the laws of human kindness rather than vice-versa (likewise, as we have just seen, with power in relation to justice). Human values are not antecedent to these material realities but are, on the contrary, informed by them. (1989: 195-97)

As we will see in the chapter devoted to Macbeth, the play has traditionally been analysed as a reinforcement of James I’s power. However, materialist criticism has opposed such interpretation of the play. Analyses such as Sinfield’s, which is developed in his article “Macbeth: History, Ideology and Intellectuals”, studied in chapter 4, explain how there are textual traces in the play that show that it also subverts the hegemony of the monarchical power.

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2. Alan Sinfield, “Heritage and the Market, Regulation and Desublimation” in Political Shakespeare. Essays in Cultural Materialism (1985) Shakespeare, of course, produced his own version of the stories he used (he intervened in history). He loads the case against Macbeth, making him a uniquely evil usurper and sanctifying his opponents (compare Richard III). The outcome is a version of the Macbeth story that is compatible with the absolutist programme of King James: the tyrannical Macbeth is distinguished, as far as he can be, from the legitimate monarch who rules justly, through divine right. In a manoeuvre typical of ruling elites, the violence of anyone who challenges the state is dreadfully wicked, whereas that which the state perpetrates itself is ordained by God. An alternative version might suggest that the difference between Macbeth and the other lords is slight; that European monarchs generally were pretty much like Macbeth; and that absolutist theories tend to obscure this and hence legitimate oppression. This was not unthinkable in Shakespeare’s time. George Buchanan – one of the sources for Macbeth – interpreted Scottish history so as to justify the overthrow of King James’s mother, Mary Queen of Scots.17 Buchanan’s version is relatively democratic; he asserts that sovereignty derives from and remains with the people. The problem is not unruly subjects but monarchs who try to extend their powers: ‘Rebellions there spring less from the people than from the rulers, when they try to reduce a kingdom which from earliest times had always been ruled by law to an absolute and lawless despotism.’ King James recognised that Buchanan’s writing contradicted his own, and tried to suppress it. Yet, I have argued elsewhere, traces of Buchanan’s version are present in Macbeth, in irreducibly awkward details of the plot, and as the story which the Jamesian version strives to disqualify. (1996: 266)

In Holderness’s text we observe how the cinematographic adaptations of Shakespeare’s films can also be subjected to critical appropriations. Holderness compares Jane Howell’s production of Shakespeare’s first historical tetralogy to the conservative adaptations by Messina or Giles. Whereas the latter present a version of the play that would correspond to Tillyard’s historical vision of the plays, Howell offers materialist versions of the plays that highlight the interconnection between different ideological discourses current during the Elizabethan time at the same time that stress the actual social relevance of these texts. The differentiation between residual, dominant and emergent aspects of culture was established in Marxism and Literature (1977) by Raymond Williams, one of the most influential scholars in Cultural Studies, and adopted by cultural materialists. Dominant discourse is the one that prevails in a given society, mainly accepted by its citizens and the one that keeps social order. The residual 17

On Buchanan see section 4.2.2.

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aspects of culture are those that refer to the way things used to be in the past. The emergent discourse is the one that offers new perspectives on social issues that will probably be assimilated within the dominant ideology. Williams also distinguishes between the alternative social meanings, which are those that are not incorporated within the dominant discourse but are accepted since they do not destabilise social order. The oppositional discourse is the one that is able to contradict and alter the status quo.

3. Graham Holderness, “Radical Potentiality and Institutional Closure: Shakespeare in Film and Television” in Political Shakespeare. Essays in Cultural Materialism (1985) In the case of Jane Howell’s productions of the first historical tetralogy, the director’s whole conception of the Shakespearean history play diverges strikingly from that propounded by Cedric Messina and evidently accepted by David Giles. Where Messina saw the history plays conventionally as orthodox Tudor historiography, and the director employed dramatic techniques which allow that ideology a free and unhampered passage to the spectator, Jane Howell takes a more complex view of the first tetralogy as, simultaneously, a serious attempt at historical interpretation, and as a drama with a peculiarly modern relevance and contemporary application. The plays, to this director, are not a dramatisation of the Elizabethan World Picture but a sustained interrogation of residual and emergent ideologies in a changing society. Commenting on Talbot’s dilemma in I Henry VI, IV. v-vi, Howell defines the drama as a disclosure of the contradictoriness of chivalric values: ‘When Talbot finally comes face to face with his own son who will not leave the battle although he knows he is going to get killed, then Talbot has to come face to face with his own values; because if the values of chivalry mean you have to sacrifice your son ...’ (I Henry VI, p.31). At the same time Howell wanted to explore the play’s potentiality for contemporary signification: ‘We felt it shouldn’t be too mediaeval ... we talked about Northern Ireland and Beirut and South America, about warlords and factions.’ This awareness of the multiplicity of potential meanings in the play required a decisive and scrupulous avoidance of television and theatrical naturalism: methods of production should operate to open the plays out, rather than close them into the immediately recognisable familiarity of conventional Shakespearean production ... The set … was constructed to appear deliberately non-naturalistic: thus allowing the play to express both historical and contemporary meanings. (1996: 221-22)

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This text by Greenblatt participates in the critical controversy that evolves around the figure of Henry V. Some critics have merely ignored those textual traces that point out the ambiguity of Shakespeare’s characterisation, others have directly alluded to such ambivalence. Greenblatt presents an innovative way of analysing the text by stressing the new historicist paradoxical way of using the idea of subversion as reinforcement of authority.18

4. Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets” in Shakespearean Negotiations (1988) We witness an anticipatory subversion of each of the play’s central claims. The archbishop of Canterbury spins out an endless public justification for an invasion he has privately confessed would relieve financial pressure on the church; Hal repeatedly warns his victims that they are bringing pillage and rape upon themselves, but he speaks as the head of the invading army that is about to pillage and rape them; Gower claims that the king has ordered the killing of the prisoners in retaliation for the attack on the baggage train, but we have just been shown that the king’s order preceded that attack ... This apparent subversion of the monarch’s glorification has led some critics since Hazlitt to view the panegyric as bitterly ironic or to argue, more plausibly, that Shakespeare’s depiction of Henry V is radically ambiguous. But in the light of Harriot’s Brief and True Report, we may suggest that the subversive doubts the play continually awakens originate paradoxically in an effort to intensify the power of the king and his war ... The very doubts that Shakespeare raises serve not to rob the king of his charisma but to heighten it, precisely as they heighten the theatrical interest of the play; the unequivocal, unambiguous celebrations of royal power with which the period abounds have no theatrical force and have long since fallen into oblivion. The charismatic authority of the king, like that of the stage, depends upon falsification. (1997: 62-63)

Montrose’s text is interesting since it shows a completely different way of analysing As You Like It. Most critical texts about this play mainly centre on the issue of gender relations and the connotations of Rosalind’s disguise. From his new historicist perspective, Montrose relates social and literary discourse. He considers that Orlando’s situation alludes to the current social problematic about the law of primogeniture that would be affecting a great 18

See Literatura inglesa hasta el siglo XVII (2002: 333-35).

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part of the audience. Montrose also presents the new historicist idea that Greenblatt stated in Renaissance Self-Fashioning about the “social presence to the world of the literary text and the social presence of the world in the literary text” (1984: 5).

5. Louis Adrian Montrose, “‘The Place of a Brother’ in As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form” (1981) Primogeniture is rarely mentioned in modern commentaries on As You Like It, despite its obvious prominence in the text and in the action. Shakespeare’s treatment of primogeniture may very well have been a vital – perhaps even the dominant – source of engagement for many in his Elizabethan audience. The public theatre brought together people from all the status and occupational groups to be found in Shakespeare’s London (except, of course, for the poorest laborers and the indigent). Alfred Harbage points out that the two groups “mentioned again and again in contemporary allusions to the theatres” are “the students of the Inns of Court and the apprentices of London.”19 In addition to these youthful groups, significant number of soldiers, professionals, merchants, shopkeepers, artisans, and household servants were also regular playgoers. The careers most available to the younger sons of gentlemen were in the professions – most notably the law, but also medicine and teaching – as well as in trade, the army, and the church. Thus, Shakespeare’s audience must have included a high proportion of gentleborn younger sons – adults, as well as the youths who were students and apprentices. Among these gentleborn younger sons, and among the baseborn youths who were themselves socially subordinate apprentices and servants, it is likely that Orlando’s desperate situation was the focus of personal projections and a catalyst of powerful feelings. “During the sixteenth century”, Thirsk concludes, “to describe anyone as ‘a younger son’ was a short-hand way of summing up a host of grievances ... Younger son meant an angry young man, bearing more than his share of injustice and resentment, deprived of means by his father and elder brother, often hanging around his elder brother’s house as a servant, completely dependent on his grace and favour.”20 Youths, younger sons, and all Elizabethan playgoers who felt that Fortune’s benefits had been “mightily misplaced” (II.i.33-34) could identify with Shakespeare’s Orlando. (33-34) Shakespeare’s comedy manipulates the differential social relationships between the sexes, between brothers, between father and son, master and servant, lord and subject. It is by the conjurer’s art that Shakespeare manages to reconcile the social imperatives of hierarchy and difference with the festive urges toward leveling and atonement. The intense and ambivalent personal bonds upon which the play is focused – bonds between brothers and between lovers – affect each other reciprocally and become the means of each other’s resolution. And as actions within the play 19 20

Montrose is referring here to Alfred Harbage’s Shakespeare’s Audience (1941). From Joan Thirsk’s “Younger Sons in the Seventeenth Century” (1969).

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are dialectically related to each other, so the world of Shakespeare’s characters is dialectically related to the world of his audience. As You Like It is both a theatrical reflection of social conflict and a theatrical source of social conciliation. (54)

SECTION 2.4 2.4. GENDER STUDIES

Section 2.4.1 2.4.1. Feminism 2.4.1.1. Introduction Before studying the most relevant feminist critical works on Shakespeare, this introductory section deals with the leading figures of the so-called first and second wave feminisms and also with the main tenets of French feminism. They have all greatly shaped and influenced the ideas of most feminist literary critics, including the ones devoted to Shakespeare’s works.

First wave feminism: Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir Pre-1960s first wave feminist criticism was highly stimulated in America and Britain by The Women’s Rights and Women’s Suffrage movements. First wave feminism was mainly interested in egalitarian social relations and, more specifically, in women’s social and political benefits as individuals and also as a collectivity. Their main concerns evolved around women’s legal status such as their right to vote, family allowances, contraception, abortion or welfare rights. They also campaigned for women’s access to all kinds of professions and to higher education, that is, to public life. They strove to change unjust social

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conditions by addressing the state since many of them thought institutions had the power to end social inequalities by allowing women to show their potentials as citizens. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) were the two leading figures writing about women’s rights during this period. Virginia Woolf’s work, one of the most influential for feminist theory, claims that gender identity is socially constructed. She considers the family as the social institution in which inequality is born. She views women as a sex-class and as a distinct group that could be organised in order to offer resistance to patriarchy by opposing dominant institutions such as the family or the educational system. She calls for rights such as mother’s allowances, divorce-law reform, a women’s college, a women’s newspaper, minimum wage and pensions for women. In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Woolf examines the contexts of women’s literary production and the social, economic and educational hindrances that women writers have continuously encountered. She defines woman as a “looking glass” that reflects back to men the image that they desire to see of themselves. By doing so, woman invigorates her own domestic and professional inferiority and isolation. In her work, she brings into being Shakespeare’s sister, Judith, who is depicted as a woman barred from education and the theatrical world. In “Professions for Women”, an interesting essay she wrote also on women writers, she sees herself and her writing career as greatly influenced by the ideology at the time, which considered women as enclosed within the household and ignorant of their own bodies and passions. To Woolf, the only way for women to freely unfold their artistic talents is to reach for social and economic equality. In her work Three Guineas (1938) she establishes the relationship between male power and their professions in law, education, medicine, etc. She views militarism, fascism and legal injustice as results of patriarchy. She proposes a women’s college that would enable women to become doctors, lawyers, judges and imbue those professions with feminine and feminist values. She also suggests the creation of the Outsider’s Society, an organisation out of patriarchal control and aimed to perpetuate women’s culture. The French feminist Simone de Beauvoir’s most significant work is The Second Sex (1949), which sold 22,000 copies in the first few weeks of its release. Her work is considered to signal the end of the first wave and the origin of the second wave feminism. As a first wave feminist, she is concerned with women’s social, economic and political situation but also emphasises elements related to sexuality and gender differences and interests that would be widely developed by the second wave. She censures the fact that the male element has traditionally been considered as positive

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and the female as negative, as the second sex, as the Other. Basing her ideas on a wide knowledge of women’s history, she denounces the fact that women have ended up accepting their inferior status, historically and universally considered by men as natural. She makes a clear distinction between sex and gender and puts a great emphasis on the social and cultural process of becoming a woman; she distinguishes between being female and being constructed as a woman. She claims that women have to get rid of their image as objects fashioned by male ideology in order to defy patriarchy. She will also be very influential to later writers such as, for example, Nancy Chodorow, by attacking Freud’s biological determinism and by asserting the fact that woman’s social status, though linked to maternal and natural functions, is not dependent on biological traits. Second wave feminism Second wave feminism was mainly influenced by the liberationist movements during the 1960s and by the American critic Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), which depicted the disappointing lives of uneducated middle-class women enclosed within the domestic sphere. Among others, the Women’s Liberation Movement was shaped by factors such as the action of new feminist political organisations and of radical groups, the growth of women’s employment, their presence in higher education or the appearance of women’s studies programmes, especially in America. The first national Women’s Liberation conference in 1970 in Oxford requested free contraception, abortion on demand, equal pay and education or 24-hour childcare. Friedan, who in 1966 founded the National Organisation of Women (NOW), shared those claims. This organisation pressed for educational and legal changes centring on issues such as religion, employment, women’s image in the mass media, the family, abortion and gay rights. Apart from dealing with public matters such as politics and economy, Women’s Liberation included within their main concerns, as we can observe, issues that belonged to the private and personal spheres such as sexuality, the body or the emotions, linking the personal with the political. They strove to challenge the structures of a patriarchal world in order to free and give voice to women. They did not address their theories to the institutions but mainly to women in order to make them react and act. The term “reproduction” was central for second wave feminists who highlighted the fact that women’s oppression was intimately linked to their sexuality. Second wave feminism struggled against the patriarchal

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institutionalisation of reproduction that barred women from being professionally active in the public sphere. During second wave feminism a great amount of women’s writing took place. There emerged a new way of speaking about women’s lives, needs and experiences. From a marginal position, woman was placed at the centre of anthropological, economic, historical, legal, literary, medical, psychoanalytical, scientific, sociological or mass-media discourses. For our purposes, we are going to focus on the literary and psychoanalytical spheres. But first, we have to bear in mind the importance of AngloAmerican critics during the second wave feminism. Anglo-American criticism: Kate Millet (1934) and Elaine Showalter (1941) The American feminist activist Kate Millet was committed to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and struggled against the concept of women’s subjection as a social construct by denouncing the degrading female images portrayed in pornography, mass-media or New Right antiabortion campaigns. Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1970) is a leading text for feminist theory. She views patriarchy as socially pervasive, constantly reproduced in the family and later developed in all social and economic structures. She presents a study of how images of masculinity are portrayed in literary, sociological and historical accounts and she also examines the way literary works can faithfully reflect sexist ideologies. The author states that sexual power, as any kind of social power, can control citizens through education and violence. Since sexuality can be fashioned, manipulated and institutionalised, the personal turns then into a political issue. Her fellow American critic Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1977) invokes the power of women’s language and of women’s writing to abolish marginality, repression or isolation. Showalter presents a feminist critique concerned with women readers as opposed to “gyno-criticism”, which deals with the analysis of the history of women writers, many of whom have been traditionally silenced by literary history. Showalter perceives a great difference between women’s writing and men’s writing since women’s experiences provide different perceptions, emotions and beliefs. She analyses the way female British novelists write since the Brontës and divides her history of women writers in three stages: from 1840 to 1880, a period she calls “feminine” because women writers imitated men; from 1880 to 1920, a period in which, she argues, political protests were central to women’s writing, and thus she calls this phase “feminist”; finally, during what she calls the “female” stage, from 1920 to

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1977, women’s writing suffers an inner transformation of self-discovery turning to female experiences as their main sources.

French Criticism: Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva The French theorists Hèléne Cixous (1937), Luce Irigaray (1939) and Julia Kristeva (1941) mainly analyse the relationship between female body and female language. In “The Laugh of The Medusa” (1975), Cixous claims that women’s writing is altogether different from men’s writing, and, accordingly, she coins the term “ecriture féminine.” Her starting point is her denunciation of woman’s degraded role as Other, as an alien defined by man, with no voice. Cixous wants to give voice to women and aims to challenge male repression. To her, women must begin by asserting their difference by uncovering their sexuality and their bodies. “Write your self. Your body must be heard”, says Cixous in “The Laugh of The Medusa.” Her theories attack the Freudian and Lacanian depiction of woman as castrated and inferior since she lacks the phallus, taken as the symbol of authority, dominance and superiority. Since Cixous considers that woman’s identity and values are closely linked with her body, this patriarchal and humiliating view of women must be challenged. Feminine sexuality and feminine writing, traditionally repressed by men, must now be brought to light. Sexual female pleasure and bodily sensations must now be impressed into writing. Pleasure and writing would then turn into women’s main liberating weapons. Writing is considered by Cixous as the only effective way of female expression. By means of writing they can finally transgress male constructions and ultimately achieve positive social and cultural transformations. Luce Irigaray, psychoanalyst, linguist, and philosopher, who trained with the psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan, presents her main ideas in three of her works: Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), which was her doctoral thesis in philosophy and caused her expulsion from the Lacanian psychoanalytical and academic circles; This Sex Which is not One (1977); and “When Our Lips Speak Together” (1977), the last section appearing in This Sex. Irigaray is also determined to de-centre the patriarchal oppression of women inserted within male discourse in Western philosophy and to fight female traditional invisibility to the male gaze. As Cixous’s works, her writings deal with the relationship between women’s sexuality and language. She strives to deconstruct Freud’s humiliating views on female sexuality in his essay “Femininity” and his depiction of woman as lacking proper sexual organs and as being envious of the

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possession of the phallus. Irigaray asserts the woman’s right to enjoy her own sexuality, which, in her view, is multiple. She emphasises psychoanalysis’ unawareness of the multiple female sexual organs such as the uterus, the vulva, the lips, the breasts and she points out the plurality of female genitals to construct her idea of an also plural woman’s syntax. Irigaray finds in language an effective weapon for women and proposes the birth of a new female syntax, traversed by images of multiplicity, of dynamism, polysemy, and fluidity as opposed to the restrictive, unified, fixed and solid male discourse. Julia Kristeva (1941) is a linguist, literary critic, cultural theorist and psychoanalyst whose work is highly influenced by figures such as Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, Mikhail Bakhtin and Sigmund Freud. Basing her theories on psychoanalysis, in Revolution in Poetic Language (1974) she explores the interrelation between what she calls the “semiotic” and the “symbolic” in the construction of human identity and also in poetic creativity. She lays the foundation of the semiotic material in the pre-linguistic preoedipal stage 21 ruled by a mother/child bonding and an unorganised flux of impulses, movements, gestures, sounds, maternal rhythms and body erotics. The “semiotic” material must be ordered, stabilised and regulated in order to enter the “symbolic”, that is, the paternal, the socialised, the linguistic zone. The symbolic implies repression of the child’s preoedipal flowing drives, inserts the subject within the social sphere, and allows the process of ego-formation and the coming into being of discourse. But what Kristeva really emphasises in Revolution is the presence of the heterogeneous and irrational “semiotic” pre-linguistic order within the ordered and rational “symbolic” social order through the analysis of poetic language. Kristeva applies her theory of the semiotic and the symbolic to the social position of women. The semiotic is related to the maternal body, to the feminine in general, to what is mysterious and unintelligible; the symbolic to the paternal, to the Law of the Father, to what is masculine. In “Women’s Time” (1979), Kristeva asserts that an attack on patriarchy is only possible through the disruption of the “symbolic” by the entering of the semiotic female material into the male symbolic domain; that is, through the creation of a new kind of language which focuses on the feminine at the same time that threatens and questions the authoritarian, ordered and closed male language.

21

See chapter 2.4.1.3 on psychoanalysis.

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2.4.1.2. Feminism and Shakespeare Juliet Dusinberre. Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (1975) In 1975, Juliet Dusinberre wrote Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, a pioneering book on Shakespeare’s attitudes to women, their social role during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods and its impact on the stage. In Dusinberre’s view, during Shakespeare’s time there was a positive change of attitude to women largely ignored by scholars. Such a change was initially induced by humanist and Puritan doctrines. First of all, Dusinberre points out the humanist belief in the intellectual equality of women. Humanists such as Juan Luis Vives, Eramus or More proclaimed the need to promote women’s education based on the Classics. As a consequence, a group of aristocratic women such as Catherine of Aragon, Lady Anne Bacon, the Countess of Pembroke or Elizabeth Cooke, among others, acquired the same linguistic and literary skills as their male counterparts. However, though Dusinberre asserts that this situation was reduced to aristocratic women and did not have a general impact on society as a whole, she considers that the image of one of those women, Queen Elizabeth I, “strengthened the convictions of some Humanists about women’s capacity for public life” (1996: 273) and she considers her political and public role as “a spur to feminism because her position forces men to ask questions about the relation between feminism and power” (303). On a much more popular level, Dusinberre emphasises the social impact of the Puritan doctrines at the time. Puritans, who assimilated humanist attitudes to women, and followed the line of the early Protestants, preached their doctrine of chaste marriage and defended that virginity and chastity were not synonymous since a married person could also be considered as chaste as a celibate. Puritanism celebrated the spiritual equality of marriage and celibacy and opposed Catholic ideas of virginity and celibacy as more valuable states than marriage, whose main aim was not spiritual but procreative and sexual22. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Protestantism considered marriage as holy, and its main aim “mutual comfort as well as a means of satisfying lust 22

Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, 7: I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, It is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn (8-9). But if any man think that he behaveth himself uncomely toward his virgin, if she pass the flower of her age, and need so require, let him do what he will, he sinneth not: let them marry. Nevertheless he that standeth stedfast in his heart, having no necessity, but hath power over his own will, and hath so decreed in his heart that he will keep his virgin, doeth well. So then he that giveth her in marriage doeth well; but he that giveth her not in marriage doeth better (36-38).

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and procreating legitimate children” (Stone 1979: 314). From Genesis 2,18: “And the Lord said, it is not good that the man shall be alone; I will make him an help meet for him”, it was deduced that marriage was the ideal state for men and women and sex turned into a divine design. The Puritans’ new idea of marriage had a great influence on the attitudes to women since they were considered as spiritually equal to men; Puritans also rejected adulterous relationships, the ultimate consequence of arranged marriages that should also be ended with. Puritan doctrines preached domestic harmony and the image of an ideal and ordered household. Sexuality became joyful for both husband and also wife, who became her husband’s source of spiritual comfort. In the Preface to the Second Edition (1996), Dusinberre asserts that, whereas Puritan writings ratified patriarchal authority, however, their change of attitude to women, by setting her as an equal to man in that new marital state, gave rise to breaches, ruptures, tensions and discontinuities that challenged the patriarchal discourse and “asked new questions about the limits of authority, equality, freedom of conscience, sexuality, property, and the legacy of inherited ecclesiastical wisdom about the inherently frail nature of woman” (xvi). According to Dusinberre, such questions destabilised the patriarchal and hierarchical order at the time. Puritan doctrine and speeches were very influential since they popularised the new ideas about women by addressing, not aristocratic, but mainly large middle-class congregations that easily assimilated their dogmas. Another aspect that contributed to stimulate the debate about the position of women at the time was the movement of protest about satirical writings on women. Dusinberre mentions, for example, Jane Anger’s pamphlet in 1589, which denounced the vilification of women in Lyly’s Euphues. The early seventeenth-century popular press witnessed a pamphlet war in which Jane Anger’s successors set against Joseph Swetnam’s play The Arraignment of Lewde, Idle, Forward and Unconstant Women (1615). Such a war ended with another play called Swetnam the Woman-Hater Arraigned by Women where he was found guilty at court and finally tortured by amazons. There was also, on the part of Humanists, a protest against the discordance between the false and artificial image of woman as adulterous, lustful or as a goddess in literature - for example in medieval romance and its setting of courtly love- and the actual image of women in real life. Despite such obvious differences and despite the artificiality of literary stereotypes, these were sometimes dangerously considered as reflections of the real woman. According to Dusinberre, during Shakespeare’s time there was a clear social effort to reject the identification between the literary and the real image of women. As another

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example of a social movement oriented to change attitudes to women, Dusinberre also mentions another debate in the popular press brought about by the appearance of a group of female activists who, by dressing as men, challenged social stereotypes about masculinity and femininity at the same time as they repudiated their role as subordinate to and dependent upon men. As Dusinberre herself points out in the preface to the second edition, one of the most original chapters of her book is the one about the use of cross-dressing on stage and its close relationship with the current debates about women.23 Since, to Dusinberre, “the feminism of Shakespeare is still largely unrecognised” (1) her book tries to reveal how the emerging new attitude to women was reflected on stage to the point that “the drama from 1590 to 1625 is feminist in sympathy” (5). She considers that Shakespeare and his contemporaries supported Puritan ideas about marriage, opposed the stereotyped images of women, and proclaimed the new concept of woman as an individual and not just as a subordinate to man. In the preface to the second edition, Dusinberre admits that ideas about the stereotyped and biased image of women were frequently referred to in the plays in order to be “criticised, ridiculed, and discredited in the dramatic actions witnessed by the theatre audience” (xiv) and in order to emphasise “the artificial construction of a creature called ‘woman’” (xx). By following new historicist concepts, in the preface she refers to the relationship between subversion and containment on the stage and concludes that drama questioned the cultural codes of the time and destabilised its patriarchal structure. As Dusinberre herself states, she “build[s] a bridge between Shakespeare’s world and her own” (xv) since she began writing her book at the University of Warwick, famous for the students’ protests and pictured as a place where, as happened during Shakespeare’s time, new questions were asked and social change was thought to be possible. Dusinberre explains in what ways the new theatrical conditions at the time helped to transmit a new image of woman. Acting companies and playwrights did not depend on patronage anymore since they were financed by their own takings in the theatre. The debate about the position of women was one of the central social issues at the time and it would call the attention of a large male, and also female, audience to put it on stage. Dusinberre finds other reasons why the playwrights were prone to debate the social role of women on stage. Since theatrical performances were considered an entertainment, like bear-baiting for example, and not a 23

See Selection of Texts 1.

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literary form, it was the perfect setting to reject the false literary attitudes to women and underline the more positive Puritan and humanist ideas about the real situation of women. Also, both playwrights and women belonged to discriminated social groups and were traditionally considered as sources of sin, hypocrisy and sexual vice. By rejecting conservative attacks on women, they were at the same time protecting themselves from such criticism. Dusinberre’s final reflections in her preface centre on her own definition of feminism as “about having a voice” (xxxiv). But, to Dusinberre, it is concerned not only with female voices but also with any voice that is silenced, excluded, ignored. In a very intelligent turn she finally finishes off by pointing out that, paradoxically, many of the texts considered as part of what she calls “that loathsome and anti-educational concept, the ‘canon’ of literary works” (xxxiv), were written by authors such as Milton, John Bunyan or even Shakespeare and his contemporaries who wrote from positions as marginal, and discriminated against, as that of women. Dusinberre also mentions the importance of female-authored texts such as letters and diaries written by women during the early modern age that had traditionally been silenced. Two very influential works on women’s writing during the early modern period are The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print. Counterbalancing the Canon (1990) by Haselkorn and Travitsky and Oppositional Voices. Women as Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance (1992) by Tina Krontiris. Another leading work on the issue of women’s voices during this period is the one by Elizabeth D. Harvey entitled Ventriloquized Voices. Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (1992). Based on Anglo-American, and especially French feminist views about gender and language, Harvey is mainly concerned with the “male appropriation of the feminine voice in English texts of the early modern period” (1), that is, with the analysis of texts written by male authors but voiced by female characters. In her preface to the second edition, Dusinberre acknowledges the impact of French feminists’ theories such as the “ecriture féminine” on Anglo-American feminists since the first publication of her book and the relevance that issues such as women’s language and body had on the Elizabethan stage. In the preface she also points out the fact that feminism not only recuperates female-authored texts that were never considered canonical or valuable, but also makes a distinction between those women who read female-authored texts, what the American feminist Elaine Showalter calls “gyno-critics”, and women who try to find new meanings, from a female perspective, in male-authored texts, what Showalter calls “revision.” Consequently, the feminist readings of Shakespeare’s plays, the revisions

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of his literary production, have, according to Dusinberre, “enriched our understanding of the agency of Shakespeare’s plays in transforming culture” (xxix). In the preface, Dusinberre refers to the controversy aroused by the publication of her book at the time; a text that, as she puts it, was written to “provoke thought” (xi). Shakespeare and the Nature of Women was inserted within a feminist “battle” about “ownership” (xi) and about “the asking of questions” (xi). That is, about challenging the influential, patriarchal and male literary establishment that had traditionally given meaning to literary texts and decided not only what texts and authors belonged to the canon, but also how they had to be read.24 Dusinberre opposes such male-dominated establishment by asking disruptive questions such as “who owns the literary text? Who owns the authoritative critical voice’” (xii). By following the post-structuralist idea about the new power of the reader over the meanings of a particular text, and the thought that there is “no single authoritative and authentic way of reading Shakespeare” (xi), Dusinberre asserts: When I wrote Shakespeare and the Nature of Women I hoped to prise open the Shakespearean text and make it accessible to investigations about women’s place in culture, history, religion, society, the family. I wanted to ask those questions from my own particular perspective, not from the impersonal one which I had been trained to adopt. My Shakespeare, not someone else’s. (xii)

But whereas she appropriates the post-structuralist view on the nature of the reader, she opposes its concept about the role of the author implied in Roland Barthes’ article “The Death of the Author” since the text is not always “free of its author” (xxxiv). To Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women could never have been written by a man. Its female signature is ever present in this text, written not in ink “but in blood, my blood, a woman’s blood” (xxxiv), Dusinberre vigorously states.

The Woman’s Part. Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (1980) The Woman’s Part. Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, edited by Lenz, Greene and Neely in 1980, is considered a revealing anthology about feminist criticism on Shakespeare at the time. Its introduction points out the feminist concern with “understanding the parts women have played, do play, and might play in literature as well as in culture” (1983: 3). Their 24

See Selection of Texts 2.

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aim is to offer new readings of Shakespeare’s plays based on such a premise. A feminist critic is considered the one that regards women as equal to men, they argue. Consequently, such criticism is not necessarily the product of female feminists but also of male critics who share such a view. The feminist contributions to this anthology are greatly influenced by leading texts on women’s subordination and feminist literary criticism such as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics. These texts concentrate on the contemporary age and nineteenthand twentieth-century female authors. Therefore, feminist studies on the age of Shakespeare carefully select their conclusions and methods since they are dealing with a different period where the situation of women was more constrained than nowadays. The volume aspires to reach four targets. First of all, authors attempt to “liberate Shakespeare’s women from the stereotypes to which they have often been confined” (4). Second, they analyse female bonding in the plays, what they call “a kind of female subculture apart from the man’s world” (5) present and traditionally ignored in these texts. Third, they examine the traits and results of patriarchal structures in Shakespeare’s texts25 and share Marxist maxims by analysing the relationship between women’s oppression and their social and economic environment. Finally, they examine the traits of female characters regarding genre. For example, they consider that in the comedies women appear as more powerful, sometimes through the use of disguise. In the tragedies they appear as more restrained, submissive and usually absent from the social order restored at the end.26 The anthology presents contributions by feminist critics that come from different critical traditions. First of all, those who centre on the historical contexts; second, those who emphasise the sources and analogues; and third, the ones that apply psychoanalytical views to the analysis of the plays. Basing their analysis on the studies of two brilliant historians, Natalie Zemon Davies and Joan Kelly-Gadol27, feminist historians in the volume challenge and deny Juliet Dusinberre’s conviction that women attained more freedom and authority during Shakespeare’s time and also the idea that drama was feminist in sympathy. They also oppose her idea that the image of Queen Elizabeth’s power must have exerted a great influence on the attitudes to women in general at the time. 25

See Selection of Texts 3. See Selection of Texts 3.2. 27 See Natalie Zemon Davies “Women’s History in Transition: The European Case” (1976) and Society and Culture in Early Modern France (1975). See also Joan Kelly-Gadol, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” (1977). 26

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Additionally, the contributions based on a historical analysis of the plays insist on the debatable relationship between life and art, an issue widely developed by Linda Woodbridge as we will see later. The essays that study the literary context of the plays observe that, by comparing them with their sources, they could detect meaningful elements that Shakespeare added in his description of women and they even bring to light the fact that “some female characters are humanized beyond the limits of the conventions from which they spring” (8). Finally, feminist critics that use psychoanalytical tools in their literary analysis develop the theme of male ambivalence toward female sexuality and male fear of female power and of male feminisation and powerlessness.28 Despite the different critical tools used by these critics, they all share the reading techniques of new criticism, that is, close reading.29 But they are not looking for the unity of the text but for the way female identity is textually constructed. They also reject the new critics’ dissociation between author and text and reader and text. They offer a kind of criticism where the reader’s personal experience and concerns are irremediably brought into a new study of the plays that attempts to confront traditional male oriented critical analysis. The reader’s response to the texts, his or her own subjectivity, is essential in order to offer new readings that challenge interpretations that have silenced and excluded textual elements related to marginal sectors of society such as women. Finally, the studies in the anthology also take into account the fact that Shakespeare’s texts do not automatically echo Renaissance ideas about women. On the contrary, they see the texts sometimes as reflections on and sometimes as critiques of such values. The question of the relationship between Shakespeare and his time, between the author and the ideas that he puts into his plays and about whether these texts portray Shakespeare as “a feminist, a sexist, or something in between” (10) is also implicit in this anthology. Some feminist studies clearly postulate that his texts question sexist attitudes towards women. However, other studies consider “unlikely that Shakespeare’s own attitudes can be so clearly separated from those of his gender, his male characters, his period; they see the profound fears of female sexuality and the desperate attempts to control it in the plays as reflections of male ambivalence rather than criticisms of it” (9).

28 29

See chapter about feminism and psychoanalysis. See section 6 of Unit 1.

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Lisa Jardine. Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (1983) In her book Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare, published in 1983, Lisa Jardine opposes the feminist approaches developed by Dusinberre and also present in some of the articles of The Woman’s Part. According to Jardine, they are based on “their reverence for the realism of Shakespeare’s plays” (1). The critic introduces her book by stating that it was: written on a growing tide of personal irritation at the apparent inability of such critics to break with the conventions of orthodox Shakespeare criticism, except in their single-minded preoccupation with the female characters in the plays, and their hostility to the chauvinistic attitudes the plays incorporate. (1)

Jardine classifies feminist lines of approach to Shakespearean drama into two groups that she defines as the “perfectly reflecting glass” school and the “distorted masculine view” school. The first group considers that Shakespeare’s literary value lies in the fact that he is able to “project on stage a spectrum of female qualities which reflected the burgeoning emancipation of the wives of the London bourgeoisie” (2). According to this first group, within which Dusinberre is included, Shakespeare presents an autonomous woman while he is able to transcend the values of the patriarchal structures around him. The second group’s position opposes the ideas of the first one by considering that Renaissance chauvinism is alive in Shakespeare’s plays since “Shakespeare’s maleness [therefore] makes it inevitable that his female characters are warped and distorted” (3). Jardine finds two different lines within this second approach that she defines as the “aggressive” and the “non-aggressive” ones. The aggressive line, led by critics such as Coppélia Kahn and Marilyn French, aims to lay open Shakespeare’s sexist prejudices and denies that “Shakespeare any longer deserves the place he occupies at the centre of English literary studies” (4). The “non-aggressive” line, illustrated by Jardine with essays published in The Woman’s Part, propounds that Shakespeare tried to faithfully reflect reality, however, “contemporary society’s limited understanding of women combined with his own male viewpoint have skewed the resulting picture” (3). Jardine discards the method presented by both schools by which Shakespearean characters are analysed as real human beings, as people. The multiple historical analyses of the position of women during the early modern period show, according to Jardine, that Shakespeare’s plays do

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not function as mirrors of reality or as the articulation of the different ideas about women at the time. Instead, she analyses certain cultural issues during Shakespeare’s age which “provide useful perspectives on the treatment of women in the drama” (6). Such cultural issues deal with cross-dressing and the boy actor,30 humanist education, Protestant ideas about marriage, changes in inheritance laws, the relationship between female language and the male fear of female sexuality, and finally the social connotations of having Elizabeth I as ruler. Many of these themes had already been analysed by feminist critics but Jardine’s interpretations are innovative. The theatrical interest in women in Elizabethan drama is not a reflection of the positive change of attitude to women that Dusinberre defended. According to Jardine, this interest: is related to the patriarchy’s unexpressed worry about the great social changes which characterise the period – worries which could be made conveniently concrete in the voluminous and endemic debates about the woman question. (6)

The second chapter in Still Harping On Daughters, “‘She openeth her mouth with wisdom’: The Double Bind of Renaissance Education and Reformed Religion”, serves as a clear example of how Jardine’s interpretations of the Renaissance attitude to women is radically opposed to Dusinberre’s conclusions. She analyses the role of woman according to Protestant, Puritan and humanist doctrines. Not only does she reject the idea that attitudes to women changed in a positive sense, she also argues that they may “have become somewhat hardened as individual women challenged traditional roles” (58). After reaching this conclusion, she offers new readings of certain scenes in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of Errors and Webster’s The White Devil that oppose the “perfectly reflecting glass school” and corroborate her own views. Jardine believes that humanist education of women did not include within its curriculum studies which could lead women to the thought that change was possible and that they could have a relevant role within social and political institutions. As Jardine states, “elegant Latin and Greek, the ability to compose verse and extempore orations, were accomplishments to be valued in the drawing-room, whilst unlikely to lead to political or radical involvement” (52). After analysing women’s role within marriage she firmly concludes that their role within the household remained unchanged. In order to illustrate her conclusions she quotes a few lines from “The homily on matrimony”, which was a compulsory reading in English churches: 30

See Selection of Texts 4.

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For the woman is a weak creature not endued with like strength and constancy or mind; therefore they be the sooner disquieted, and they be the more prone to all weak affections and dispositions of the mind, more than men be. (43)

Linda Woodbridge. Women and the English Renaissance. Literature and the Nature of Womankind 1540-1620 (1984) Linda Woodbridge’s Women and the English Renaissance. Literature and the Nature of Womankind 1540-1620 (1984) is one of the best feminist studies about Renaissance attitudes to women and literature. Woodbridge rejects the idea of feminist critics like Dusinberre that thought to have found the origins of modern English and North American feminism in the English Renaissance. According to Woodbridge, the literature of the period emphasises the differences between women and men and do not proclaim the intellectual, emotional and moral equality of the sexes that constitute the main concern of feminism.31 In the introduction to her work she focuses on the literary debate about the nature of women at the time through the appearance of attacks on and defences of women. The nature of such debate encourages Woodbridge to reflect on the difficult relationship between life and art.32 While she acknowledges that social historians have considered Renaissance texts dealing with women as reflections of the real world, Woodbridge considers that the debate, or what she calls “the formal controversy”, is just part of a literary game and does not reproduce the actual attitudes to women at the time. Woodbridge frames this debate within a medieval rhetorical exercise at university that showed how to argue both sides of the same question in order to improve not only rhetorical but also logical skills. Viewed from such a perspective, the formal controversy about the nature of women should not be considered as a mirror of reality. However, Woodbridge observes that the dissociation between literature and art is never complete. In her opinion, literature is always, to a certain degree, based on reality and is also able to modify such reality. Consequently, as she states, “as life often imitates art, the image of woman in literature has long influenced the behaviour of living women” (6). In the first part of her book she analyses the controversy about women as largely a literary game. As defences of women she deals with Thomas Elyot’s The Defence of Good Women (1540); the Dutch Humanist Agrippa’s 31 32

See Selection of Texts 5. See Selection of Texts 5.

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A Treatise of the Nobilitie and Excellencye of Woman Kynde (1542); Edward More’s Defence of Women (1560) and Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (1561). As an attack on women she focuses on Joseph Swetnam’s The Arraignment of Women (1615), answered by three defences by women and a play33. However, in the second part of her book she centres on the transvestite controversy that, in her opinion, held a much closer relationship to contemporary reality. In 1620, Hic Mulier was published as an attack on women dressing as men. Such an act was considered a rebellion against nature. The same year, Haec Vir was published as a response. It defended women, denounced the inadequacy of social customs and criticised male effeminacy during a period when a misogynistic and homosexual king was surrounded at court by favourites. As we can see, this second controversy was grounded on real facts and was intended to exert influence on the social events at the time. The rest of Woodbridge’s book is concerned with the extent to which the image of women in canonical texts by playwrights like Shakespeare may reflect such a contemporary reality. For example, she centres part of her study on Shakespeare’s cross-dressed heroine. She opposes Dusinberre idea that the disguise helped the author to ponder about the nature of femininity and masculinity in positive terms. According to Woodbridge “transvestite disguise in Shakespeare does not blur the distinction between the sexes but heightens it” (154).

Valerie Wayne. The Matter of Difference. Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (1991) In 1986, the World Congress of the International Shakespeare Association in West Berlin witnessed a debate between feminists, new historicists and cultural materialists. The Matter of Difference, a collection of materialist feminist essays, is the result of a seminar on materialist feminist criticism of Shakespeare that met at the Shakespeare Association of America conference in Austin, Texas in April 1989, and that continued such debate. In the introductory chapter, Wayne points out how the essays in this volume show certain collaboration between feminists, new historicists and cultural materialists. By adopting practices from these approaches feminist studies can produce a more historically grounded feminism. As Wayne states, “feminist criticism can benefit from interaction with those knowledges. Much more can be written and said about the relation between Shakespeare’s texts and Renaissance discourses on marriage, medicine and theology” (1991: 5). However, the contributions 33

See section on Juliet Dusinberre.

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to this volume also reveal a critique of new historicism “for its apolitical and recuperative effects” (4) and a critique of traditional feminist approaches for their “tendencies to idealise or essentialise women” (4).34 Wayne opposes the new historicist idea that subversion is always contained for the benefit of the dominant forces. On the contrary, Wayne sees political resistance as a necessary element for social change and views feminism as a political movement that upholds such transformations. Wayne emphasises the political function of the volume and views it as an “intervention in the dispute among new historicists, cultural materialists and feminists, by offering an alternative built from an alliance between the most radical elements of those approaches” (11). Wayne considers Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt’s collection, Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class and Race in Literature and Culture as the most influential text for materialist feminist criticism.35 According to Newton and Rosenfelt, materialist feminist criticism centres on the power relations implied by gender, class, race and sexual identification. In order to describe such power relations they analyse literature, history and society and, more specifically, the way social and cultural practices are textually presented. Wayne denounces that history, literature or myth have traditionally silenced the positive role of women in the shaping of the past. However, she states that this volume aims to present a different version of history and literature in which, not only women, but also any kind of oppressed and silenced persons, matter. Wayne proclaims the value of difference not just from men and women but even “among and within women” (1). Difference, plurality is essential in the kind of analysis that the Matter of Difference presents, a volume that privileges the importance of racial, economic, social and erotic categories and the fact that women are not universally the same: The problems of women in Europe and America are not the same as those of women in India or China ... Perhaps we repeat the trilogy of race, class and gender with such insistence because the relation between those categories is not a stable one, since each of the determinants acts on others and is affected by still other variants. Our repetition tries to maintain some grounding or focus in a fluid and mobile field, but an alternative approach is to acknowledge the instability and multiplicity of historical subjects and to resist, insofar as that is possible, the critical impulse to freeze them into aesthetic archetypes by our analysis. (23-24)

34 35

See Selection of Texts 6.1 and 6.2. See Selection of Texts 6.1.

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The essays in The Matter of Difference analyse plays by Shakespeare such as Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, King Lear, Titus Andronicus and Othello from a materialist feminist perspective. They deal with issues such as “money and women’s work, rape in English law and drama, prosecutions for sexual crimes and slander, [on] the circulation of homoerotic desire, the disarticulation between oppressions of class and gender, changes brought about by the material conventions of theatre attendance, and rhetorical practices in this profession” (12). The volume is divided in three sections. The first is devoted to Shakespearean Comedy, the second to Shakespearean Tragedy and the last one to the English Renaissance Culture. The first two chapters question the genre division that we have already observed in The Woman’s Part in the sense that they do not view “the comedies as providing a haven of possibilities for women, and the tragedies as summarily confining, condemning and killing them” (12). Both tragedy and comedy are presented as sharing many elements and as having a close relationship with cultural practices. One of the main purposes of this book is to relate material conditions of life during the Renaissance, configured by gender, race, class and erotic practice not only to literary texts but also to the present times. Wayne is conscious that “producing history is not an apolitical activity” (1) and that our sex, our social class, our race, our historical moment, our geographical location and our political and social circumstances affect the way we rewrite the past from our present. Wayne also remarks that the contributors to the volume consider materialist feminism as a “muchneeded critique of the capitalist and patriarchal structures that are being extended and consolidated in the west and the rest of the world”(10). The Matter of Difference aims to establish a close link between political commitment and critical practices. Other influential feminist critical works on Shakespeare This chapter will conclude by making brief references to six influential books for feminist studies on Shakespeare. In 1995, Penny Gay published As She Likes It. Shakespeare’s Unruly Women. This volume centres on Shakespearean comedy and, more specifically, on the way unruly women in such plays were performed on stage during the second half of the twentieth century. Gay focuses her attention on Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It and Measure for Measure. She analyses the representation of gender in the plays and on stage and deals with the implications of the relationship between theatre as a male-dominated sphere and the female-oriented performances. In

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the same year, Deborah Barker and Ivo Kamps edited Shakespeare and Gender. A History. This book, that aims to be for “classroom use”, shows the development of feminist criticism since the late 1970s. The essays chosen in this volume represent turning points in such a critical history. A year later, Shirley Nelson Garner and Madelon Sprengnether edited another volume of essays entitled Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender. The volume presents a feminist interrogation of the Aristotelian definition of tragedy in which the female voice is silenced and the characterization of the tragic hero is fully developed from his fatal error to his final decline. This question will be analysed from different critical perspectives such as feminist new historicism, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism or autobiographical criticism that will complement and sometimes challenge each other. They primarily analyse how Shakespeare constructs tragic subjectivity and they centre on the place of women in the scene of tragic action. They also pay attention to the social discourses that elevate the hero’s status while silencing female presence. In 1997, Coppélia Kahn published Roman Shakespeare. Warriors, Wounds, and Women for the series “Feminist Readings of Shakespeare.” It is the first full-length feminist study of Shakespeare’s Roman plays. She analyses The Rape of Lucrece, Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus and Cymbeline and, more specifically, she centres on female Roman characters such as Lucrece, Lavinia, Tamora, Portia, Calphurnia, Octavia or Volumnia. Kahn points out that Shakespeare’s Roman plays question “the ideology of gender on which the Renaissance understanding of Rome was based” (1). Traditional criticism has considered that Shakespeare’s Roman plays have unconsciously represented Romanness as an image of maleness. Kahn considers that Shakespeare was aware of the relationship between masculinity and Romanness and by dramatising this bond, he “demystified its power” (2). In order to develop her argument she thoroughly analyses the image of the wound as central in the process of gender contruction in the plays and concludes that “poised, at it were, between warriors (men locked in agonistic structures of rivalry) and women, the wound in these texts is always a site of anxiety and indeterminacy; a point at which it is possible to identify an ideology of gender difference in process” (18). In 1997, Jane E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin published Engendering a Nation. A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories also within the series “Feminist Readings of Shakespeare.” The authors respond to the lack of feminist studies on Shakespeare’s History Plays. The history plays represent traditional gender relations and a clear distinction between the public, male and aggressive domain and the enclosed, female and

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private sphere. These authors aim to analyse these plays from a more profound perspective in order to detect “stories about gender; that is, about how masculinity and femininity differ and about the ways those differences are to be linked to specific social arrangements involving work, marriage, citizenship, and cultural power” (29). Finally, the various essays in A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare (2000), edited by Dympna Callaghan, show us elements such as the history of feminist Shakespeare criticism and issues such as textual editing, language, social economies, race and colonialism, sexuality and religion from a feminist perspective.

SELECTION OF TEXTS In Text 1, Dusinberre refers to Virginia Woolf’s concept of androgyny applied to Shakespeare’s use of disguise. Woolf rejects the clear-cut distinctions between sexes. Dusinberre observes how Shakespeare integrates the distinctive traits of both sexes through disguise and reveals the fact that gender distinctions are socially constructed. In Text 2, Dusinberre acknowledges the authority of a male-dominated cultural establishment that considers as valid only the male way of writing, reading and speaking. Dusinberre discloses the fact that there are other ways of expression that do not find a place within the authorised academy. Women’s writing is one of those modes of expression that must assert itself and find its place. For Dusinberre feminist criticism gives her the voice that has traditionally been neglected and silenced.

1. Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (1975) When disguise gives a woman a double image of herself the dramatist has more difficulty getting her out of her breeches. Virginia Woolf described ‘Shakespeare’s mind as the type of the androgynous, of the man-womanly mind ... It is one of the tokens of the fully developed mind that it does not think specially or separately of sex ... It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or manwomanly.’ The experience of Rosalind, or Viola, or Portia as men colours their character as woman. A man’s attire, like a man’s education, allows them to be more complete and fully developed women. Disguise draws men and women together in the comedies through their discovery of the artifice of difference which social

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custom sustains ... Shakespeare’s heroines integrate their experience as men with their feelings as woman, which makes it harder for the dramatist to return them to their skirts. Orlando tires of the disguise before Rosalind. Rosalind is a perfect woman when a man; as a woman she needs more of a man than Orlando. Rejoicing with her in the saturnalian revelry of her masculinity in Arden, the audience regrets relinquishing her to her father to be formally given to a husband. Its playfellow must again become the possession of the male world. Shakespeare himself wanted his heroine to escape and brought her back as insouciant and elusive as ever to tell the audience that she was still Jove’s own page: ‘If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not: and, I am sure, as many as have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths, will for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell.’ (1996: 265-66)

2. Juliet Dusinberre, Preface to the Second Edition of Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (1996) Women must stand out for their own way of writing and be willing to maintain that that way is different from the way men write, and that men will have to accept it, along with the writings of men who want to write in alternative modes. Feminist scholarship is now a recognised and completely respectable academic discipline. But the whole apparatus of how work is valued is still vested overwhelmingly in the almost entirely male establishment of the media, journal and newspaper editors, even the universities themselves. The way I write, the way I construct an argument, the tone of voice I adopt which is often light-hearted when I intend seriousness (yes, I do intend things when I write), that way of writing is itself a political statement, and always has been. I don’t believe that the mode of writing at present preferred in the academy, which has its origins in a long history of male education in rhetoric and the classics, is the way most women either want to write, or write best. Women – and men also if they want to develop more various and vital cultural models – should resist a single dominant mode of writing, reading and speaking. But at present, if one does, and this is an important aspect of women’s under-performance in competitive examinations, one will be assessed and found wanting according to that dominant standard. For me feminism is nothing to do with separatism. We occupy this planet together, and it will go down with all of us together. It is to do with writing, having a voice just being there speaking from my own place in women’s history and culture. The battle for how to write has only just begun, and Shakespeare and the Nature of Women sets out recklessly along that path, as along many others. Go, little book. ( xxxvi)

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3. The Woman’s Part. Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (1980)

The definition of Miranda as a “dependent foot” in Text 3.1 derives from the scene in The Tempest in which Miranda asks his father not to use his magic with Ferdinand. Prospero answers: “What! I say, / My foot my tutor?” (I.ii.471-72). Miranda is then described as “the foot of the family organization of which Prospero is the head” (1983: 287). She is depicted by Leininger as trapped within the patriarchal organization of Prospero’s realm. Even the mechanisms of power relations in the play evolve around Prospero’s use of Miranda’s sexuality. In Text 3.2, Berggren makes a differentiation between Shakespearean tragic and comic heroines. In comedy, female characters are related to fecundity and they have dominant roles whereas in tragedy they are linked to barrenness. Berggren also alludes to the otherness of female characters and their symbolic connotations in the plays. As an example of the interrelation between female sexuality, sterility and villainy in Shakespeare’s works, Berggren analyses the role of female characters in King Lear. Observe how the critic detects the absence in the Shakespearean male tragic universe of the multiple possibilities that disguise offers to the development of female characterisation and empowerment in the comedies.

3.1. Lorie Jerrell Leininger, “The Miranda Trap. Sexism and Racism in Shakespeare’s Tempest” Miranda, admired and sheltered, has no way out of the cycle of being a dependent foot in need of protection, placed in a threatening situation which in turn calls for more protection, and thus increased dependence and increased subservience. Miranda’s presence as the dependent, innocent, feminine extension of Prospero serves a specific end in the play’s power dynamics. Many reasons are given for Caliban’s enslavement; the one which carries greatest dramatic weight is Caliban’s sexual threat to Miranda. When Prospero accuses Caliban of having sought “to violate / The honour of my child” (I.ii.349-50), Caliban is made to concur in the accusation: O ho, O ho! Would’t had been done! Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else This isle with Calibans. (I.ii.351-53)

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We can test the element of sexual politics at work here by imagining, for a moment, that Prospero had been cast adrift with a small son instead of a daughter. If, twelve years later, a ship appeared bearing King Alonso and a marriageable daughter, the play’s resolution of the elder generation’s hatreds through the love of their offspring could still have been effected. What would be lost in such a reconstruction would be the sexual element in the enslavement of the native. No son would serve. Prospero needs Miranda as sexual bait, and then needs to protect her from the threat which is inescapable given his hierarchical world – slavery being the ultimate extension of the concept of hierarchy. It is Prospero’s needs – the Prosperos of the world – not Miranda’s, which are being served here. (1983: 289)

3.2. Paula S. Berggren, “The Woman´s Part: Female Sexuality as Power in Shakespeare´s Plays”

In Shakespearean comedy, it is true, the heroine dominates; in Shakespearean tragedy, she most emphatically does not. Moreover, the women in tragedy seem to split into two basic types: victims or monsters, “good” or “evil.” While Shakespeare drew on conventional sources for almost all of his characters, male and female, we need a fuller range of categories to group the men adequately: not just heroes and villains, but warriors, princes, courtiers; Machiavels and Vices; braggart soldiers, clowns, fools. Despite the fertility of local, imaginative touches that beggar our attempts to delimit, we can nevertheless perceive a fundamental distinction along sexual lines. The women in Shakespeare remain the Other; there are fewer of them, certainly, and they seem more regularly than the fuller array of male characters to bear heavy symbolic burdens. Furthermore, I would suggest, they become more or less crucial to the dramatic procedures by virtue of the one act of which women alone are capable. The comic world requires childbearers to perpetuate the race, to ensure community and continuity; the tragic world, which abhors such reassurance, consequently shrinks from a female protagonist. Such women as exist in tragedy must take their mark by rejecting their womanliness, by sublime sacrifice, or as midwives to the passion of the hero. We wonder how many children Lady Macbeth had only because she has dismissed them as an irrelevance in her life. The curse of the tragic world is to be barren; the salvation of the comic is fecundity. (1983: 18-19) Lear’s three daughters in effect sum up the Manichaean view of female sensuality in Shakespeare’s high tragic world: if not Cordelia, then Goneril and Regan. After blessing them at first with the natural abundance embodied in “plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads” (I.i.65), King Lear reverses his promise to Goneril and Regan, bidding Nature instead “dry up [their] organs of increase” (I.iv.288). They consequently manifest that depraved and nonprocreative lasciviousness that the sonnets attribute to the Dark Lady; indeed, evil in Shakespearean women seems to grow from a sexuality so out of tune with its procreative potential that it breeds villainy rather than children. When female lechery is not actually sterile, its progeny is malignant: from Tamora to Cymbeline’s

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Queen, the impulse to destroy passes inevitably from dissatisfied mother to dissatisfied son. Even the complex women of the major tragic phase suffer from an excess of libidinal energies that neither marriage nor motherhood can channel. Purgative transvestism might have done wonders for Goneril, Lady Macbeth, and Volumnia, but no outlets for safety-valve experimentation of this sort exist in the rigid masculine world of Shakespearean tragedy. (24-25)

It is interesting to read Text 4 in relation to Dusinberre’s references to Woolf’s idea of androgyny, to Smith’s comparison between Lodge’s Rosalynd and Shakespeare’s Rosalind in Text 1 of section 2.4.2, and finally to the criticism that Goldberg directs to Jardine’s analysis of transvestism on the Elizabethan stage in section 2.4.2. As we see, Jardine establishes a clear difference between Lodge’s Rosalynd, who is clearly distinguished from her role as Ganymede in the romance, and Shakespeare’s Rosalind who keeps the sexual ambiguity throughout the play since she is represented by a transvestite boy actor whose maleness is always present and, according to Jardine, sexually attractive for the male audience.

4. Lisa Jardine, “‘As boys and women are for the most part cattle of this colour’: Female Roles and Elizabethan Eroticism” in Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (1983) When Rosalind in As You Like It adopts male disguise, she takes the name of Ganymede: Jupiter’s boy-lover ... In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Julia adopts the name of Sebastian, another homosexual prototype. In doing so they allude directly to the erotic androgyny which their boy-dressed-as-girl-dressed-as-boy creates. When Rosalind/Ganymede describes to her lover Orlando (who does not recognise her as female) how she cured a man mad with love by aping his lover, she/he combines the terms of the anti-stage attacks and the wanton effeminacy of the classical Ganymede to intensify the provocativeness of ‘his’ exaggerated wooing .... Rosalind is just a boy player/Ganymede, simpering out feminine affections in the manner so offensive to moralists like Rainoldes,36 and this adds to the piquancy of the speech. In Shakespeare´s source, Thomas Lodge´s Rosalynde: Euphues Golden Legacie (London, 1590), the discrepancy between the views of women expressed by Rosalind in her own persona, and those she expresses whilst disguised as the page Ganymede is made explicit. She ‘keeps decorum’ in slandering women whilst dressed as a woman ... 36

Rainoldes was also spelled Rainolds. One of the intriguing ironies of the age is that Dr John Rainolds’ surname is an anagram of “Rosalind” – it is quite possible that he used multiple spellings like Shakespeare. Even so, Shakespeare could have spelled his heroine “Rosalinde” and kept the anagram, if it was intended in the first place.

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There is no such ‘keeping decorum’ for Shakespeare’s Rosalind. She is the ‘peevish boy’ with whom Phoebe falls in love, even when most feelingly acting the girl-hero in love; as Ganymede deriding the ways of woman, she is the boy-actor mincing and lisping his way through his ‘woman’s part.’ As Rosalind speaking the Epilogue, she is a little bit of both, saucily provoking the male members of the audience with her problematic sex: If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not. And I am sure, as many as have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths, will for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell.

Wherever Shakespeare’s female characters in the comedies draw attention to their own androgyny, I suggest that the resulting eroticism is to be associated with their maleness rather than with their femaleness. (19-20)

Linda Woodbridge opposes Dusinberre’s idea that the origin of modern feminism could be found in the defences of women within the Renaissance debate about women. According to Woodbridge, these tracts ignore the principal claims of the feminist movement. Woodbridge also reflects upon the complex relationship between reality and literature.

5. Linda Woodbridge. Women and the English Renaissance. Literature and the Nature of Womankind 1540-1620 (1984) The positive side of the Renaissance debate about women has elicited an odd, but perhaps predictable, response: in the defenses of womankind against literary detraction, some writers have discerned the infancy of modern feminism. During each of this century’s several periods of feminist activism, social and literary historians, from Violet Wilson in 1924 to Juliet Dusinberre in 1975, have attempted to locate the origins of modern English and North American feminism in the English Renaissance – possibly because major writers of the English Renaissance like Shakespeare and Spenser provide so many female characters to work with, possibly because the word Renaissance itself sounds so promising ... As I said, this response is odd but predictable: predictable because the assumption that feminism is identical with kindness to women is a common befuddlement; odd because modern feminism is the belief in the essential intellectual, emotional, and moral equality of the sexes, an equality which underlies apparent differences which feminists believe are mainly attributable to cultural influences, and the concomitant belief that this equality of essence makes logical and just the demand for equality of rights and opportunity for women. But Renaissance defenses of women constantly emphasize the differences between women and men, make assumptions about female “nature”, ignore cultural influences on female behaviour.

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The writer who tries to assess the implications for real life of the Renaissance formal debate about the nature of women is constantly at risk; and this holds true, too, for the way women are portrayed as characters in literature outside the formal debate. The relationship between literature and life is a very slippery subject. (2-3) By emphasizing the role of literary convention, I hope to retard the wholesale appropriation of literary materials as documents in the history of popular attitude; by showing how certain recurrent literary structures and character types seem to reflect the real world, I hope to remind the strictest aesthetician that there is some connection, however sublimated or oblique, between female literary figures and women of flesh and blood. Before we can explore the point at which life and literature intersect and the ways in which life and literature interact – and such explorations are very much the business of a feminist literary critic – we must be clearer in our own minds than we have been so far that life and literature are not the same. To such a clarification this book addresses itself. (7)

6. The Matter of Difference. Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (1991)

Catherine Belsey writes the Afterword to The Matter of Difference. In this extract, she defines the concerns of materialist feminism. Its main interests are social and economic instabilities and its repercussions on the life of women of all classes and races. The crucial term is “difference.” Materialist feminism rejects the existence of a female essence since it stresses the differential traits, not just between man and woman, but also among women. In the light of such critical views, to Belsey, the critical approaches to Shakespearean female characters have been deficient. In “Historical Difference: Misogyny and Othello”, Valerie Wayne uses as her starting-point Carolyn Porter’s attack on new historicists in “Are we being historical yet?” for emphasising Renaissance dominant ideology and not taking into account some other alternative discourses. Wayne remarks how Porter shows that “subversive elements are contained and marginal elements subordinated, dominated and othered in some new historicist practices” (153). In order to point out the multiplicity of discourses and their interaction, Wayne argues that Othello presents three different ideologies of woman and marriage articulated by the Renaissance debate about women: Iago and, later on, Othello represent the residual medieval discourse of misogyny; the dominant humanist and Protestant ideology that favoured marriage and praised women was voiced by Desdemona; and finally, the emergent ideology that highlighted the similitude between the sexes is

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expressed by Emilia.37 Read Text 6.2. carefully and observe Emilia’s challenging position in the play that Wayne describes. Notice her defiance of the notion of woman as other and her claims for an equality between men and women on sexual terms.

6.1. Catherine Belsey, “A Future for Materialist Feminist Criticism?” The now classic essay by Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt emphasises the repudiation of idealism that characterises materialist feminism. Not quite conceding that ‘materialist’ is a euphemism for the unacceptable, unspeakable ‘Marxist’, but not quite denying it either, Newton and Rosenfelt emphasise materialist feminism’s concern with the social and the economic, as opposed to the purely psychological, and with historical difference, as opposed to the universal and essential categories of ‘woman’ and ‘patriarchy.’ Idealism fails to take account of the power of social class and social institutions to determine differences between women, as well as between women and men. It fails to do justice to the different forms of oppression which exist at specific historical moments. Middle-class feminism has had to come to terms with its own idealist tendencies, evident in its failure to engage the commitment of working-class women; white, western feminism is gradually learning to listen to black women and women of colour, whose oppressions are also culturally, historically and economically specific. Materialism stresses the specificity of struggle because it attends to the social and economic conditions which both permit and promote conflicts of interest. And in Shakespeare criticism, too, have we perhaps done less than justice, in the past, to the class position of Shakespeare’s female figures, in our efforts to stress the gender relations the plays depict? Have we shared the idealist tendency to analyse love and ignore money? And have we paid insufficient attention to the specific economic and social instabilities that constitute the context of Shakespeare’s plays? One of the things that materialist feminist criticism means, Newton and Rosenfelt state firmly, is ‘more work than one is used to’, and for Shakespeareans, as this book suggests, that includes more work on the class relations in the plays, among the audience and in Elizabethan society at large. (257-58)

6.2. Valerie Wayne, “Historical Differences: Misogyny and Othello” Emilia’s alternative claims for women’s desire are made through asserting not a difference but a likeness between the ‘affections, / Desires for sport, and frailty’ of men and women, and those claims constituted an emergent ideology during 37

On residual, dominant and emergent ideologies see Selection of Texts 3 in section 2.3.

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the period. While the dominant discourse asserted difference and inequality (yet, as Gouge would have it, a ‘small inequalitie ... for of all degrees wherein there is any difference betwixt person and person, there is the least disparitie betwixt man and wife’),38 the emergent discourse on women’s behalf argued for equality on the grounds of a similarity between the sexes. Tilney’s Isabella contends, ‘For women have souls as wel as men, they have wit as wel as men, and more apt for procreation of children than men. What reason is it then, that they should be bound, whom nature hath made free?’39 Shakespeare’s Emilia reasons on the same principle of likeness, but her questions were even more threatening to those who championed marriage, because the dominant discourses presented marriage as a relation that would contain women’s desire. While an antimatrimonial misogyny is the residual ideology articulated in this play through Iago and, eventually, Othello, and a general advocacy for marriage is projected as dominant through Desdemona, Emilia’s emergent position calls the constitution of woman as other into question by claiming that woman’s desire can no more be harnessed than man’s can. Her position challenged the double standard implicit in some (though not all) descriptions of monogamy and questioned the objectification of the other that occurs in many manifestations of desire. Instead of affirming an opposition between women and men, Emilia proposes that women, like men, are not so constituted as to permit sexual control by their spouses. The emergent character of her approach is especially difficult for us to read now because our own emergent discourses ask us to be alert to gender differences and to differences between genders; yet during the Renaissance, asserting a likeness with men was an important means by which women justified some of their claims to power. The position most fundamentally opposed to Emilia’s in the play is that which asserts identity as absolutely different from and opposite to an other. (167-168)

2.4.1.3. Feminism and Psychoanalysis Introduction: Psychoanalysis and Literature We could divide psychoanalytical literary criticism into four kinds: first, the one that focuses on the psychology of the author of the work;40 second, the one that attends to the work’s content, that is, the unconscious motivations of characters, sometimes considered as reflections of the author’s psychology, or the psychoanalytical significance of certain elements in the text; third, the one that emphasises its formal construction; and, finally, the one that centres on the reader.

38 William Gouge was the author of Of Domestical Duties (1622), a Renaissance marriage guide that deals with the conduct and education within the family. 39 Wayne is here referring to Edmund Tilney, author of the marriage treaty called The Flower of Friendshippe (1568). 40 See Selection of Texts 2.

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Freud (1856-1939), who coined the term “psychoanalysis” in 1896 to name a therapy intended to uncover repression, made explicit the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature since he used literary texts to validate his clinical findings. He compared art to neurosis and considered the text as a symptom of the artist, who, like the neurotic, abandons reality in order to enter the realm of fantasy through his work. His analysis of the nature of dreaming in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) has been very influential for psychoanalytical literary theory. Freud established a correspondence between authors and texts and dreamers and their dreams. The dream, considered by Freud as a fulfilment of wishes, presents a “manifest content”, which is the dream as we remember it, and a “latent content”, or what he calls “dream-thoughts”, the materials of dreams. These could be the wishes, images or stimuli that provoke such a dream, that is, the concealed thoughts lying behind it. The “manifest content” of the dream is the product of the transformation of the “dreamthoughts.” Such a transformation is known as the “dream-work.” The interpretation of dreams consists of the examination of such a process. To Freud, the mechanisms by which the “dream-thoughts” have been transformed into the “manifest content” are mainly the work of “condensation” and “displacement.” That is, during the dream some images are condensed into a single one since the “manifest dream” has a much smaller content than the latent one. Also the meaning of objects belonging to the latent “dream-thoughts” is displaced on to objects in the “manifest content” related to it, usually for the purpose of disguise. During the “dream-work” there is another stage which Freud calls “secondary revision.” After examining how the mechanisms of “condensation” and “displacement” work in a particular dream, this revision aims to reconstruct the dream by reordering its elements and giving it a consistent narrative that usually uncovers the repressed wishes of the unconscious. Freud viewed a literary text as constituted as a dream and the reader, or critic, as a therapist. Texts spring from a group of materials, the literary “latent content”, as specific sets of values, ideas or elements from other literary texts, which are transformed by certain techniques as literary devices. Literary critics analyse the way these techniques, which would be the corollary of the “dream-work”, function; that is, the way the author has combined, manipulated or transformed the materials he or she uses in order to create his or her work of art and give it its final form, which would correspond to the “manifest content.” Finally, such analysis will lead the critic to a “secondary revision”, that is, an ordered and consistent account of the meaning of the text. In order to uncover the process of the “dream-work”, psychoanalysts analyse the moments of distortion and

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ambiguity in the dream. In the case of literary criticism, textual ambivalences, repetition of certain terms, or even the silencing of certain issues are elements that must be analysed in order to ascertain the unconscious of the text. The identification between dream and text led to psychoanalytical analyses centred mainly on the author’s psychology and on the formal construction of the text. But there is another psychoanalytical approach that centres on the reader-response to the text; that is, on the psychological effect that a literary text awakens in the reader. Such approach arose in the 1950s and 1960s and its leading figure is Norman Holland. His work The Dynamics of Literary Response (1968) deals with such an issue. The reading process brings about unconscious fantasies and conscious defences against them, which must be placated in order to have access to the text. Reading is enjoyable since it turns the reader’s unconscious wishes and fears into culturally acceptable meanings. To Holland, the literary text is a coded system in which the reader finds the expression of what he or she desires to hear. Reading is a replication of identity. He compares different responses of different readers to the same text, and the relationship between their free associations to the text. Holland concludes that nothing happens in the text, everything that matters is located in the reader. The kinds of psychoanalytical literary criticism which focus on the author or the reader’s psychology are both contested by Carl Jung’s “archetypal criticism”, which became significant for literary critics during the 1950s and 1960s. In his work Psychological Types (1921) Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) makes a distinction between the personal and the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious is constituted by an individual’s repressed feelings and thoughts. Within the collective unconscious we find the inherited feelings, thoughts and memories that we all share. Archetypes are central to this collective unconscious. They are images from the earliest stages of human existence related to universal rites of passage such as the coming of age and the facing of death. According to Jung, the main symbol systems of the world’s myths, religions and literatures are unified by the presence of these archetypes. In his essay “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry” (1922), Jung states that the symbols in the works of art do not come from the author’s “personal unconscious” but from this all-embracing “collective unconscious.” Finally, in this introduction, we will briefly deal with the psychoanalitycal findings of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), which have greatly influenced literary theory during the last three decades of the twentieth century. Lacan’s theories are a reinterpretation of Freudian

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theories in structuralist and post-structuralist terms. Lacan centres on issues such as the processes of ego-formation, the socialisation of the human subject and its relation with language. First of all we should describe what Lacan defines as the two main orders in the formation of the infant’s psyche: the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Both orders correspond to what Freud calls the preoedipal and the oedipal stages but Lacan analyses both phases in linguistic terms. For Lacan, during the Imaginary Order, a prelinguistic order, there is a harmonious and symbiotic relationship between mothers and infants. These do not see themselves as separate entities from the external world, let alone from their mothers. It is during this period when Lacan’s mirror stage takes place - children are approximately between six and eight months. Lacan describes the mirror stage in his essay “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I” (1949). The moment in which children are able to recognise their own image and the persons and things around them in a mirror is basic to their identification as a self separated from their environment (1977: 1). As Lacan himself states, “the function of the mirror stage is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality ... between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt” (4), that is, between the inner world and the outer world. Children experience their body as fragmented before this stage and by looking at themselves in the mirror they achieve, for the first time, a sense of totality, of autonomy that will eventually lead to a sense of selfhood. In order for the “mirror stage” to be completed, infants should also see the objects that surround them and, especially, their mothers reflected in the mirror. The mirror stage brings about a transformation from the infants’ unintegrated state to their structured integration. Lacan considers the infants who see themselves in the mirror as signifiers and the images they see in the mirror as signifieds, as the complete meaning of self. Infants experience not a real but a fictive sense of completeness, of wholeness, by finding images in the world with which they can identify. Children misrecognise themselves, what they see in the mirror is just an idealisation since it is not the integrated image they are observing. The Imaginary Order could be then defined as a structuralist one in which there is a total correspondence between signifier and signified, in which harmony and unity rules, in which infants see themselves as integrated as a Saussurean sign.41 However, the entry into the Symbolic Order, which would correspond to the Freudian Oedipus phase, presupposes the entry into a poststructuralist order in which the correspondence between signifier and signifier disappears;42 in which the image of oneself as a unified and 41 42

See chapter 2.1. on Structuralism. See chapter 2.2. on Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction.

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autonomous entity is disrupted. In this new order the father is the image of authority, of Law, of societal regulations. The paternal image separates the infant from its mother’s hold, and, by so doing, the Law of the Father represses the infant’s desires; the repression of the infant’s desire constitutes his or her unconscious. In this new psychic order, the infant’s self is constituted in relation to a threatening and powerful Other, which observes, control and objectifies him or her. That Other takes the shape of the parents, of repression, of language, that is, of authority. Entering the Symbolic entails a loss of unity and wholeness; the subject appears as split, consisting of a conscious, accessible mind, and an unconscious series of drives. For Lacan subjectivity becomes then fragmented. By entering this new realm in which the figure of the father replaces the maternal one, the infant becomes aware of sexual difference, of the need of gender roles and enters the realm of language. Once he or she accepts these rules, the infant becomes socialised since, by entering into contact with the father, he or she realises that it is just a part of a wider familial and social environment. Lacan considers that, once the child enters the realm of language, he or she distinguishes between the “I” who speaks and the “you” to whom the subject speaks. Analysing subjectivity in poststructuralist terms, Lacan remarks how the child’s identity is constructed in relation to other identities, in relation to their differences and similarities. Once immersed in the Symbolic Order, the child’s process of socialisation begins and its ego-formation will be determined by external forces, social and cultural, that is, ideological, that will progressively construct his or her subjectivity. The illusion of completeness that the child experienced during the Imaginary Order disappears. Freud considered that the unconscious existed before entering the realm of language, Lacan sees the formation of the unconscious as simultaneous to the appearance of language. In fact, one of Lacan’s most famous statements, that we can find in his famous essay “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious” (1957), is that “what the psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious is the whole structure of language” (1977: 147). The psychoanalyst finds in speech, in language, “its instrument, its context, its material” (147). The unconscious, in fact, is only available to the therapist through language. But, as Lacan’s definition of language is a post-structuralist one, the unconscious is viewed, not in structuralist terms, that is, composed of Saussurean signs with stable meanings, but of signifiers in continual movements, whose signifieds are never present since they are repressed. The unconscious is then considered as a post-structuralist text which will never offer us a definite interpretation, a final meaning.

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Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare During the first seventy years of the twentieth century, psychoanalytical analyses of Shakespeare’s texts were mainly based on Freudian theories. Freud himself frequently alludes to Shakespeare’s works in order to apply his psychoanalytical conclusions. One of Freud’s most popular Shakespearean analyses is his essay “The Theme of the Three Caskets” (1913). Freud aims to find an explanation to the scene in The Merchant of Venice in which Bassanio has to choose between three caskets in order to win Portia as bride. Freud bases his analysis on dream interpretation and concludes that, as in dreams caskets usually represent women, the selection among the three caskets is a selection among three women. Freud relates this motif in The Merchant of Venice with literary examples of the choice between three women; King Lear is one of them. Freud then makes connections between Portia and Cordelia and concludes that their traits are related to silence, to muteness. He again applies his analysis on dreams and decides that, since in dreams dumbness signifies death, the choice of the caskets is the choice of a dead woman. By the mechanism of displacement, the image of a dead woman is a reflection of the image of woman as signifying death. However, Freud notes, nobody chooses death freely. Death as a choice is interpreted by Freud in psychoanalytical terms. He alludes to the fact that, in the unconscious, opposites sometimes represent the same thing. Consequently, the choice of death can be interpreted as the choice of love and the overcoming of death. One of the most influential psychoanalytical studies of Shakespeare’s work is Hamlet and Oedipus (1949), written by the American psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, disciple of Freud. In the second chapter called “The Problem of Hamlet and the Explanations Proffered”, Jones offers a complete view of past explanations of Hamlet’s problem. That is, of Hamlet as a man incapable of any action. Jones refutes all these analyses and concludes that the explanation of Hamlet’s reactions, of Hamlet’s incapacity to kill Claudius, lies in his unconscious conflicts. Jones bases his arguments on Freudian psychoanalysis, and more specifically on the Oedipus complex, the child’s desire to kill the father and his desire for the mother. Jones develops Freud’s suggestions in The Interpretation of Dreams where he links Hamlet’s problem to the Oedipus phase.43 According to Jones, by killing Hamlet’s father and having sex with his mother, Claudius performs Hamlet’s desires. After Claudius’s acts, Hamlet’s repressed oedipal conflicts emerge again and incestuous and murderous thoughts invade his mind. 43

See Selection of Texts 1.

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Apart from studying the character’s hidden causes, Jones also analyses Shakespeare’s own character through reading his text in the chapter entitled “The Hamlet in Shakespeare”, in which he states that Shakespeare’s father’s death in 1601, probably the year of the play’s publication, might have awaken childhood repressed thoughts and desires that lie behind the play’s structure.44 In Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalitic Essays (1980), edited by Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn, we can find David Willbern’s useful “Bibliography of Psychological and Psychoanalytic Writings on Shakespeare 1964-1978.” This bibliography shows us the great amount of critical texts that have analysed Shakespeare’s plays in psychoanalytical terms.45 For example, in Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (1964), Norman N. Holland strives to offer a comprehensive view of the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis. The first part of the book centres on the work of Freud on the psychoanalytical view of literature and describes the work of Freud and the relationship he establishes between art and psychoanalysis and his account of the creative process. In the chapter called “Beside Freud” he studies the views of other analytic writers, such as Ernst Kris and Simon O. Lesser, on the artist and his work. Apart from offering his own readings of the plays, the second part of Holland’s book deals with Freudian psychoanalytical views of Shakespeare’s plays and also with the relationship between the work of art and the psychology of Shakespeare not just as a man, but also as an artist, as a creator of a theory of art. Psychoanalysis is widely used by feminist critics. Freud has been considered by feminism as the image of patriarchal ideas about women. Instead, feminist works that ground their theses on psychoanalysis theories are primarily influenced by the so-called object relations theory. This theory centres not on the oedipal complex, as classic Freudianism does, but on the preoedipal stage during which the child interacts with objects and people in his or her environment and where the maternal, and not the paternal, role rules. One of the most influential works on this field has been, as we will see in detail in the following section, Nancy Chodorow’s

44

See Selection of Texts 2. Relevant works on Shakespeare and psychoanalysis are for example, C. L. Barber’s Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study in Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (1959); The Whole Journey: Shakespeare’s Power of Development (1986) by C. L. Barber and Richard P. Wheeler; Shakespeare’s Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and CounterTurn (1981) by Wheeler; Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (1987) by Marjorie Garber; After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (1993) by Julia Reinhard Lupton and Kenneth Reinhard. 45

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The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (1978). As we will see in our analysis of Titus Andronicus and King Lear, Chodorow reveals that, since male identity depends on a traumatic process of separation from his mother, men suffer from fear of a threatening mother and a rejection of the feminine. The object relations theory is also implemented by Janet Adelman in her book Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest” (1992). Without leaving aside Freud’s influence, feminist-psychoanalytical Shakespearean studies written during the last three decades of the twentieth century have been greatly influenced by the work of Jacques Lacan and his notion of the Imaginary and Symbolic Orders as we will observe in the following section.46 Feminist studies also adapt Lacan’s theories; some of these analyses consider them as an attack on patriarchy, while others still observe in his theories a predominance of male-dominated assumptions. In order to make these ideas more comprehensible, in the following section we will offer two examples of psychoanalysis applied to feminist studies of two Shakespearean plays: Titus Andronicus and King Lear.47

46 For example, Barbara Freedman’s Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (1991) grounds her theories on a mixture of Lacanian theories, classical Freudian ideas and also Renaissance theories of vision and perception. 47 For those who are not familiar with the story of Titus Andronicus here is a summarised plot to make the analysis of the play more accesible: The Roman General Titus Andronicus returns to Rome from wars against the Goths. Tamora, Queen of the Goths, the Moor Aaron, her lover, and her sons, Alarbus, Chiron and Demetrius are taken as Titus’s prisoners. When Alarbus is sacrificed in order to appeased the souls of Titus’s dead sons, Tamora vows revenge. Titus offers the imperial crown to Saturninus, the oldest son of the last emperor and offers her daughter, the submissive and obedient Lavinia, as his wife and Roman empress. But Lavinia is already betrothed to Saturninus’s brother, Bassianus, who abducts her. Saturninus then, who has fallen in love with the seductive, intelligent and vengeful Tamora, chooses her as the new Roman empress. Tamora and Aaron will plot their revenge against the Andronicus. Her sons, Chiron and Demetrius kill Bassianus, throw him into a pit in the forest and then rape Lavinia before they tear out her tongue and cut off her hands. Aaron falsely accuses Titus’s sons, Martius and Quintus, who fall in the pit, of having murdered Bassianus. Saturninus imprisons them. Aaron tells Titus that the emperor will free his sons if either Marcus, Titus’s brother, or Lucius, Titus’s son, cuts off his hand and sends it to him. Titus is the one who cuts off his own hand but he gets it back in return with the heads of his two sons. Titus decides to take revenge on Saturninus and Tamora. With the help of Lavinia, who, with a stick accuses Chiron and Demetrius of rape and mutilation, Titus cuts their throats and cooks a pie with their flesh and bones that Saturninus and Tamora will eventually eat. The final scene also shows us how Lavinia and Tamora are killed by Titus, who is in turn killed by Saturninus. Lucius, who kills the emperor, is finally nominated as the new Roman emperor. Aaron is buried up to his chest and starved to death.

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Feminist psychoanalytical analyses of Titus Andronicus and King Lear Titus Andronicus In “Rape and Revenge in Titus Andronicus” (1978), David Willbern’s analysis is based on psychoanalytical theories which were subsequently used by feminist studies of the play. Willbern’s essay does not follow a feminist approach but it is essential to understand the close link that sometimes exists between psychoanalytical criticism and feminism. The critic centres his analysis on the metaphorical connotations of the central image of the pit in the play. According to the critic, Quintus and Martius’s description of the pit is a symbolic description of Lavinia’s rape. The psychoanalytical interpretation of the following lines, which are delivered by Quintus to describe the pit after Martius falls in it, observes in the terms “hole” or “mouth” a reference to Lavinia’s vagina and in the mentioning of “new-shed blood”, of “flowers” – that point to the verb “deflower” - and of the verb “hurt” an allusion to the actual rape of Lavinia: What, art thou fallen? What subtle hole is this, Whose mouth is covered with rude-growing briers Upon whose leaves are drops of new-shed blood As fresh as morning dew distilled on flowers? A very fatal place it seems to me. Speak, brother, hast thou hurt thee with the fall? (2.2.198-203)

To Willbern, the pit symbolises “an image of the violated vagina” (1978: 170). Definitions of the pit as “this fell devouring receptacle” (2.2.235) or as a “swallowing womb” (2.2.239) relates the image of the pit to the image of a devouring mouth all throughout the play. Consequently, the pit, Willbern states, can be related to terms such as sexual intercourse, womb, birth or the act of being devoured. Willbern observes an obvious link between all these terms and certain psychoanalytical theories that examine the mother’s essential role in her child’s psychic development. In the stage Freud names as preoedipal, a close relationship between mother and child is born. The power exerted by the mother during this phase makes Freud describe her as phallic. Such a powerful role will be taken over by the father during the oedipal phase. During the preoedipal stage, the mother must satisfy her child’s desires and instincts and their union must be complete. Children see their mother as part of themselves. However, their correct psychological evolution depends on the dissolution of such unity. That is, children must be occasionally frustrated; their needs and desires must be unanswered by their mother. Consequently, they will progressively see her as an independent entity and will begin to discover

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their own identities. In The Reproduction of Mothering (1978), Nancy Chodorow explains such evolution in the following terms: Discomfort and the loss of merging result both in the further development of the infantile ego and in the growth of a different kind of object love ... the infant achieves a differentiation of self only insofar as its expectations of primary love are frustrated. If the infant were not frustrated, it would not begin to perceive the other as separate. Frustration and ambivalence generate anxiety. Freud first argued that anxiety triggers the development of ego capacities, spurs the development of ego capacities as well as the creation of ego boundaries. (69-70)

If this process is not completed, that is, if the mother does not allow the child to be frustrated and to feel anxious, she will eventually turn into a psychological threat for the infant: This transition can be very difficult because children at this early stage may one minute sense themselves merged with the mother (and require complete anticipatory understanding of their needs), and the next, experience themselves as separate and her as dangerous (if she knows their needs in advance). (83-84)

From being a source of desire and fulfilment, the mother could then turn herself into the image of fear, rejection and hate for the child. That is, “total merging and dependence are not so desirable. Merging brings the threat of loss of self or of being devoured as well as the benefit of omnipotence” (Chodorow 1978: 69). In “Female Sexuality” (1931), Freud pointed out the growth of “the surprising, yet regular, fear of being killed (devoured?) by the mother” (227) during this phase. Freud states that “it is only in men that I have found the fear of being eaten up”(237). The fear of being eaten up is the psychoanalytical element on which Willbern grounds his analysis of Titus Andronicus. To Willbern, the image of the mother is central in the play. Lavinia represents “the pure and virtuous mother, threatened with attack and invasion” (1978: 164). Tamora is described as “the dangerous, seductive, threatening mother, from whom one needs protection” (164). Lavinia and Tamora symbolise two radically different maternal images, closely linked during the preoedipal stage. Also, to Willbern, Rome’s description is related to these two contradictory ideas of the mother. That is, Rome is sometimes depicted as a mother that nurtures and protects its children. But, on the other hand, Rome also threatens to attack and devour them. For example, when Saturninus and Tamora become rulers in Rome, the city turns itself into “a wilderness of tigers” (3.1.54). Thus, Willbern states, “Rome has turned wild, like the

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dark forest of Act II. Her once-gracious loving acceptance is now, like the blood-drinking pit, a devouring threat” (173). Willbern notes that the image of the pit emphasises the image of the devouring mother in the play. The description of the pit as a “swallowing womb” (2.2.239) looks forward to the image of Tamora devouring her sons. This image makes Willbern relate the action of Titus Andronicus with the preoedipal phase during which the mother turns into a destructive element for the child: The unconscious fear of women – more precisely, of female genitals – may originate from a more primary source than castration anxiety. It can emerge from a fear of the catastrophically perceived preoedipal mother, who threatens total dismemberment and destruction: the devouring mother. This threat is seen as primarily oral, and consequently, revenge in Shakespeare is at its deepest level an oral vengeance. (171)

Willbern’s thesis is appropriated by feminist critics such as Cynthia Marshall (1991) or Dorothea Kehler (1995). But it is Carolyn Asp, in “‘Upon her Wit Doth Earthly Honor Wait’. Female Agency in Titus Andronicus” (1995), who extensively describes Tamora in Willbern’s terms: The power of the phallic mother is both seductive, alluring, and terrifying. As the perceived all-powerful figure in the child’s development, she can give or withhold favors, nourish or starve, attract or repel. In this stage, the maternal figure is often ambivalent toward her child and it is this indeterminacy that is terrifying. Will she nurture me or will she kill me? Tamora’s command that Aaron’s child be killed because it will incriminate her encapsulates the male’s deep psychic fear of maternal power. She nourishes only those sons who will advance her cause within the Symbolic Order; those who compromise her must die. (342)

Asp analyses Lavinia and Tamora by presenting a set of oppositions that make clear distinctions between both characters. Asp’s approach is mainly psychoanalytical, and basically grounded on Lacan’s theories of the Imaginary and the Symbolic Orders. Asp identifies Tamora with the Imaginary Order and Lavinia with the Symbolic one: In Lacanian theory, those elements of culture and civilization such as ritual, convention, law, even language, belong to what he calls the Symbolic Order which is coded “masculine” because it has, historically, been under the control of patriarchy ... An alien to Rome, which in this play we could say represents a Symbolic Order increasingly corrupted, Tamora questions its values, laws and customs. Although she can operate within this Order, she is more centrally placed in and draws her inner power from what Lacan calls the Imaginary Order. This Order is coded “feminine” and is the locus of the imago of the all-powerful phallic

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mother. In development terms, it represents a fantasy of need and instinct fulfillment, of narcissistic and aggressive drives that are unhindered by what Lacan calls “the Father’s Law.” It is the father’s intervention in the mother-child dyad with the prohibitory word “not” that forces or allows entrance into the world of the Symbolic Order. Movement from the Imaginary to the Symbolic Order by repressing instinct is a movement into what Freud calls “civilization” ... Instead of having power herself, Lavinia functions as an object to be used by powerful males within the Symbolic Order to cement alliances and maintain surface of order. (335-36)

Asp’s thesis presents clear binary oppositions such as civilisation / aggression, law / disorder, masculine / feminine, father / mother, Symbolic / Imaginary, Lavinia / Tamora. The preoedipal stage could be identified with the Lacanian Imaginary Order where the mother exerts her power. On the contrary, the Symbolic Order would be identified with the oedipal phase. During this stage, the father’s authority rules and breaks the union between mother and son. The child views his father as an enemy that fights to possess the mother and as a symbol of subjugation and power. According to Freud, the child identifies his father’s aggressive stance with a threat of castration. Fear forces him to accept his father’s authority and reject the desired union with his mother. In the case of the daughters, the little girl perceives her mother’s apparent castration and, out of fear, also agrees to the father’s power. As opposed to the freedom inherent in the relationship with the mother in the preoedipal phase, the father’s repressive and authoritarian attitude introduces children into a social universe, controlled by laws and rules that they must abide by: The early mother-infant relationship, though socially constructed, is experienced by the child as presocial, or nonsocial. It is the person who intervenes in this relationship – the father – who represents culture and society to the child. Hitherto, the social organization of parenting has meant that it is women who represent the nonsocial – or the confusion of biological and social – and men who unambiguously represent society. Mitchell argues that the child’s becoming social and encultured is the same thing as becoming social and enculturated in patriarchal society. (Chodorow 1978: 81)

This patriarchal society identifies the father as the origin of social elements that keep the stability of social order, such as religion, morality and social sense. As Freud states in “The Ego and the Id” (1923): Religion, morality, and a social sense – they were acquired phylogenetically out of the father-complex: religion and moral restraint through the process of mastering the Oedipus complex itself, and social feeling through the necessity for overcoming the rivalry that then remained between the members of the younger generation. (237)

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Asp describes the end of Titus Andronicus as the symbol of the supremacy of the Symbolic Order and the defeat of the Imaginary. The final triumph of a male-dominated order implies Tamora and Lavinia’s decline. Both female characters are eventually expelled from the Roman patriarchal order. However, Asp also observes a social breach within this masculine order: Although the place and fates of the female characters in the play are overdetermined and misogynistic, they are not that far removed from the anxieties provoked by female power and desire within culture in general. Fortunately criticism and productions of this play increasingly draw our attention to these problematic representations and force us to confront similar fears and anxieties within our own culture. (1995: 344)

Asp builds her argument on Freud’s thesis in Civilization and Its Discontents (1962). The birth of civilisation springs from a process that can be identified with the psychological evolution leading to the completion of human identity and the individual’s incorporation within a social order. Freud states that a civilised organisation is born when the instincts of a social group have been frustrated and repressed as it happens to the infant during the preoedipal phase. As a consequence, Freud points out that “this ‘cultural frustration’ dominates the large field of social relationships between human beings ... it is the cause of the hostility against which all civilizations have to struggle” (in Asp 1995: 334). As a result, the Symbolic Order holds within itself the seed of resistance to the established order. According to Asp, in Titus Andronicus, this germ is personified in Tamora’s political, linguistic and sexual power. Willbern locates the origin of male unconscious fear of women in the preoedipal phase and, more specifically, in the image of the devouring mother. In the same way, Asp sees Roman political and social disorder as a result of Tamora’s threatening and powerful behaviour. Tamora is then identified with the phallic mother. Feminist criticism of the play has considered male fear of female power as one of its central themes. For example, in “‘I can interpret all her martyr’ d signs’: Titus Andronicus, Feminism and the Limits of Interpretation” (1991), Cynthia Marshall explains such fear in psychoanalytical terms. She makes reference to the danger of the devouring mother and states that “Titus seems terrified not simply of women, but of the traditionally female role of nurturing, protecting, and nourishing a dependent” (208). Marshall considers misogyny in the play as the consequence of male fear of women, like Tamora, able to exert political power:

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The misogyny of Titus Andronicus is strongly overdetermined: women are violently punished whether they are powerful, dependent, or (in the case of the Nurse) neutral. One explanation for such rampant misogyny is a collective male terror of female power, the anxiety Freud refers to in “The Taboo of Virginity” and elsewhere. Titus Andronicus offers the example, rare in English literature, of a woman controlling her society (though only temporarily), and Tamora wields sufficient strength to provoke real fear in the men around her. (208)

According to Marshall, Tamora’s political, linguistic and sexual power “challenge[s] male illusions of self-creation and self-sufficiency” (207). Marshall bases her argument on Willbern’s analysis of the pit. She metaphorically relates the pit to terms such as hell, tomb, womb, vagina or mouth and links this metaphorical scenario to women’s dangerous and perverse character. To Marshall, Lavinia and Tamora: are subjected to anger displaced from the ominously gaping tomb. To rationalize this anger, women are ascribed pride, lust, appetite, and in a final gesture, revenge itself ... In a fulfillment of the misogynistic vision, not only generally negative qualities but the specific destructive force plaguing Roman society must be, and is, objectified in the figure of a woman. (207)

In the same way, Coppélia Kahn, in “The Daughter’s Seduction in Titus Andronicus, or, Writing is the Best Revenge” in her book Roman Shakespeare (1997), also points out the close relationship in the play between the malevolent pit and female threat. To Kahn, the pit acquires the same connotations that Willbern and Marshall had already pointed out. However, Kahn emphasises the fact that the pit symbolises the negative connotations applied to the womb in any patriarchal society. By quoting Janet Adelman, Kahn concludes that the text presents, through elements as the pit, “anxieties about masculinity and female power” (56). The pit symbolises “maternal fecundity that, eluding patriarchal control becomes excessive, destructive, and malignant, breeding further evils” (54-55). The maternal image again turns into the idea of destruction and fear that, in psychoanalytical terms, Willbern located in the preoedipal stage. Kahn establishes a clear correspondence between the final scenes of the play and the transition from the preoedipal stage to the oedipal stage. That is, from the Imaginary Order to the Symbolic one; from a dangerous and feminine atmosphere to a social and male organisation ruled by the authority of the father: Under proper patriarchal control, the womb is subordinated to the tomb, to the patriarchal family as configured by the Roman state, its military aims, and the dictates of virtues. Eluding that control, the

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maternal womb burgeons aggressively, pollutes patrilineal descent, and destroys civil order, whereas the daughter’s womb, first virginal and then violated, serves as the focal point whereby the father defends patriarchy against the mother’s attack and ultimately regains control. Titus positions its hero between a rampaging mother and a dutiful daughter. (55)

King Lear In her essay “The Absent Mother in King Lear” that we can find in the volume Rewriting the Renaissance. The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (1986), Coppélia Kahn analyses King Lear from a psychoanalytical perspective and again alludes to the preoedipal and oedipal phases in order to “uncover the hidden mother in the hero’s inner world” (2002: 35). Kahn points out the fact that, according to Freud, sexual differentation is greatly governed by the paternal figure within the context of a patriarchal society and family. As a consequence, the role of the mother during the preoedipal phase has been largely subordinated to the role of the father during the oedipal stage. Kahn observes how this primacy of the paternal image over the maternal one, apart from “reversing the sequence of development in the individual” (35), has been a constant presence on the surface of many texts dominated by images of patriarchy, male domination or misogyny. However, what Kahn aims to reveal is the existence of what she calls “the maternal subtext.” That is, the “imprint of mothering on the male psyche, the psychological presence of the mother whether or not mothers are literally represented as characters” (35). Kahn starts her essay by asserting the obvious absence of a mother in King Lear. The play creates a male and paternal atmosphere in which the mother’s role is totally ignored. From the beginning of the play we face the relationship between fathers and children, between King Lear and his daughters and between Gloucester and his sons. Also, Kahn observes how the play depicts a masculine world that, especially through the initial characterisation of Lear, intends to repress and silence feelings considered as feminine or maternal. However, to Kahn “the absence of the mother points to her hidden presence” (36). In order to prove such presence, Kahn grounds her analysis on Nancy Chodorow’s re-examination of the preoedipal stage and her emphasis on the maternal role during her child’s individuation and sexual identity. According to Chodorow, both boy and girl need a maternal reference for the completion of their ego-formation. Female identity arises after the union and identification with the mother figure. Male identity springs after rejecting such initial union. In both cases the maternal role is considered as essential during the process of individuation for both sexes.

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Kahn initiates her analysis by studying the first scene of King Lear. We witness a father, Lear, giving one of his daughters, Cordelia, in marriage; a ritual in which the mother is absent and the father is the only image of authority and procreation. Kahn suggests that the analysis of this first scene might lead us to think that Lear’s demand of her daughter’s love is a sign of incestuous desire. But, instead, according to Kahn, the relationship between father and daughter is hiding “a deeper emotional need in Lear: the need for Cordelia as daughter-mother”(40). After rejecting Cordelia for her refusal to say how much she loves him, Lear states: “I lov’d her most, and thought to set my rest / On her kind nursery” (1.1.12324). Lear is analysed by Kahn as “a child’s image of being mothered” (40). Kahn’s description of Lear as someone who desires to control his daughters and at the same time be dependent on them resembles the “child’s preoedipal experience of himself and his mother as an undiferentiated dual unity, in which the child perceives his mother not as a separate person but as an agency of himself, who provides for his needs” (40). Lear’s madness is also seen as his reaction to the loss of Cordelia, to maternal loss. Lear’s madness is then compared by Kahn with the infants’ enraged reaction to their mother’s absence during the preoedipal phase. The appearance of images of “oral rage” during the play is also interpreted in psychoanalytical terms by Kahn. Devouring and biting images abound in the play. According to Kahn they are all related to ideas of maternal aggression during the preoedipal phase, as we noted in the previous chapter about Titus Andronicus, and also to the chid’s aggression against the mother during those moments of frustration and abandonment. Despite the multiple allusions to the unkindness of female nature during the play, Kahn observes how it presents Lear’s progressive acceptance of his own feminine traits by being able to face his own feelings and to abandon the strict patriarchal and authoritarian values of his world. In the final scenes, Cordelia appears as the image of the daughter-mother her father desired her to be and Lear is again depicted as “a mischievous child who makes his mother run after him (“Come, and you get it, you shall get it by running”, 4.6.199, 201-202). When he reappears, he is as helpless as a child, sleeping and carried in by servants” (47). However, Kahn observes how Lear’s realisation of his own weaknesses and feelings and also Cordelia’s death make him accept her daughter’s autonomy and help him to see her as his daughter and not as a maternal figure. Separateness has to be completed: Cordelia’s death prevents Lear from trying to live out his fantasy, and perhaps discover once again that a daughter cannot be a mother. When he enters bearing Cordelia in his arms, he is struggling to accept the

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total and irrevocable loss of the only loving woman in his world, the one person who could possibly fulfill needs that he has, in such anguish, finally come to admit. No wonder that he cannot contemplate such utter, devastating separateness, and in the final scene tries so hard to deny that she is dead. (49)

SELECTION OF TEXTS In Text 1 Freud does not present Hamlet as he has traditionally been depicted, that is, as incapable of taking action. He portrays him as someone who sees in his uncle’s behaviour the reflection of his own oedipal struggle: the desire to usurp his father’s place. Observe how Freud’s critical perspective opposed Bradbrook’s views about motivation on the Elizabethan stage.48 In Text 2, Jones centres on the author’s psychology when analysing the play. He compares Hamlet’s situation to Shakespeare’s personal experiences at the time. He also points out Freud’s theory that replacing the father after his death awakens childhood wishes of union with the mother. Holland, in Text 3, presents how Wertham’s theory about Hamlet’s delay opposes Freud and Jones’s. Wertham highlights Hamlet’s love for and identification with his father and his resentment for his mother’s adultery. He also stands against the theories that link the death of Shakespeare’s father with the play. Text 4 gives us an example of how Lacan’s theories about the mirror stage can serve as a model of literary analysis. In his essay, Armstrong gives us several examples of mirror images in Hamlet that could be examined from a psychoanalytical point of view. Since he is dealing with Shakespeare’s theatrical production, note the duplicity of the term “stage” in the title of Armstrong’s essay.

1. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) Strangely enough, the overwhelming effect produced by the more modern tragedy has turned out to be compatible with the fact that people have remained completely in the dark as to the hero’s character. The play is built on Hamlet’s hesitations over fulfilling the task of revenge that is assigned to him; but its 48

See section 1.5.2.

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text offers no reasons or motives for these hesitations and an immense variety of attempts at interpreting them have failed to produce a result ... The plot of the drama shows us, however, that Hamlet is far from being represented as a person incapable of taking any action. We see him doing so on two occasions: first in a sudden outburst of temper, when he runs his sword through the eavesdropper behind the arras, and secondly in a premediated and even crafty fashion, when, with all the callousness of a Renaissance prince, he sends the two courtiers to the death that had been planned for himself. What is it, then, that inhibits him in fulfilling the task set him by his father’s ghost? The answer, once again, is that it is the peculiar nature of the task. Hamlet is able to do anything – except take vengeance on the man who did away with his father and took that father’s place with his mother, the man who shows him the repressed wishes of his own childhood realized. Thus the loathing which should drive him on to revenge is replaced in him by self-reproaches, by scruples of conscience, which remind him that he himself is literally no better than the sinner whom he is to punish. (1965: 298-99)

2. Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus (1949) The other fact is that Shakespeare’s father died in September 1601. Unfortunately we have no data about the cause of his death or how long he had been known to be suffering from a fatal illness. Many years ago Henderson pointed out this conjuncture and argued that it played an important part in the writing of “Hamlet”; he stresses the feeling of death throughout the play, and notes that Shakespeare then turned from comedy to tragedy. Rosner considered that when writing the play Shakespeare was in an “excessively nervous condition” because of the death of his father and the execution of Essex. Schücking also observes the same concatenation, and Freud attached great significance to it, remarking that to many men the death of the father is perhaps the most important event in their life; the moment when a man succeeds, i.e. replaces, his father may revive the forbidden wishes of his infancy. The dates and circumstances, however, are too indeterminate to allow us to regard Freud’s supposition from being any more than an inspired guess, which, however, may be greatly inspired. One might perhaps add in this connection that the only other play in which Shakespeare depicted a son’s intimate relation to his mother, “Coriolanus” (cp. “the most noble mother of the world”), was written just after the death of his mother in 1608. (128-29)

3. Norman Holland, Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (1964) Concentrating on Hamlet’s doubts and delays has led to one variant on the oedipal view, but the principal variant has been to consider Hamlet’s delay the result of matricidal impulses instead of parricidal ones ... The real originator of the matricidal view is Dr. Frederic Wertham, most widely known as an attacker

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of wicked comic books. In a book-length study of a young matricide in New York and a later, shorter theoretical paper, he has set out his reasons for disagreeing with the Freud-Jones view that Hamlet cannot punish Claudius for doing what he, Hamlet, would like to do. Wertham argues, first, that Hamlet identifies with his father, not with Claudius; he expresses love for his father, not the hostility he directs to Claudius. Second, the revenge, as it actually works out, seems more for the adultery than the murder; Laertes even has to remind Hamlet, “The king, the king’s to blame.” Further, Dr. Wertham insists that Hamlet was not written after the death of Shakespeare’s father, and he insists that Freud was really provoked to his reading of the play because he wanted to prove that the oedipus complex was universal. (180)

4. Philip Armstrong, “Watching Hamlet Watching: Lacan, Shakespeare and the Mirror / Stage” in Alternative Shakespeares Vol. 2 (1996) In the mirror stage, the child constructs its fantasy ego according to the upright and coordinated figure in the glass. This always and only offers what Lacan calls a méconnaissance, a misleading recognition, because the masterful image apprehended in the mirror does not correspond to the actual degree of muscular coordination attained by the infant. The imaginary identification thereby produces a frustrated aggressivity, for the spectator desires to assimilate this image of the body as a totality, but remains at odds with it, experiencing its own body only partially and in fragments. The ego then desires the destruction of the ideal other but, dependent upon it for its own identification, remains locked in a disabling impasse, like the master and slave of Hegel’s dialectic. In his seminar ‘Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet’, Lacan takes Hamlet’s relation to Laertes as a model for this imaginary fascination. He quotes the Prince’s description of Laertes to Osric – ‘his semblable is his mirror and who else would trace him his umbrage, nothing more’ (V.ii.118-20)49 – commenting that ‘The image of the other ... is presented here as completely absorbing the beholder’ (1977a: 31). In this struggle only one outcome is possible: the destruction of both parties. In eventually fighting his ego ideal, therefore, Hamlet effects his own death. The playwright situates the basis of aggressivity in his paroxysm of absorption in the imaginary register, formally expressed as a mirror relationship, a mirrored reaction. The one you fight is the one you admire the most. The ego ideal is also, according to Hegel’s formula which says that coexistence is impossible, the one you have to kill. (Lacan 1977a: 31)

Characters other than Laertes also function as mirror images in this play. Most interestingly, from the point of view of the theatrical transaction between audience and actor, Hamlet identifies himself with the player who delivers the speech about Pyrrhus, especially at the moment where he describes how the avenger’s sword, raised over the head of Priam, 49 In The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Hamlet this line corresponds to 5.2.11112. The meaning of these lines would be: “the only thing that resembles him is his own image in a mirror, whoever imitates him is just a shadow of him.”

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Acting out as well as speaking these lines, the player vividly foreshadows the moment at which Hamlet, a few scenes later, will stand with his sword poised above his uncle’s head, embodying once again the inert aggressivity produced by an imaginary identification with the ‘painted tyrant’ before him. (224-25)

Observe in the following text Kahn’s application of Chodorow’s relation theory to Lear’s behaviour. Also notice the reference to Freud’s famous essay “The Theme of the Three Caskets” explained above. As we have seen in the selection of texts of this section on psychoanalysis, critical examinations of Shakespeare’s plays are not only based on theories developed by preceding critical analysis but also reinforced or even contradicted by previous and subsequent critical stances.

5. Coppélia Kahn, “The Absent Mother in King Lear” (1986) in Rewriting the Renaissance. The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe The play’s beginning, as I have said, is marked by the omnipotent presence of the father and the absence of the mother. Yet in Lear’s scheme for parceling out his kingdom, we can discern a child’s image of being mothered. He wants two mutually exclusive things at once: to have absolute control over those closest to him and to be absolutely dependent on them. We can recognize in this stance the outlines of a child’s experience of himself and his mother as an undifferentiated dual unity, in which the child perceives his mother not as a separate person but as an agency of himself, who provides for his needs. She and her breast are a part of him, at his command. In Freud’s unforgettable phrase, he is “his majesty, the baby”. As man, father, and ruler, Lear has habitually suppressed any needs for love, which in his patriarchal world would normally be satisfied by a mother or mothering woman. With age and loss of vigor, and as Freud suggests in “The Theme of the Three Caskets”, with the prospect of return to mother earth, Lear feels those needs again and hints at them in his desire to “crawl” like a baby “toward death”. Significantly, he confesses them in these phrases the moment after he curses Cordelia for her silence, the moment in which he denies them most strongly. He says, “I lov’d her most, and thought to set my rest / On her kind nursery” (1.1.123-24). (2002: 40) 50

In The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Hamlet these lines correspond to 2.2.437-39.

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Section 2.4.2 2.4.2. Gay Studies In the last few pages of the introductory chapter of Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England (1991)51, Bruce R. Smith defines his book not just as an example of literary criticism or social history but also as a political tract. Its main political aim is, as he states, “to consolidate gay identity in the last decade of the twentieth century, to help men whose sexual desire is turned toward other men realize that they have not only a present community but a past history”(1994: 27). Smith grounds his analysis of Shakespeare’s work on Foucault’s notions of sexuality and homosexuality in The History of Sexuality. Volume I. An Introduction (1976) in which we read that: Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power. (1990: 105-106)

Sexual identity and behaviour are considered as sites of social control and are consequently defined as historical, cultural or social constructs, and not as “natural givens.” Sexuality is not considered as a transhistorical phenomenon but as a concept whose definition changes with time. Foucault remarks that sexual activity became an object of scientific analysis in the eighteenth century. Since then, sex has been the subject of biological, medical, political, economic, psychological or sociological discourses. But for other cultures sexuality carried quite different connotations. For example, it was an ethical concern for Greek and Roman antiquity and a subject of moral discourses during the Middle Ages. According to Foucault, the idea of sexuality is closely related to discourse. Every culture’s notion of sexuality is constructed through language. The relevant point of such interconnection is that sexual behaviour is mainly moulded and controlled by discourse, that is, by the way sexuality is talked about. As Smith argues, “for an individual, sexuality is the interpenetration of external social controls with internal experience” (1994: 9). 51

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The portrayal of sexuality as a cultural artefact makes Smith question the Renaissance attitude to homosexual behaviour and whether homosexuality is also “a cultural variable that may be specific to our own time and place” (9) or “a biological or psychological type, a predisposition that exists and has existed in all times” (9). Smith acknowledges that the current distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality is a very specific way of analysing sexuality that emerges by the end of the nineteenth century. In this fashion, personal identity is then dependent upon the sexually desired object. Foucault observes the close relationship between homosexuality and individuation and states that “the nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life” (1990: 43) and that “nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him” (43). But during the Renaissance sex was not considered essential for the description of one’s own identity. As Smith remarks “nothing in Renaissance theology, philosophy or jurisprudence suggests that individuals found their identity in this way. Homosexual behaviour may be a cross-cultural, transhistorical phenomenon; homosexuality is specific to our own culture and to our own moment in history” (1994: 10). During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries no one was classified as “homosexual” since it is a term coined in the late nineteenth century. As Foucault remarks: We must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized – Westphal’s famous article of 1870 on “contrary sexual sensations” can stand as its date of birth ... Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species. (1990: 43)

Therefore, as Alan Bray states in his influential book Homosexuality in Renaissance England (1982) “to talk of an individual in this period as being or not being ‘a homosexual’ is an anachronism and ruinously misleading” (in Smith 1994: 11). The terms used at the time when referring to homosexual behaviour were “buggery” and “sodomy.” As Foucault remarks, sodomy was “a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them” (1990: 43). In his work Sodometries. Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (1992)52, Jonathan 52

See Literatura inglesa hasta el siglo XVII (2002: 311).

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Goldberg, who bases his study on Foucault, Bray, and Sedgwick’s authoritative Between Men. English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), examines the meaning of sodomy in Renaissance England. Sodomy did not only refer to sexual encounters between men and it was not only, and Goldberg remarks that maybe it was not even primarily, a sexual term since it indicated also a series of social and religious infringements. Sodomy made reference to sexual acts that did not promote reproduction resulting from marital sex such as anal intercourse, fellatio, masturbation or bestiality and involved sexual acts of men with men, women with women, men with women and even anyone with animals. But these sexual acts were denounced only when those who had done them were also violating the structures of the social hierarchy by being accused of treason, murder, incest, poisonings, bribery, sorcery, counterfeiting of currency or religious heresy. Therefore, as Goldberg remarks, “sodomy named sexual acts only in particular stigmatizing contexts” (1995: 19). But, as the critic implies, that does not mean that such acts did not take place all the time, “unrecognized as sodomy, called, among other things, friendship or patronage, and facilitated by the beds shared, for instance, by servants or students, by teachers and pupils, by kings and their minions or queens and their ladies” (19). According to Stephen Orgel in Impersonations. The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (1996)53, male sexual encounters were prosecuted if nonconsensual, that is, when it was rape. According to the Lord Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke, anal penetration and ejaculation had to be proven and it was also required a witness. However, as Orgel observes “the laws of Renaissance England as elucidated by Justice Coke said nothing about sex between consenting male partners, about sex between men other than anal sex, about homosexual activity of any kind performed in private: none of these legally constituted sodomy” (58). In order to have a complete view of what homosexuality implied in early modern England, Smith argues that we have to distinguish and examine different perspectives on homosexuality portrayed in various kinds of discourse such as the juridico-political, the moral, the medical and the literary. However, since legal, moral and medical discourses tend to look into the physical facts of sex in order to oppose and define terms such as virtue versus vice, legality versus illegality or health versus sickness, Smith considers that literary discourse is mainly devoted to the emotional side of sexual encounters. Whereas moral, legal and medical discourses are primarily interested in sexual acts, the poetic discourse highlights the 53

See Literatura inglesa hasta el siglo XVII (2002: 312).

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mechanisms of sexual desire. Hence, Smith describes as the main subject of his book the “connections between homosexual desire and patterns of poetic discourse” (1994: 18). Since Smith follows the new historicist notion that power and ideology are implicit in the texts, in language, in literary discourse, he is primarily interested in examining the role Elizabethan fiction had in shaping homosexuality during the period. His main concern evolves around the analysis of imagery, character types, themes or vocabulary used by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers when dealing with homosexual experience. In order to do so, Smith selects a group of six myths, six stories about homosexual desire offered by classical literature and later appropriated by Renaissance writers in order to adapt them to their own sexual concerns. In order to understand Smith’s critical method and its application to Shakespeare’s work we will focus on chapter 4 of Homosexual Desire and the myth that he baptises as “The Shipwrecked Youth.” He starts by alluding to the Greek romance of the third century A.D. by Achilles Tatius Clitophon and Leucippe in which we witness a conversation among Menelaus, Clitiphon and Clinias on a voyage. Whereas Menelaus narrates the death of the beautiful boy he was in love with, Clinias hears the story with sympathy since he is in great pain after the death of his young male lover. Clitophon and his lover, the beautiful maiden Leucippe, are fleeing their parents’ authority in order to enjoy their love. The conversation is briskly interrupted by a shipwreck and the lovers are cast ashore. Smith highlights the popularity of Greek romances during the sixteenth century. He finds their appeal in their portrayal of an imaginary universe where all desires can be fulfilled, and where “homosexual desire found a safe haven” (121). As he states, “voyaging out to sea, Menelaus and Clinias can speak of their love for boys with a license that, for sixteenth-century readers at least, the two men could never assume onshore” (121); Tatius’s romance presents homoerotic desire for an adolescent boy “with undisguised directness” (122). First in his analysis, Smith relates the world created by romance, in which everything is turned upside down and where nothing is forbidden, with the atmosphere of the traditional festivities that celebrated the cycle of seasons in England when “society’s usual rules were relaxed” (126) and were images of homoeroticism were allowed to emerge. Second, he analyses texts influenced by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, such as Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis or Beaumont’s Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, that point at homoerotic elements that involve as a sexual object an adolescent boy. He also examines the influence of the homosexual desire and the youth as sexual object portrayed by Greek romances on Robert Greene’s Menaphon (1589)

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and Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countesse of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1593). But most important to our interests is their influence on Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde: Euphues Golden Legacie (1590) as the source of As You Like It. Smith centres his analysis on the different connotations of disguise regarding gender relations in Lodge’s romance and in Shakespeare’s play. Smith states that when reading Lodge’s text, we never forget that Rosalynd is a woman. However, the critic argues that Shakespeare’s play does not make the differentiation between male and female clear and constantly reinforces the confusing character of sexual identities.54 Furthermore, the adaptation of Lodge’s text, written to be read, into a theatrical script, written to be staged and seen by Elizabethan spectators, necessarily changes the treatment of gender roles: At the Globe the audience would have seen, not a man falling in love with a woman dressed as a boy, but a man falling in love with a boy dressed as a woman dressed as a boy. They would have not just read about the androgynously alluring adolescent; they would have seen him. In the dalliance of “Orlando” and “Rosalind” they would have witnessed in literal fact what Orlando and Rosalind were playing out in fiction: a man and a boy flirting with abandon and getting away with it. (1994: 147)

Smith mentions how Puritans rejected boy-transvestism on stage. Basing his thoughts on a verse in the Deuteronomy 22:5 beloved by antitheatricalists that reads: “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God”, John Rainolds in Th’ Overthrow of Stage-Playes (1599) denounces the fact that crossdressing leads to homosexual acts. Smith alludes to Stephen Orgel’s wellknown article “Nobody is Perfect: Or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?” (1989) in which the critic deduces that Rainolds’s attacks emphasise the audience’s erotic response to theatre and its homosexual appeal. Also, feminist critics, such as Lisa Jardine, as we will see later, have observed the presence of homosexuality in a theatrical environment in which men wrote and acted mainly for men. The transvestite youth was then considered as a way of stimulating homosexual desire. But, on the contrary, Smith also observes how statements by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century playgoers like Thomas Platter, George Sandys, Thomas Coryate or Lady Mary Wroth corroborate that spectators consider boy-transvestism on stage as a mere theatrical convention. Smith acknowledges that before feminist studies on this issue, the testimony of 54

See Selection of Texts 1.

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playgoers were considered as more faithful to the real response of the Elizabethan audience than Rainolds’s conclusions. According to Smith, Shakespeare considers cross-dressing as a sign of liminality. It symbolises the liberation from the rigidities of everyday life and, as the critic states, “a relaxation of the social rules that hold man’s animal passions in check” (1994: 153). The world of Shakespeare’s romantic comedy is then viewed as the world of Greek romance in which everything is possible and nothing is forbidden. In the final pages of this fourth chapter, Smith mentions the main fears of the antitheatricalist Philip Stubbes who, in his Anatomy of Abuses (1585), considers that the real danger of theatre was not what was said or done on stage but the impact it could have on the spectator after the performance: Than, these goodly pageants being done, every mate sorts to his mate, every one bringes another homeward of their way verye freendly, and in their secret conclaves (covertly) they play the Sodomits, or worse. And these be the fruits of Playes and Enterluds for the most part. (in Smith 155)

In Sodometries, Goldberg observes that when Stubbes refers to sodomy in his tract, he is referring, not to male/male sexual relations but to adulterous heterosexual encounters (1995: 120). However, in Impersonations, Orgel alludes to William Prynne’s comment on Stubbes’s reference to sodomy as evidence of the homoerotic character of the stage when in Histriomastix (1633) he states: Yea, witness ... M. Stubbes, his Anatomy of Abuses ... where he affirms that players and play-haunters in their secret conclaves play the sodomites; together with some modern examples of such, who have been desperately enamored with players’ boys thus clad in woman’s apparel, so far as to solicit them by words, by letters, even actually to abuse them ... This I have heard credibly reported of a scholar of Bailliol College, and I doubt not but it may be verified of divers others. (in Orgel 1996: 30)

Smith states that “with Shakespeare’s plays Stubbes and his kind may have good reason for their suspicions. Take, for example, Rosalind’s epilogue” (1994: 155). The actor that impersonates Rosalind takes off his disguise as Ganymede before the epilogue. He then starts the epilogue as Rosalind when he says “It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue” (5.4.198). But he finishes it as a boy actor when he acknowledges that “If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me” (214-16). As Smith remarks, the aim of the epilogue is to give an end to the play, to allow the actor to take off his disguise and to take the spectator back to real life. But, as Smith concludes:

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The effect of Rosalind’s epilogue is quite the opposite: the boy actor may first take off his garb as Ganymede and then his costume as Rosalind and gradually start speaking in his own person, but his pose as androgynous flirt invites us to take with us as we leave the theater some of the liminal freedom we allowed ourselves during the play. That is what the characters in the play itself have done: they have changed by their experiences in the forest of Arden and have become better lovers, brothers, and rulers as a result. And so, Shakespeare implies, can we. (155)

In Sodometries, Goldberg makes reference to the interest shown by new historicism and feminism in questions of race, gender and sexuality in order to state that his work is intended to address certain critical problems raised by such approaches. According to Goldberg, traditional, new historicist and feminist literary criticism of Renaissance texts ground their arguments on heterosexuality as the only form of sexuality and centre their analysis on gender rather than sexuality by mainly pointing at the inequality between sexes. Goldberg takes as examples of this practice works that examine the implications of cross-dressing on the Elizabethan stage by Jean E. Howard, Stephen Orgel, Laura Levin, or Lisa Jardine. In “Cross-dressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England” (1988), Jean E. Howard’s analysis evolves around the relationship between cross-dressing and female liberation. Whereas she does not find such correspondence and considers cross-dressing as a mere stage convention, she finds female attendance to theatrical performances a better way to challenge patriarchy. As You Like It is, however, presented as a play where boy-transvestism shows the constructedness of gender difference and defies the subordination of women to men. According to Goldberg, Howard’s only reflection on the relationship between men and women shows her “tacit assumption that there is only one form of sexuality” (1995: 107), that is heterosexuality. Despite the fact that, as Goldberg points out, Levine’s and Orgel’s studies consider homosexuality as an alternative to heterosexuality, their analyses are always determined by a heterosexual way of analysing sexuality. In “Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization from 1579 to 1642” (1986), Laura Levine considers that the anti-theatrical tracts bear a clear worry about personal identity since stage male cross-dressing could transmit the idea that if a man could turn into a woman any person could be turned into another. Levine’s main emphasis is on how the crisis of male identity on stage could entail the spectator’s homosexual response. Accordingly, as the playgoer experiences a desire for the boy on stage he would then assume a weakened female position. Levine’s discourse links terms such as homosexuality, effeminization or failed masculinity. As

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Goldberg deduces from such a discourse, “this may well be the homophobic and misogynistic logic of attacks on cross-dressing, but Levine validates it as the truth of homosexuality” (1995: 110). Orgel’s thesis in “Nobody’s Perfect: Or, Why Did the English Take Boys for Women?” (1989) sustains that anti-theatrical pamphlets showed an obvious fear of women and of the effeminization of the stage rather than a fear of the boy actors’ sexual attractiveness. Again, to Goldberg, such a view shows “a collapse of sexuality into questions of gender, a reading of all forms of sexuality as heterosexuality” (1995: 109). Goldberg also accuses Levine and Orgel of ignoring the fact that their neat division between heterosexuality and homosexuality in early modern England is erroneous since, as we have already noted, such differentiation does not exist at the time and since both boys and women were considered sexual objects for men. Additionally, Goldberg observes that neither Levine nor Orgel take into account the fact that at the time effeminacy was not considered a sign of homosexual behaviour since it was more frequently related to men who were especially kind to women. Goldberg concludes his analysis of both Levine’s and Orgel’s studies by uncovering the fact that both critics view same-sex relationships as “versions of male/female ones” (111) as a “consequence of the heterosexism that shapes their definitions of homosexuality” (111). Orgel develops this thesis and reinforces Levine’s in Impersonations. He strengthens his heterosexual perspective by asserting that “concepts of sodomy in the anti-theatrical discourse in fact depend on a heterosexual mode” (1996: 34). He argues that Rainolds’s tracts view cross-dressing as sexually exciting for men since the woman’s garment that the boy actor is wearing reminds the male playgoer of the image of a woman and, as Orgel states, behind such homoerotic desire is hidden a heterosexual attraction. Also, Orgel explains, the fear of the effeminization of the stage and of the audience, in his opinion “brilliantly anatomized by Laura Levin” (27), was based on the interconnection made during that time between femininity, bestiality and women’s violent and uncontrollable sexual appetites. As a result, Orgel argues that, since the spectator is attracted to an “undifferentiated sexuality, a sexuality that does not distinguish men from women and reduces men to women” (29), the real fear of the antitheatrical tracts is the fear of “a universal effeminization. In this anxiety, the fact of transvestite boys is really only incidental; it is the whole concept of the mimetic art that is at issue, the art itself that effeminates” (29).55 Orgel argues that the fear of women’s dangerous sexuality was more 55

See Selection of Texts 3.

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intense than the anxiety about homoeroticism since social hierarchy and order depended on the control of female sexuality. In fact, as Orgel points out, at the time, homosexual behaviour was rarely prosecuted while the fear of illegitimate births resulted in a constant surveillance and punishment of extramarital heterosexual encounters. Anti-theatricalists considered the institution of the theatre as a dangerous and anarchic site where the presence of loose women threatened to destabilise social order. This situation answers Orgel’s initial question about the absence of women on the English stage at the time. As he himself concludes: The reason always given for the prohibition of women from the stage was that their chastity would thereby be compromised, which is understood to mean that they would become whores. The problem here is obviously not with theatre but with women, on whom the culture projects a natural tendency towards promiscuity of all kinds, and for which theatre is being seen as a release mechanism. Behind the outrage of public modesty is a real fear of women’s sexuality. (49)

In Impersonations, Orgel answers to Goldberg’s rejection of his thesis that boys on the stage are viewed as women and that, consequently homoeroticism is a version of heterosexuality, by reminding us of the correlation between boys and woman in the Elizabethan culture. In As You Like It, for example, Rosalind tells Orlando that when in love, both boys and women behave in the same way: “boys and women are for the most part cattle of this color” (3.2.402-403).56 Orgel notes that in this play the analogy between woman and boy is sexually explicit. And, when we see the wooing scenes between Ganymede and Orlando the boy is in this case displacing the woman and alluding to obvious homosexual undertones. The name Ganymede would immediately trigger off the classical story of Jupiter and Ganymede in the mind of the Elizabethan spectator. We have to remember that the story of Jupiter and Ganymede was the best-known myth of homoerotic desire at the time. But the presence of the eroticised boy also, as Orgel points out, “destabilize[s] the categories, and question[s] what it means to be a man or a woman” (63). Orgel views Rosalind’s doublet and hose as elements that betray the cultural fear projected by early modern gynaecological and judicial beliefs about female sexuality at the time. Both discourses viewed women as imperfect men and found those moments in which female independence from men’s authority and control was reclaimed challenging and dangerous. On the stage, Orgel finds those moments when the wooing scenes start, when the female sexual essence must be taken into account. 56

See Literatura inglesa hasta el siglo XVII (2002: 376).

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In As You Like It, this crucial moment takes place when Rosalind, after she finds out that Orlando really loves her, realises that she does not need her disguise any more since it now functions as a trap rather than as a protection. Since women’s sexuality was considered as ungovernable and insatiable, Rosalind’s male disguise would work as a controlling mechanism, as Orgel points out, “for Orlando’s benefit, not for Rosalind’s; it would constitute a way around the dangers of the female libido” (63). However, the critic concludes that Rosalind’s disguise can be analysed as a more direct reference to homoeroticism: It is clear from Rosalind’s epilogue, however, that the disguise is not only for Orlando’s benefit, nor need it be so narrowly construed. In a moment unique in Shakespeare, the heroine directly addresses the men in the audience and undoes her gender: “If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me ...” Even after the wooing has been successfully accomplished, the play insists that the wife is really a boy – and this too, of course, may be a way of offering Orlando (or any number of spectators of either sex) what he really wants. (63-64)

In Sodometries, Goldberg also scrutinises Lisa Jardine’s analysis of cross-dressing in Renaissance texts in her work Still Harping on Daughters.57 Goldberg observes how not only does Jardine explain the positions of anti-theatricalists but she also embraces their views. As John Rainolds, Jardine also thinks that the presence of the boy actor provokes erotic excitement in a male audience and that plays are imbued with cases of dubious sexuality. She examines the connotations of homosexuality on the Renaissance stage in order to prove that there is no place for women on the Elizabethan stage. To Jardine, cross-dressed stage performances were not written to appeal to women since the boys’ femininity was only intended to please men. Jardine portrays a male-dominated Elizabethan theatre in which playwrights, actors and playgoers are all masculine. For her, the allure of boy actors relates theatre to a sexuality that is viewed as problematic, ambiguous, distorted and opposed to legitimate sexual relations between real men and women. According to Jardine, the theatrical play on homosexuality is a way that leads to misogyny, to the feminine exclusion. Whereas Goldberg examines the ways in which critics have established a clear equation of homosexuality, effeminization and transvestism on the Elizabethan stage, he also argues that Renaissance homosexuality is not exclusively found in the theatrical transvestite youth. To Goldberg, homoeroticism in Renaissance drama is also present in the context of 57

See Text 4 in section 2.4.1.

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male friendship, widely analysed by Bray in his article “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England” (1990). Goldberg opposes Jardine’s analysis of Marlowe’s Edward II, in which she finds obvious references to the relationship between cross-dressing and homosexuality, by asserting that the real site of homosexuality in the play is the friendship between Edward and Gaveston. Goldberg concludes that “a rereading of Elizabethan drama through what Marlowe makes available might be undertaken, and even Shakespeare would be implicated” (1995: 141). He refers to Joseph Porter’s analysis of the friendship between Mercutio and Romeo as counterpoint to the relationship between Romeo and Juliet in Shakespeare’s Mercutio (1988) and views it as an example of how male friendship in Shakespeare, like the relationship between Antonio and Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice, Sebastian and Antonio in Twelfth Night or Achilles and Patroclus in Troilus and Cressida among others, must be rethought.58 In Homosexual Desire, Smith already devotes the analysis of his first myth, called “Combatants and Comrades” and based on Plutarch’s narration of the story of the friendship between Theseus and Pirithous, to male bonding. As Smith asserts, this myth about “how a pair of archenemies became fast friends” (1994: 33) shows “the tendency of human males to be aggressive toward other males and, at the same time, to form strong bonds with them” (33). By examining early modern legal and moral discourses, Smith discloses that there was a close link between male friendship and sexual desire since male bonding was usually compared to sexual relations between men and woman. Smith examines male bonding in plays such as Coriolanus, Henry V, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, Twelfth Night or The Merchant of Venice bearing in mind the erotic dimension of male friendship. Also, Orgel, in Impersonations, alludes to the ambiguity of male relations at the time and, by referring to Bray’s view, he asserts that the rhetoric of male friendship was the same rhetoric used when referring to sexual love. Accordingly, the dividing line between the homosocial and the sodomitical was a very thin one. Male affection was not hidden but made public at the time, however, as Orgel concludes “how far beyond beneficence and gratitude that love went is imponderable, and there is nothing in the language of love that will reveal it to us – it is a language that implies everything and nothing” (1996: 42).

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SELECTION OF TEXTS In Text 1, Smith establishes a comparison between As You Like It and its source Rosalynde by Thomas Lodge. Smith observes the complexity of gender relations in As You Like It as compared to the ones extant in Lodge’s text. Smith also points out how Shakespeare develops the theme of homoeroticism in the wooing scenes between Rosalind/Ganymede and Orlando. A fact that is absent in Lodge. Compare this text to Text 4 of section 2.4.1. In Text 2, Goldberg argues for the centrality of male friendship in the analysis of homoeroticism on the Elizabethan stage. Pay attention to the engaging reflection on the plurality of gender situations resulting from Rosalind’s use of her disguise. In Text 3, Orgel refers to the fear of men’s effeminization in Shakespeare’s time and also to the sexual and threatening character of the theatre, closely related to transvestism on stage.

1. Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England. A Cultural Poetics (1991) ROSALIND. Marry, that should you, if I were your mistress, or I should think my honesty ranker than my wit. ORLANDO. What, of my suit? ROSALIND. Not out of your apparel, and yet out of your suit. (4.1.81-83)

Clothed or naked, Orlando is invited to woo Rosalind, while she puts herself “in a more coming-on disposition.” ”Ask me what you will”, she invites, “I will grant it.” After all this seductive game-playing there is, almost certainly, a sudden shift to seriousness in Orlando’s simple reply: “Then love me, Rosalind.” But the woman playing a man remains cavalier to the end: “Yes, faith, will I, Fridays and Saturdays and all.” Undaunted, Orlando keeps up the romance: “And wilt thou have me?” Rosalind would put the emphasis on “have”: “Ay, and twenty such” (4.1.105-111, emphasis added). In keeping with her aggressive role in the game of seduction, it is Rosalind, not Celia, who proposes the mock-marriage in As You Like It. In two respects, then, Shakespeare goes far beyond Lodge in making sport with gender roles. First, he lets the woman play the role of sexual aggressor. But the confusion of sexual identities runs deeper than that. Orlando, unless he breaches all the rules of romantic comedy and sees through Rosalind’s disguise, plays along with the game far more eagerly than his counterpart in Lodge and trades come-hither dares with someone he thinks is a boy. (1994: 146)

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2. Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries. Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (1992) The representation of friendship in Shakespeare (Hamlet and Horatio, Macbeth and Banquo, Brutus and Cassius, and the list goes on) needs to be rethought, from the ground up ... Against arguments that take such cross-dressed figures as Julia, Portia, Viola or Rosalind as the privileged locus of homosexuality, one might read, as constituted otherwise, the relations between friends ... But one might also see that Rosalind/Ganymede, unlike Portia/Balthasar (all cross-dressing is not the same, even in Shakespeare),59 sustains a differentiated identity that produces the boy as a sex that is neither male nor female and thus as a site for male/male (those two beardless boys, Orlando and Ganymede), female/female (those two dark ladies, Phebe and Rosalind), and male/female desires that are not collapsed one into the other; when the epilogue refuses to settle the question of gender of its speaker, it can only suggest, as Valerie Traub argues, that the marriages in the plays are a great deal more iffy than is usually supposed. (1995: 142-43)

3. Stephen Orgel, Impersonations. The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (1996) The fear of effeminization is a central element in all discussions of what constitutes a “real man” in the period, and the fantasy of a reversal of the natural transition from woman to man underlies it. It also, in a much more clearly pathological way, underlies the standard arguments against the stage in antitheatrical tracts from the time of the Church Fathers on. In this context, the very institution of theatre is a threat to manhood and the stability of the social hierarchy, as unescorted women and men without their wives socialized freely, and (it follows) flirt with each other and take each other off to bed: the association of theatre with sex is absolutely pervasive in these polemics. But in England, the sexuality feared is more subversive than even this suggests, precisely because of the transvestism of the stage. It is argued first that the boys who perform the roles of women will be transformed into their roles and play the part in reality ... But the argument against transvestite actors warns of an even more frightening metamorphosis than the transformation of the boy into a monster of both kinds. Male spectators, it is argued, will be seduced by the impersonation, and losing their reason will become effeminate, which in this case means not only that they will lust after the woman in the drama, which is bad enough, but also after the youth beneath the woman’s costume, thereby playing the woman’s role themselves. (26-27) 59 Portia is one of the characters in the Merchant of Venice. She also dresses as a man, as Balthasar.

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SECTION 2.5

2.5. POSTCOLONIALISM Before analysing postcolonial critical works on Shakespeare, this introductory section briefly deals with the ideas of three of the main leading figures of Postcolonial Studies that have greatly shaped and influenced the ideas of those postcolonial critics devoted to Shakespeare’s works. Introduction By legitimating invasion and exploitation of inhabited lands, colonialism works through a set of social, economic, political, cultural or religious mechanisms of control. These mechanisms work over colonised citizens considered as inferior and different from ruling colonisers who regard inequality as the basis of the social structure of the colony. Postcolonialism works as a response to colonialism and also to any form of human exploitation and domination. It has been an important field of study since the 1970s, especially since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978. Postcolonial Studies, which were consolidated by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989), constitute a powerful intellectual and critical movement, which centres on the relationship between European colonisers and the colonised societies in the modern age. They are usually known to oppose imperialism and Eurocentrism and they refer both to the periods before and after the independence of the colonies. Accordingly, postcolonial critics are interested in issues such as the history of the colonised territory before invasion; the situation of countries while they are still under European control; the mechanisms of control used by the colonisers; the process of anti-colonial nationalism; the social, economic or political conditions of a land no longer colonised but profoundly transformed by the coloniser after years of subjugation; the role of gender, race and class in colonial and postcolonial discourse; the colonised land’s impact on the coloniser; and also what they call “neo-colonialism”, that is, new forms of subjugation exerted by capitalism and globalisation. One of the most authoritative works on anti-colonialism is Frantz Fanon’s Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (1952) translated into English as Black

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Skin, White Masks in 1967. Fanon was born to a middle-class family in the French colony of Martinique in 1925 but spent part of his life in France since he studied medicine and psychiatry in Lyon. Being himself a victim of French racism, he applies his knowledge on psychoanalysis to study the effects of colonialism on the colonised subject’s identity. He attacks the idea that the colonised is biologically different from the invader and states that colonialism erases black identities and constructs racial differences by subjecting black men to the white coloniser. He also points out the subjugating effects of adopting the language of the coloniser. According to Fanon, the use of the French language implies the acceptance of Western values that associate blackness with evil, with bestiality: The Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter – that is, he will come closer to being a real human being – in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language ... Every colonized people – in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality – finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle. (1967: 18)

Black men try to be dissociated from the image of evil by losing their own identities, their own blackness, that is, by wearing white masks and by internalising cultural values that reject their “local cultural originality.” They repudiate their own corporality and become alienated from themselves. Fanon’s work greatly influenced two of the most important postcolonial theorists, Edward Said and Homi Bhabha. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) examines Western derogatory depictions of the “Orient”, which geographically would include most of Asia and the Middle East. According to Said’s study, European representations have presented the Orient, its people and culture as the Other in negative terms by creating binary oppositions that link the West with authority, power and superiority and the Orient with the Other, with difference, inferiority and alienation. Said denounces the fact that this image of the colonised is culturally constructed by the coloniser who needs such opposition in order to maintain his own supremacy. Said challenges Orientalist thinking and discards racial and religious prejudices and differences grounded on biological reasons or cultural objectification. Though objectively acknowledging the obvious cultural differences between the Orient and the West, Said attempts to efface the Western conception of the Orient as different because inferior.

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In his article “Of Mimicry and Men: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” (1984), Homi K. Bhabha develops the consequences of a term widely used by postcolonial critics, “hybridisation.” According to Bakhtin in the “Discourse in the Novel” in The Dialogic Imagination (1981), hybridisation is “a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor” (358). Bhabha studies the constant cultural exchange that takes place between coloniser and colonised during the process of colonisation. He mainly centres on the implications of the linguistic exchange and the way the colonised imitates or mimics the coloniser’s discourse. According to Bhabha, despite the fact that the use of the coloniser’s language is not a conscious subversive act on the part of the colonised but an inevitable outcome of colonialism, hybridisation has disrupting effects on the colonial discourse. Bhabha observes how the hybrid subject, that is, the colonised subject that speaks the language of the coloniser, is initially used in the benefit of the colonial power. This subject is viewed as an instrument of control and dominance by acting as an interpreter, or as a mimic-man, and as a representation of power, as an intermediary between the rulers and the repressed population. However, the mere existence of the Other as sharing the colonial text implies a destabilisation of the colonial essence, purity and authority. Instead of functioning as a representation and reinforcement of colonial power, mimicry turns into a disturbing and threatening element to the coloniser. By means of language, the Other is contaminated by the dominant culture and enters into the mainstream discourse. The Other’s use of the language of authority introduces ambivalence and uncertainty into the colonial text that loses authenticity and uniqueness. Postcolonialism and Shakespeare In the introductory pages of Post-Colonial Shakespeares (1998), Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin make a clear distinction between a “colonial” and a “post-colonial Shakespeare.” They affirm that during the last two centuries Shakespeare’s work was analysed from a very conservative, colonial perspective. His plays were thought to proclaim the superiority of the coloniser and they were used to strengthen, and never question, cultural and racial hierarchies. As they both state, Shakespeare “became, during the colonial period, the quintessence of Englishness and a measure of humanity itself. Thus the meanings of Shakespeare’s plays were both derived from and used to establish colonial authority” (1). However, the breaking up of the all-powerful European empire after the Second World

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War led to great interest in post-colonial literature and criticism. Postcolonial studies began to challenge the colonial repressive mechanisms and ideologies and to give voice to the subordinated colonised subject, traditionally silenced. As in the case of new historicism, post-colonial literary studies view texts as essential to the creation of history and culture; that is, they consider the cultural discourse as fundamental for the construction of the ideological framework. Also, history is considered as an “essential part of textual meaning” (3), not just a mere backdrop for Shakespeare’s plays.60 For post-colonial analyses, language constitutes a central element in the study of the native’s identity and is also considered as the ruler’s weapon for domination. All these ideas had a great impact on Shakespearean criticism. From considering Shakespeare as an icon of colonial authoritarian values, as the symbol of white European supremacy, the critical emphasis shifted to the analysis of the way Shakespeare’s plays had been shaped by early modern England colonial and racial discourses and also of the way Shakespeare’s production had become central to colonial studies. Also, many Shakespearean post-colonial studies argued that Shakespearean reinterpretations implied a reinterpretation of our own world. Post-colonial studies establish the difference between the meanings of terms such as race, colonialism and cultural difference during the early modern period and our own. They also try to ascertain the extent to which our own views are shaped by the ones held by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Additionally, and most important, they attempt to decipher to what extent Shakespeare’s texts work as cultural discourses that shape ideas about race and cultural difference. Hybridity is examined in the introductory pages of Post-Colonial Shakespeares and also in another very influential book by Ania Loomba called Colonialism / Postcolonialism (1998) where she clearly establishes the relationship between postcolonial studies and literature. Loomba states that scholars do not come to an agreement over the effect of the colonial regimes on the natives. Some argue that the colonised people were unable to exert any power or influence while being under Western control. Others highlight the fact that even the most tyrannised people were always able to find a way to give voice to their claims. But Loomba remarks that, being that the case, the fundamental question was whether they used their own language or they borrowed the coloniser’s. According to Loomba, colonisers used Shakespearean critical analysis in order to impose their rules since they turned Shakespeare’s plays into symbols of English 60

See chapter 2.3 on new historicism.

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authority and European supremacy. However, the colonised subject was not always a mimic-man that accepted the language of the master and his values. Mimicry could also work as a challenge to authority. Consequently, the colonised could appropriate Shakespeare as a subversive element against colonial power. Their use of Shakespeare turned the native into a hybrid subject and colonial language into an ambivalent discourse. Loomba remarks how “many postcolonial critics regard hybridity of colonial and postcolonial subjects as a potentially radical state, one that enables such subjects to elude, or even subvert the binaries, oppositions and rigid demarcations imposed by colonial discourses” (7). However, other scholars consider hybridity as “the alienation of subordinated people from their own cultures” (8). In Colonialism / Postcolonialism, Loomba argues that there is a contradiction within the colonising process. The critic asserts that the coloniser’s aim is to maintain racial and cultural differences between the ruler and the ruled. However, converting the natives implies a process of education and transformation of the Other that entails his or her immersion within the colonial discourse. The immediate consequence of this process is that, as Loomba states, “the gap between cultures and people can be bridged” (90).61 Loomba gives a clear example of how the colonised uses this contradiction in order to subvert the colonial order: Lala Hardayal, a founder of the anti-colonial Ghadder Association, used Shylock’s speech in The Merchant of Venice, which begins ‘I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes?’ (III, I, 51-57) to argue that Shakespeare stood for human equality and that we should remember Shylock if we are ever tempted to scorn or wrong a brother man of another race or creed. Now, at one level, such an invocation of Shakespeare might be seen to prop up the authority of the Bard. But at another level, it certainly challenges rather than accepts colonialist views of racial difference. Thus Hardayal mimics the English uses of Shakespeare in order to contest the legitimacy of English rule in India. (90)

Althusser’s description of education systems as “important means for the dissemination of dominant ideologies” (88) is a central point in Loomba’s Colonialism / Postcolonialism.62 For example, Loomba points at different ways Othello has been analysed in schools and colleges all around the world. Othello was first considered, not as a black man, but as “some shade of brown, not really ‘Negroid’, or was ‘ white’ inside” (84). This kind of critical view refused to admit that Shakespeare’s hero was not white. Masculine jealousy drawn forth by women’s transgression was then 61 62

See Selection of Texts. See chapter 2.3 on new historicism.

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considered the main theme of the play. But when Othello was viewed as a black character, jealousy was treated as an effect of an irrational and inferior race. Iago’s revenge was then justified since he represented whiteness fighting against blackness. Loomba reminds us that racist readings of Othello were taught in classrooms all around the world in order to strengthen racist ideologies and Englishness in places such as Britain, South Africa and India: Literary studies were to play a key role in attempting to impart Western values to the natives, constructing European culture as superior and as a measure of human values, and thereby in maintaining colonial rule ... English literary studies became a mask for economic and material exploitation, and were an effective form of political control ... Far from being antithetical to the political sphere, then, literature and culture are central to it. (85-86)

But within the educational systems, Shakespeare was also used by the colonised in order to challenge authority and so as to assert his or her own identity as a free individual. Loomba remarks, for example, how Hindu College was “the hotbed of Indian nationalism” (90). Many nationalists used English literature and especially Shakespeare so as to demand independence and freedom for native peoples. They used the language of the masters in order to fight them. As Loomba reminds us, Caliban appropriated Prospero’s language for the same purposes: “You gave me language, and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse. The red-plague rid you/ For learning me your language!” (1.2.363-65).63 Loomba cites as a literary example of hybridity the Cuban writer Roberto Fernández Retamar’s view of Caliban as a symbol of what he calls “our mestizo America.” He alludes to the fact that the racially mixed population of America still uses “the language of our colonizers” and “so many of their conceptual tools ... are also now our conceptual tools” (in Loomba and Orkin 1998: 8). Loomba and Orkin call attention to another important effect of the colonising process: the coloniser’s fear of cultural integration. Not only does the colonised turn into a hybrid subject by coming into contact with the ruler’s culture, the coloniser can also turn hybrid by interrelating with the Other. As Loomba remarks, “neither the colonisers nor the colonised are homogeneous categories” (1998: 87). Leading Shakespearean critics have also pointed to this issue while analysing some of his plays. English colonial enterprises were germinating when Shakespeare was writing his plays. Some post-colonial critical works related their analyses of certain colonial mechanisms functioning in some plays with the same colonial 63

See Literatura inglesa hasta el siglo XVII (2002: 443-446).

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processes at work in the actual colonies at the time. For instance, Emily C. Bartels in “Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello and Renaissance Fashionings of Race” (1990) and Virginia Mason Vaughan in “The Construction of Barbarism in Titus Andronicus” (1997) analyse Rome in Titus Andronicus as an empire whose social and political identity is transformed by the influence of the colonised and conquered people, the Goths. These critics observe in this play a clear contemporary allusion to the fear that the purity of the English identity, identified in the play with the Roman identity, could be threatened by the colonisers’ relationship with the colonised peoples. They ground their analysis on travel accounts such as Andrew Thevet’s New Found World (1568), Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589), Theodore de Bry’s “Grand Voyages” (trsl. 1590), Thomas Harriot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590), John Leo Africanus’s A Geographical Historie of Africa (trsl.1600) and on Montaigne’s essay “On the Caniballes.” Bartels and Vaughan note that the depiction of the native lands and peoples in these accounts is ambiguous. Inserting these narrations within what Bartels calls “England cross-cultural discourse” (1990: 433), the critic observes how the native is viewed as “characterized alternately and sometimes simultaneously in contradictory extremes, as noble or monstrous, civil or savage” (434). In the same way, Vaughan observes this ambiguity by pointing out that the exoticism of the natives was at the same time “a source of wonder and anxiety” (1997: 10) for the coloniser. Stephen Greenblatt, in his essay “To Fashion a Gentleman: Spenser and the Destruction of the Bower of Bliss” in Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), examines the relationship between the native and the ruler in his analysis of Spenser’s “The Bower of Bliss” in The Fairie Queene.64 To Greenblatt, the colonisers felt attracted to the natives’ culture and such fascination was considered a threat to the essence and purity of the colonisers’ identity. According to Bartels, the fact that the English coloniser found certain traits of the Other appealing “undermines England’s claim to natural dominance and superiority” (1990: 435). Consequently, in order to keep European supremacy untainted they had to destroy those elements they found alluring since “to succumb to that beauty is to lose the shape of manhood and be transformed into a beast” (Greenblatt 1984: 175). Travel accounts also revealed that, whereas on many occasions the natives’ behaviour was civilised, the ruler’s manners were savage and barbarian. Vaughan argues that the coloniser’s main concern was “the apprehension that instead of finding difference, the colonizer would find 64

See Literatura inglesa hasta el siglo XVII (2002: 236-37).

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similarity, that instead of civilizing the natives, he himself would go native” (1997: 177). As Vaughan remarks: As several travel accounts demonstrated, even labels like ‘cannibal’ could be applied to the colonizer as well as the colonized; Hakluyt includes among his narratives, for example, the report of Master Hore after a journey to Newfoundland. Under the pressure of starvation, one of his men ‘killed his mate while hee stouped to take up a roote for his reliefe, and cutting out pieces of his body whome he had murthered, broyled the same on the coles and greedily deuoured them.’ (177)

In Colonialism / Postcolonialism, Loomba notes Edward Said’s belief in Orientalism that the construction of a binary opposition between the European self and a non-European Other was essential for the triumph of colonial supremacy. Loomba observes how language, literature and other types of representations are all involved in such a construction. For example, she describes a picture engraved in the late sixteenth century by Stradanus that presents Vespucci discovering America. This image reinforces the relationship between women and colonial discourse since America is portrayed as a naked woman as we can see in the image below.

Amerigo Vespucci discovering America by Jan van der Straet (Stradanus) c. 1600.

Loomba mentions how the image of the new land as a woman also appears in other types of representations of the age such as in the first of the great sixteenth-century atlases, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570),

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published in English in 1606 as The Theatre of the Whole World, or in Sir Walter Raleigh’s writings. The act of colonising, invading and sacking a land was compared to the act of assaulting a naked woman. Colonisers were then symbolically identified with rapists, with savages, with the traits to which indigenous people were related. But this image was inverted by the colonisers that, feeling the threat of a native uprising, depicted the colonised as a rapist of white, European women, symbols this time of European culture. Again The Tempest works in the construction of colonial discourse by showing us an example of the native as rapist, as an invader of European dominance. Caliban is accused of thinking of raping Miranda by Prospero.65 As Loomba remarks, the stereotype of the black rapist is a way of strengthening the binary opposition between civilisation and wildness by deviating the violence of the colonial encounter from the European to the non-European Other. We have seen how Shakespeare’s plays reflect dominant colonial discourses in order to reinforce them or to question them. But as Loomba and Orkin remark, the Shakespearean universe has also been used in order to provide “a vocabulary for theorizing the colonial encounter and psyches” (1998: 10). They give us three significant examples that we should bear in mind since they refer to three important authors working on colonial issues. As we have stated above, Roberto Fernández Retamar used Caliban as a symbol for Latin American hybridity. Second, the South African Wulf Sachs used Freud’s concept of Hamletism to refer to indecision when an action has to be carried out in order to point out that black and white psyches are not different. Loomba and Orkin also refer to Octavio Mannoni’s use of the relationship between Prospero and Caliban in his analysis of anti-colonial uprisings in Madagascar in his work Prospero and Caliban. The Psychology of Colonization, originally published in French in 1950 under the title Psychologie de la Colonisation. Mannoni offers a psychological explanation for a revolt in Madagascar in 1948 where the natives rose against the French colonisers. He applies his own psychological analysis of the relationship between Crusoe and Friday in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Prospero and Caliban in The Tempest to the relationship between colonised and coloniser in Madagascar. The theme of rape and the deflection of violence from the European to the non-European are also referred to by Mannoni. He observes what he calls a “dependency complex” in the natives. When they are abandoned or ignored by their masters they suffer a sense of betrayal that leads them to guilt and this guilt to violence. He spots this “dependency complex” in Caliban in the following lines which, for Mannoni, represent complaints, not of being exploited but of being betrayed: 65

See Literatura inglesa hasta el siglo XVII (2002: 444).

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Caliban ... When thou camest first, Thou strok’ dst me, and mad’st much of me; wouldst give me Water with berries in’ t; and teach me how To name the bigger light, and how the less, That burn by day and night: and then I lov’d thee. (1.2.332-36)

But now, Caliban goes on saying, “you sty me / In this hard rock, whiles yo do keep from me / The rest o’ the island” (1.2.342-44). Mannoni observes how Prospero tries to justify this situation by mentioning Caliban’s attempt to rape Miranda. However, he argues that “there is no logic in this argument” since “it is primarily a justification of hatred on grounds of sexual guilt, and it is at the root of colonial racialism” (2001: 106). That is, Mannoni considers that Prospero’s justification reflects how the coloniser’s evil intentions, his own raping instincts and incestuous desires, are projected on to the colonised, the inferior being that, as Mannoni remarks, serves as a scapegoat. Basing his conclusions on conversations with European colonials, he concludes that: “it is easy to see why it is always his daughter or his sister or his neighbour’s wife (never his own) whom a man imagines to have been violated by a negro; he wants to rid himself of guilt by putting the blame for his bad thoughts on someone else” (106). In order to emphasise the implications of literature in the colonial discourses and also the coloniser’s effort to establish a clear difference between civilisation and wildness, Loomba mentions Peter Hulme’s analysis of The Tempest in Colonial Encounters (1986). Hulme shows how major European languages appropriated two Native American terms, “hurricane” and “cannibal”, in order to reinforce the colonial discourse. Both terms were used to draw a clear line between the civilised and the savage. “Hurricane” and “cannibal” were used as terms that referred to the uncivilised and barbarous Other. “Cannibalism” was also connected to the Latin word “canis”, which means “dog”, in order to reinforce the brutality of the natives. Hulme points out that The Tempest participated in the construction of this colonial discourse. Its tempests function as the dangerous hurricanes and Caliban’s name refers to the cannibals that were depicted as a current threat for the European colonisers, a threat that is again recalled by the fact that in Act 4 the conspirators are hunted by dogs, called Tyrant and Fury. But Loomba reminds us that, though literary texts, such as The Tempest, participate in the construction of colonial discourses by reflecting the bestiality of the non-Europeans and can be used to work as mirrors of dominant ideologies, they can also function as challenges to authority. The crucial point that Loomba makes is that, historically, Shakespeare’s plays have been reinterpreted and appropriated in

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accordance with the interests of the readers and spectators and not taking into account the author’s intentions: Does Othello serve as a warning against inter-racial love, or an indictment of the society which does not allow it? Does The Tempest endorse Prospero’s view of Caliban as a bestial savage, or does it depict the dehumanisation of colonial rule? It is difficult to establish Shakespeare’s intentions, but we can certainly see how these plays have been read differently by people over time and in different places. The Tempest, for example, has been staged, interpreted and appropriated as a romance that has nothing to do with colonialism, as an imperial fable depicting the victory of the white man’s knowledge over both nature and the savage, and as an anti-colonial text that depicts the struggle of the enslaved Caliban. (1998: 74)

One of the most influential essays on Shakespeare and colonial discourses that shows how the interpretation of a literary text serves the purposes of the interpreter is the one by Francis Barker and Peter Hulme called “’Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish’: The Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest” in Alternative Shakespeares (1985). Barker and Hulme’s main aim is to explore the ways in which The Tempest is “imbricated within the discourse of colonialism” (204). In order to do so, they analyse certain elements of the play that have been traditionally silenced by critical works interested in strengthening colonialist ideology. Barker and Hulme take usurpation as the central figure of the play. The themes of legitimacy, usurpation, domination and resistance are alluded to in the play when dealing with issues such as Antonio’s revolution against his brother Prospero; Caliban’s attempted rape of Miranda; Antonio and Sebastian’s conspiracy against Alonso; and Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo’s uprising against Prospero. Traditional criticism has recognised these moments of usurpation but has silenced the most relevant one: Prospero’s usurpation of the island. Barker and Hulme observe how Prospero’s initial account of the events prior to the action of the play is in clear opposition to Ariel and Caliban’s accounts. However, these have been silenced by traditional criticism that, in turn, highlight Prospero’s version. Whereas Prospero’s description of his encounter with the island is summed up in his words “Here in the island we arriv’d” (1.2.171), Ariel and Caliban’s versions emphasise Prospero’s desires for power over the island and its inhabitants and their own situation of enslavement. Barker and Hulme draw a line between what they call The Tempest and Prospero’s play. The latter represents the traditional and colonial interpretations that occlude the play’s different colonised voices in order to give authority just to Prospero’s, to the coloniser’s interests. After Caliban’s claim that “this island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou tak’st from me” (1.2.333-34),

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Prospero’s justifications for the illegitimate power he exercises over the island is based, as we have already mentioned, on Caliban’s attempt to rape Miranda. He ignores his own role as usurper. But at the same time, he acknowledges the fact that he needs Caliban’s servitude in order to survive on the island: “We cannot miss him; he does make our fire, / Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices / That profit us” (1.2.313-15). Barker and Hulme consider Prospero’s attitude as “performative of the discourse of colonialism, since this particular reticulation of denial of dispossession with retrospective justification for it, is the characteristic trope by which European colonial regimes articulated their authority over land to which they could have no conceivable legitimate claim”(200).

SELECTION OF TEXTS Notice how both texts refer to Bhabha’s theories of hybridisation. They allude to the fact that the native’s assimilation of the colonial culture, in which Shakespeare would be included and which is intended to set European supremacy, can result in the subversion of colonial authority and in the blurring of colonial boundaries between what is considered as civilised and what is viewed as the Other, as the uncultured, even as the savage. Observe the interesting reflection presented in the second text about Shakespearean appropriations. Shakespeare is not just viewed as a means to highlight English supremacy in the colonies. It is also adapted and interpreted in multifarious ways all around the world in order to counter such imposed authority.

1. Ania Loomba, Colonialism / Postcolonialism (1998) But is mimicry an act of straightforward homage? In a series of essays, Homi Bhabha suggests that it is possible to think of it as a way of eluding control (1994: 125-133). He draws upon recent theories of language, enunciation and subjectivity which point out that communication is a process that is never perfectly achieved and that there is always a slippage, a gap, between what is said and what is heard. As we have been discussing, in the colonial context ‘the English book’ (the Western text, whether religious like the Bible, or literary like Shakespeare) is made to symbolise English authority itself. But this process whereby a text or a book stands in for an entire culture is a complex, and ultimate fraught exercise. The process of replication is never complete or perfect, and what it produces is

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not simply a perfect image of the original but something changed because of the context in which it is being reproduced. Bhabha suggests that colonial authority is rendered ‘hybrid’ and ‘ambivalent’ by this process of replication. Thus opening up spaces for the colonised to subvert the master-discourse ... The process by which Christianity is made available to heathens, or indeed Shakespeare made available to the uncultured, is designed to assert the authority of these books, and through these books the authority of European (or English) culture and to make the latter feel like clowns in the boudoir. Thus the intention is to assert an unbridgeable gap or difference between colonisers and colonised peoples. But the effort to convert the natives also assumes that the latter can be transformed by the religious or cultural truths enshrined in the colonial text. Here the assumption is that the gap between cultures and people can be bridged. (89-90)

2. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (eds.), Post-Colonial Shakespeares (1998) Colonial masters imposed their value system through Shakespeare, and in response colonized peoples often answered back in Shakespearean accents. The study of Shakespeare made them ‘hybrid’ subjects, to use a term that has become central to post-colonial criticism and which is increasingly used to characterize the range of psychological as well as physiological mixings generated by colonial encounters. Many post-colonial critics regard the hybridity of colonial and post-colonial subjects as a potentially radical state, one that enables such subjects to elude, or even subvert the binaries, oppositions and rigid demarcations imposed by colonial discourses. As Michael Neill’s essay in this volume argues, Anglophone cultures the world over have been ‘saturated with Shakespeare.’ Indeed, Shakespeare has also penetrated much of the non-English-speaking world – he is today the most performed playwright in the world, a fact that is often taken as testimony of Shakespeare’s ‘universal genius.’ Instead, we might suggest that such a phenomenon reveals not just the spread of imperial networks in education and culture but also the fact that there is no single ‘shakespeare’ that is simply reproduced globally. Rather, as Dennis Kennedy puts it, ‘almost from the start of his importance as the idealized English dramatist there have been other Shakespeares, Shakespeares not dependent upon English and often at odds with it’ (Kennedy 1993: 2). Thus Shakespeare’s work not only engenders ‘hybrid’ subjects, but is itself hybridized by the various performances, mutilations and appropriations of his work. (7-8)

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RECOMMENDED BIBLIOGRAPHY BARKER, Francis and Peter HULME 1996 (1985): “’Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish’: The Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest.” Alternative Shakespeares. Ed. John Drakakis. London and New York: Routledge. 191-205. BELSEY, Catherine 1996 (1985): “Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies.” Alternative Shakespeares. Ed. John Drakakis. London and New York: Routledge. 166-90. DOLLIMORE, Jonathan 1989 (1984): Radical Tragedy. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. DOLLIMORE, Jonathan and Alan SINFIELD, eds. 1996 (1985): Political Shakespeare. Essays in Cultural Materialism. Manchester: Manchester UP. DUSINBERRE, Juliet 1996 (1975): Shakespeare and the Nature of Women. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and London: MacMillan Press. EAGLETON, Terry 1996 (1983): Literary Theory. An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. FOUCAULT, Michel 1990 (1976): The History of Sexuality. Volume 1. An Introduction. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. FREUD, Sigmund 1965 (1900): The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Avon Books. GOLDBERG Jonathan 1995 (1992): Sodometries. Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities. Stanford: Stanford UP. GREENBLATT, Stephen 1997 (1988): Shakespearean Negotiations. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —— 1984 (1980): Renaissance Self-Fashioning. From More to Shakespeare. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. HOLLAND, Norman N. 1966 (1964): Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare. New York, Toronto and London: McGraw-Hill Book Company. JARDINE, Lisa 1983: Still Harping on Daughters. Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. JONES, Ernest 1955 (1949): Hamlet and Oedipus. A Classic Study in the Psychoanalysis of Literature. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc. LEITCH, Vincent B., ed. 2001: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company. LENZ, Carolyn, Ruth SWIFT, Gayle GREENE and Carol THOMAS NEELY, eds. 1983 (1980): The Woman’s Part. Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. LOOMBA, Ania and Martin ORKIN, eds. 1998: Post-Colonial Shakespeares. London and New York: Routledge. McDONALD, Russ, ed. 2003: Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1945-2000. University of North Carolina: Blackwell. ORGEL, Stephen 1996: Impersonations. The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

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SELDEN, Raman and Peter WIDDOWSON, eds. 1993: A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. SMITH, Bruce R. 1994 (1991): Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. WAYNE, Valerie, ed. 1991: The Matter of Difference. Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. WOODBRIDGE, Linda 1984: Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620. Brighton: The Harvester Press.

RECOMMENDED WEBSITES 1. Glossary of Literary Theory: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/glossary/Poststructuralism.html 2. Shakespeare online. 20TH-century Theory. Significant Movements (Early to Mid 20th Century): http://www.shakespeare-online.com/links/msub-e20th.html 3. Contemporary Literary Theory. John Lye: http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/2P70/contemporary_ literary_theory.htm 4. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Structuralism: http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/structura lism.html 5. Structuralism and Semiotics. John Williams Philips: http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/structuralism.htm 6. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Deconstruction: http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/ deconstruction.html 7. Deconstruction, New Historicism and Hamlet: http://academic.regis.Edu/jkarpins/Handouts%20for%20EN %20466/deconstruction.htm 8. Post-structuralism: http://www.philosopher.org.uk/poststr.htm 9. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. New Historicism: http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/ new_historicism.html 10. Cultural Materialism and New Historicism: http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/SESLL/EngLit/ugrad/hons/theory/ CultMaterialism.htm

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11. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Cultural Studies: http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/ cultural_studies-_2.html 12. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Feminist theory and criticism: http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/ feminist_theory_and_criticism.html 13. Shakespeare and Freudian Theory: Hamlet and Titus Andronicus http://www.literatureclassics.com/essays/216/ 14. Bibliography of Gay and Lesbian History. English Early Modern History: http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/bibeng1.htm 15. Political Discourses - Theories of Colonialism and Postcolonialism: http://www.postcolonialweb.org/poldiscourse/discourseov.html 16. The Postcolonial Tempest: Response to Peter Hulme’s ‘Stormy Weather’: Ania Loomba http://eserver.org/emc/1-3/loomba.html

KEY TERMS These are the main concepts and authors analysed in this Unit. Ask yourself whether you are able to give a brief and concise account of what these concepts refer to and of the main ideas presented by each critic. Structuralism Ferdinand de Saussure Language : stable and enclosed structure of meaning Structural Anthropology Claude-Lévi Strauss Poetics Binary Oppositions Quasi-structuralists: L. C. Knights Shakespearean Structuralism: Roman Jakobson Post-Structuralism Derrida and “Différance” Deconstruction New definition of language: locus without a centre, without a fixed meaning

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New Historicism and Cultural Materialism Opposition to Tillyard’s views Stephen Greenblatt Clifford Geertz: Thick Description Michel Foucault: Power, resistance, discourse Relationship between power, subversion and containment Interrelation between subject and discourse Althusser: Ideology New definition of subject: product of social forces Mikhail Bakhtin: Carnival Differences between new historicism and cultural materialism Feminism First wave feminism Virginia Woolf Simone de Beauvoir Second wave feminism Anglo-American criticism Kate Millet Elaine Showalter French Criticism Hélène Cixous Luce Irigaray Julia Kristeva Feminism and Shakespeare Juliet Dusinberre The Woman’s Part Lisa Jardine Linda Woodbridge Valerie Wayne Psychoanalysis Freud: manifest content, latent content, dream-thoughts, dream-work, secondary revision Carl Jung Jacques Lacan: Imaginary Order, Symbolic Order, Mirror Stage Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare Freud’s “The Theme of the Three Caskets” Ernest Jones Norman Holland

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Feminism, Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare Nancy Chodorow: object relations theory, pre-oedipal stage Titus Andronicus: feminism and psychoanalysis King Lear: Coppélia Kahn, feminism and psychoanalysis Gay Studies Michel Foucault and the term homosexuality Alan Bray Sodomy Bruce R. Smith Stephen Orgel Jonathan Goldberg Cross-dressing Post-colonialism Edward Said Frantz Fanon Homi K. Bahbha: hybridisation Ania Loomba Peter Hulme The Tempest

SELF-ASSESSMENT QUESTIONS Answer ONE of the following questions: 1. Define the concepts of ideology, discourse and power. How do new historicists and cultural materialists apply them to the study of Shakespeare’s works? In what ways are their analyses different from Tillyard’s historical perspective? 2. Give a brief summary of the main ideas presented by Dusinberre’s Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, Lenz’s The Woman’s Part, Jardine’s Still Harping on Daughters, Woodbridge’s Women and the English Renaissance and Wayne’s The Matter of Difference. What are the main differences you can find between them? 3. In the light of the explanations about Shakespearean post-colonial studies, what is the relationship you find between the colonised’s knowledge of Shakespeare’s works, English authority and defiance of the colonial discourse? Where would you insert the concept of hybridisation within that context?

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COMPLEMENTARY EXERCISE 1. But Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England also has a political purpose: it is an attempt to consolidate gay identity in the last decade of the twentieth century, to help men whose sexual desire is turned toward other men realize that they have not only a present community but a past history. (Smith 1994: 27) Yet it is my guiding supposition in the pages that follow that by exploring some of the terrains of confusion in the Renaissance, I am also exploring sites of present confusion, and that readings that are as attentive and as unpresuming as I hope the ones that follow are, can indicate both the bankruptcy of the concept of sodomy, as well as the work that the term has been able to do – and continues to do – precisely because the term remains incapable of exact definition. (Goldberg 1995: 18) In these two texts, Bruce R. Smith and Jonathan Goldberg point out the contemporary relevance of critical analyses of Shakespeare, in these cases in the field of gay studies. Comment on the extent to which critical lines of approach to Shakespeare’s production such as new historicism and gender studies have been and are still significant in current social and political debates.

PART 2 THE SHAKESPEAREAN STAGE: HAMLET AND MACBETH

Unit 3 HAMLET

PROGRAMME 3.1. Hamlet: Historical and Literary Contexts 3.1.1. Date 3.1.2. Main Sources of Hamlet 3.2. Critical Approaches to Hamlet 3.2.1. Some critical approaches from the eighteenth to the first half of the twentieth century. 3.2.2. Contemporary Critical Approaches to Hamlet: Catherine Belsey, Leonard Tennenhouse and Elaine Showalter. 3.3. Textual Analysis

INTRODUCTION Aims and Objectives Unit 3 is devoted to the analysis of Shakespeare’s most popular tragedy: Hamlet. The unit is divided in three sections. The first one offers information about the textual and historical contexts of the play. Despite the fact that it will be dealing with issues such as dates and sources, I have tried to present interesting pieces of information and not mere facts to be memorised. The play will always be located within the social, theatrical and political circumstances of the period in which it was composed. In this way, we will see the play as an integral part of its age. The second section deals with a selection of critical studies about Hamlet since the eighteenth century. We will have the opportunity to see how the Shakespearean critics that we have studied in Units 1 and 2, such as Johnson, Coleridge, Bradley or Wilson Knight, have analysed the play. Their insights will show us the range of interpretations that the complexity of certain aspects of Hamlet has provoked. Moreover, other relevant studies of Hamlet by critics such as T. S. Eliot or Dover Wilson will be examined. The second part of section 2 is devoted to contemporary critical approaches to Hamlet. We have selected a cultural materialist approach by Catherine Belsey, a new historicist approach by Leonard Tennenhouse,

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and a feminist approach by Elaine Showalter. It is essential to have a clear view of the main tenets of the critical lines explained in Units 1 and 2 in order to understand their conclusions about certain aspects of Hamlet. The third section presents a textual analysis of the play in which we will study its metatheatrical allusions, the role and significance of the Ghost, the ambiguous relationship between Ophelia and Hamlet, and the philosophical ideas presented by the play about the human nature, the world and death.

Study Guidelines My first recommendation is that you read the play before reading the unit. Otherwise, a great deal of information will not make any sense to you. After reading the unit, I strongly recommend reading the play again since you will enjoy this second reading much more and will discover new things that you did not perceive the first time. The edition of Hamlet we will be using in this unit is The New Cambridge Shakespeare updated edition of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark edited by Philip Edwards (2003) (ISBN 0 521 53252 3). Reading the play also means reading the footnotes of Edward’s edition. I strongly recommend that you do not skip over these notes to the play. They will make your understanding of certain passages much clearer. The study of Units 1 and 2 is also very helpful in order to assimilate the contents of section 2. It is also very important to take into account that the third section on Textual Analysis is completed by the information that you can find from page 40 to page 61 of the introduction of The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Hamlet by Edwards. The footnotes in each section are also a very important source of information. They define certain concepts, give information about certain authors or expand certain ideas. They will also refer to lines of the play that illustrate and reinforce the idea that is being studied at that point. Furthermore, they will direct you either to some pages of Edward’s introduction or to some of his footnotes. You will find a great deal of information about the play in the recommended websites too. Regardless of whether you choose to comment on the text of the Further Knowledge Exercise or not, it is recommended that you consult the sample commentary since a text will have to be commented on in the exam.

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Title page of the First Quarto (Q1) of Hamlet (1603)

3.1. HAMLET: HISTORICAL AND LITERARY CONTEXTS 3.1.1. Date The sections devoted to the dates of Hamlet in this unit and Macbeth in Unit 4 intend to show evidence that situates the date of Hamlet around 1601 and of Macbeth around 1606. However, our main interest is not just to prove these could be the correct dates of the plays’ composition. The analysis of the dates of the plays for their own sake would not be of interest for someone concerned with the plays’ multiple and significant references. That is the reason why these sections aim to show how the enquiry into the date of the composition of these plays uncovers the fact that they are intimately connected with political, social and religious issues of their time. By trying to discover the year Shakespeare decided to write Hamlet and Macbeth I intend to show how even the textual analysis of what sometimes may seem an insignificant detail lays open, most frequently, relevant structural or thematic elements of the plays. In September 1598, the schoolmaster Francis Meres published Palladis Tamia, Wit’s Treasury and in it he states that: As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins: so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage. For comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love Labours Lost, his Love Labour’s Won, his Midsummer’s Night Dream, and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy, his Richard the 2., Richard the 3., Henry the 4., King John, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo and Juliet. (Schoenbaum 1987: 190)1.

1 According to S. Schoenbaum in William Shakespeare. A Compact Documentary Life (1977), the entry of Love’s Labour’s Won has provoked many critical theories about which Shakespearean play this title could refer to. However, Schoenbaum concludes that, despite these critical efforts, this entry “remains a minor Shakespearian enigma” (1987: 191).

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Meres’s statement highlights the relevance of the Classics during the Renaissance and the popularity of Shakespeare on the Elizabethan stage. But, for our purposes, it is also useful if we observe that Meres does not mention Hamlet in the list he offers of the playwright’s plays. This leads us to think that Hamlet might have been composed after that date. If the play could not have been written before that date, it could not have been composed after 1602. That was the date it was entered for publication in the Stationer’s Register2 with the title “The Revenge of Hamlet Prince [of] Denmark as it was lately acted by the Lord Chamberlain his men.” A year later, in 1603, as we can see in the illustration showing the title page of the First Quarto above, Hamlet was first printed. The publication of Q1 is considered a “bad” quarto since it comes from a defective and shortened acting version probably dictated to a scribe by an actor who had played Marcellus and Lucianus. Two copies of Q1 have survived. Q2 was published in 1604-1605 and in its title-page we read “Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect Coppie.” Q2 is the better text and the more complete and is supposed to be set from Shakespeare’s own manuscript. This could have been the text that was entered in the Stationer’s Register in 1602. The third basic printed text of Hamlet is in the First Folio of 1623 which is shorter than Q2 and has many variants from it. Since this copy was printed seven years after Shakespeare’s death and around twenty years after he first wrote the play, the Folio text could have been altered by the players for their own theatrical interests.3 We should remember that the concept of authorship during the Renaissance was not the same as the one we have nowadays. Once the theatrical company got hold of the playwright’s manuscript, the play-text could be altered for stage purposes with or without the author’s approval. The play itself also leaves certain textual traces that could help to date it. For example, before the play-within-the-play we witness the following dialogue between Hamlet and Polonius: Hamlet Polonius Hamlet

My lord, you played once i’th’university, you say. That did I my lord, and was accounted a good actor. And what did you enact?

2 The Stationer’s Register was a ledger book of an association of publishers and printers in which works to be published were registered. 3 The version of Hamlet we read in The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition by Philip Edwards blends both the Q2 and the Folio text. As Edwards remarks, he has “wished to keep the different shapes of the second quarto and the Folio in front of the reader as much as possible. I have therefore marked all the second quarto passages which are cut in the Folio within square brackets. As for the main body of the text where the two early versions run parallel, the text of this edition will necessarily be an eclectic text, because neither version, in the case of any single variant, has a guaranteed superiority over the other. In some cases I have judged the Folio to be correct and in some cases the quarto” (2003: 32).

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Polonius Hamlet

I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed i’th’Capitol. Brutus killed me. It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there. Be the players ready? (3.2.87-94)

For us, twenty-first-century readers or spectators of Hamlet, these lines do not have the same meaning as they had for the Elizabethan playgoers. Many of those seeing Hamlet on stage would have probably seen Julius Caesar and would have realised that the actors playing Hamlet and Polonius were the same actors that had played the roles of Brutus and Caesar. That is, as E. A. J. Honigmann asserts in “The date of Hamlet” (1956), the Elizabethan actor John Heminges played both the role of Caesar in Julius Caesar and of Polonius in Hamlet and the popular actor Richard Burbage played Brutus in Julius Caesar and the prince in Hamlet. Once we have this piece of information, these lines by Polonius and Hamlet acquire new meanings. To begin with, these lines are a metatheatrical allusion since both actors are reminding themselves, and also the audience, that they are mere players that can perform different roles, they are not Hamlet and Polonius but Heminges and Burbage on stage. This is an idea that is repeated in most plays by Shakespeare and it was a theatrical convention at the time. That is, several factors such as the proximity between actors and audience, the simplicity and austerity of the props, the centrality of ritual elements on stage and the artificiality of the performance, in comparison to the contemporary realistic interpretation, resulted in the absence of realistic illusion on stage. In other words, the audience was always conscious during the performance that what they were watching was mere illusion and the actors were always reminding the playgoer of such a fact by alluding to their nature as mere performers. As Park Honan states in Shakespeare. A Life (1998), on the Elizabethan stage there existed the “audience’s ‘double awareness’ of the player’s dramatic role and of the player who is only pretending. The Elizabethan actor, as in soliloquies and asides, expresses his sense of being in fact a performer; the boy in female clothes remains for the audience a boy actor and an impersonated female ... audiences do not forget he is also a stage actor, frail as themselves” (1999: 109).4 As we will see in the section on Textual Analysis 4 Andrew Gurr, in his essential book The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642 (1992) develops this idea and maintains that “without the proscenium arch to separate players from audience, as it has generally done since the Restoration, the presentation of illusion as reality was inevitably more complicated. The players were closer for one thing, in the midst of the audience, and lacked the facilities for presenting the pictorial aspects of illusion because they were appearing in three dimensions, not the two that the proscenium-arch pictureframe establishes. Awareness of the illusion as illusion was therefore much closer to the

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in this unit, and also in the unit about Macbeth, metatheatrical references will be central elements in the plays. On the other hand, the allusion to Brutus’s murder of Caesar is anticipating Hamlet’s murder of Polonius. The metatheatrical allusion is offering us the image of Richard Burbage killing John Heminges, an image that had already been seen on stage when Julius Caesar was performed. Observe the irony of these lines and how an apparently minor conversation turns into a death announcement. Moreover, many critics have established a close link between certain elements of Julius Caesar and Hamlet. The latter has traditionally been considered as a development of some aspects of the former. Philip Edwards’s remarks in his introduction to The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Hamlet are shared by many critics: That Hamlet is a reworking of the basic underlying theme of Julius Caesar, namely the commitment of the philosopher-hero to violent action in order to remove an intruder from the government of the state and restore an ideal condition belonging to former times, seems to me undeniable. (2003: 6)

Finally, what these lines between Polonius and Hamlet also suggest is that the date of composition of Hamlet must have been after September 1599, the date Julius Caesar was being performed at the Globe. But we must be careful when dating the composition of the plays since, for example, in this case, this allusion to Julius Caesar could have been a later interpolation, that is, a later addition to the text. Hamlet leaves us other textual hints that could help us to set the date of the play. Let’s read the following lines between Hamlet and Rosencratz about the bad situation of the players in Denmark: Hamlet Rosencrantz

How chances it they travel? Their residence, both in reputation and profit, was better both ways. I think their inhibition comes by the means of the late innovation. (2.2.306-309)

Hamlet asks Rosencrantz the reason why the actors are not playing in the city. The meaning of Rosencratz’s answer has been much disputed. surface all the time. It is presumably because of this that so many of the plays begin with prologues and inductions openly acknowledging that the play which follows is a fiction. Both poets and players were often reminded that their business was a cheat – either illusion or delusion. In numerous plays a masque or a play within a play (The Spanish Tragedy, The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Maid’s Tragedy) serves as an emblem of deceit. Playing is counterfeiting, a continual presence. So the illusion is acknowledged to be illusion” (1999: 181).

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“Inhibition” means “prohibition.” It refers to the players’ inability to perform in the city. Though speaking about the theatrical situation in Denmark, Shakespeare is obviously alluding to theatrical circumstances in London at the time. Such “inhibition” could refer to the new law in 1600 which only allowed theatrical performances in two theatres, the Globe and the Fortune, by just two companies, The Admiral’s Men and The Chamberlain’s Men. The performing days were also limited. These circumstances could explain why it was difficult for some companies to act in the city. Other critics consider that “inhibition” refers to the closing of the theatres in London due to the plague in the summer of 1603. If that is the case, these lines would then have been added after the completion of the play. “Innovation” meant at the time a political insurrection or a change of any sort. If it refers to new changes it could allude to theatrical changes such as the popularity of the children’s companies during those years as we will see later. But, if “innovation” takes a political meaning, Rosencratz’s answer would allude to the fact that the players were forbidden to act in the city because of the recent political disturbance. Though it is impossible to confirm what this “late innovation” is alluding to, many critics have considered that it points to the political disorder resulting from Essex’s rebellion of 8 February 1601.5 It is thought that Rosencratz’s answer to Hamlet refers to the fact that Shakespeare’s company during those years, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, was travelling and not performing in London because they were out of favour at Court for their relation with the Essex conspiracy. Shakespeare’s play Richard II, in which the king is deposed by Bolingbroke, future Henry IV, was used by Essex’s supporters as a symbol of Elizabeth’s dethronement by Essex. Shakespeare represented Richard II as a weak king, influenced by his counsellors and the main issues dealt with in the play are political legitimisation and succession. Many identified Richard II with Elizabeth, an old queen, with no heir, and very much influenced by her favourites. Bolingbroke’s ambition for power was compared with Essex’s. Usurpation was a threat to the kingdom under such circumstances. As we see, Shakespeare’s Richard II, written around 1595 had a great political relevance at the time. But in 1597, when it was first printed, the scene of Richard’s abdication and his dethronement were not included since they were considered subversive scenes.

5

Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, became Elizabeth’s favourite. His military success and efficiency made him Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1599. But, though he had the best Tudor army ever, he was defeated and he signed an unauthorised truce with the leading Irish rebel, the Earl of Tyrone. Elizabeth became enraged, arrested him and he was deprived of his titles. In January 1601, the dissenting earl led an abortive rebellion against the Queen in London. He was imprisoned and later on executed for treason.

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However, a few years later, Richard II was politically appropriated as a weapon against the Queen by Essex’s supporters. In 7 February 1601, the day before Essex rebelled against Elizabeth, Richard II was performed, in its totality, by The Lord Chamberlain’s Men at the Globe. The performance was arranged and paid for by Essex’s followers as a sign of rebellion. Though the actors considered the play was no longer popular they were paid a great amount of money and they agreed to perform the play for an audience that supported Essex. For them, the play clearly symbolised Elizabeth’s political decline and Essex’s triumph. Essex’s rebellion failed and he was tried and finally executed. But the Queen was conscious of the strong connection between political matters and the stage and of the damage this relationship could do to her image as sovereign. A few months later she would tell William Lambarde, the keeper of the records of the Tower, “I am Richard II, know ye not that?” We observe how this is a very clear example of how the theatrical discourse was intimately linked with the political one and how a play could be used, not just to reinforce authority, but to challenge it, to disrupt the existing order. If the term “innovation” refers to Essex’s rebellion we can observe how Rosencratz’s answer to Hamlet acquires evident political undertones directly related to the situation of Shakespeare’s theatrical company, obliged to travel for having participated in a political uprising against the Queen. Though we cannot be sure about the validity of this interpretation, it is interesting to be aware of the possibility in order to observe how even apparently innocent commentaries in the play could have a great significance hidden below the surface. After Rosencratz’s answer there is another piece of textual evidence that would situate the composition of the play also around 1601. After Hamlet’s question about the popularity of the actors on stage, Rosencratz’s answer alludes to what is known as “the war of theatres” or “Poetomachia” during 1601 in London: Hamlet Rosencratz Hamlet Rosencratz

Do they hold the same estimation they did when I was in the city? Are they so followed? No indeed they are not. How comes it? Do they grow rusty? Nay, their endeavour keeps in the wonted pace, but there is sir an eyrie of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of the question and are most tyrannically clapped for’t. These are now the fashion, and so be-rattle the common stages (so they call them) that many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose-quills, and dare scarce come thither. (2.2.310-19)6

6 This passage presents one of the multiple textual variations between Q2 and the Folio Text since it is not in the Q2. We can find it only in the Folio Text.

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Rosencratz refers here to the new fashion and great success of the children’s acting companies (“an eyrie of children, little eyases”) that perform in private theatres and that attack (“be-rattle”) adult players performing in the public playhouses (“common stages”). That is, Rosencratz is clearly alluding to “the war of the theatres”, whose height was by mid 1601. The great popularity of these children’s companies provoked a crisis for the men’s companies at the time and also for Shakespeare’s own company, another reason to travel out of London. The “little eyases” could be a reference to the company known as The Children of the Chapel that in 1600 started playing at the Blackfriars. There, they acted Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels in 1600 and Poetaster in 1601. Both plays taunt the plays and playwrights of the public theatres such as Dekker or Marston. Dekker got back at these attacks by writing Satiromastix later that same year. Again, we see how Shakespeare is constantly alluding to social events that were central at the time in England and that, as in this case, affected his own way of life as a playwright. The situation of the Danish actors is a clear mirror of the situation of the actors of his own company. The parallelisms between Hamlet and Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, staged in 1600-1, have led some critics such as Harold Jenkins, in the Introduction to The Arden Shakespeare edition of Hamlet in 1982, to state that Marston was influenced by Hamlet when writing his own play. Consequently, Hamlet would have been written before 1600. However, other critics such as Philip Edwards consider that Marston’s play was written before Shakespeare’s and was mainly based on the Ur-Hamlet.7 There is then no critical agreement on this point as on many others regarding the date of the play. We could conclude, as Philip Edwards does,8 that the play was written between 1599, the year Julius Caesar was being acted, and 1602, the year it was entered in the Stationer’s Register. Despite the fact that this could also be a later addition to an already finished play, the passage that refers to “the war of the theatres” would situate the composition of the play around 1601 as the possible allusion to Essex’s rebellion would also indicate.

3.1.2. Main Sources of Hamlet Saxo and Belleforest The story of Hamlet is based on the twelfth-century story of Amleth told by the Dane Saxo Grammaticus in his Historiae Danicae (Danish 7

See The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Hamlet (2003: 6-7) and section about the sources of Hamlet below. 8 See The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Hamlet (2003: 8).

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History) which was first printed in 1514 and then translated into Danish in 1575. The Latin text was translated into English by Oliver Eston in 1894. As Geoffrey Bullough remarks in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare Vol. VII (1973), the Amleth saga belongs to a series of stories about revenge in which the hero pretends to be mad or stupid in order to save his life and then has an opportunity to devise a stratagem against his enemies (1978: 6). The story of Amleth has also as central issue the assassination of Horwendil, Amleth’s father, by his brother Feng. Both brothers are joint governors of Jutland under the King of Denmark. Feng publicly justifies his actions as a way to save Gerutha, Horwendil’s wife and Amleth’s mother, from her husband’s cruelty. Feng and Gerutha then get married. Meanwhile, Amleth pretends to be an idiot in order to save his life and to hide his plans against his uncle. Feng’s courtiers try to test Amleth’s folly in order to see whether it is real or pretended. But they only get ambiguous answers resulting from a witty mind, always speaking in riddles. His foster-sister is set to tempt him sexually. Feng’s supporters consider that his desire for a sexual encounter would prove him sane. This encounter takes place but, since Amleth boasts of it ridiculously, nobody believes him and Amleth’s insanity seems to be proven. On another occasion, Amleth kills one of Feng’s courtiers who is concealed in the chamber where Gerutha and Amleth are having a conversation. Amleth dismembers his body, and then reprehends his mother for having married his uncle. Feng then sends Amleth with two men to the King of England with a letter ordering his death. Amleth changes the content of the letter, ordering instead the murder of the two men who accompanied him and asking the King of England for his daughter as his own wife. The King of England acquiesces in both issues. Amleth comes back from England, sets fire to the palace, kills Feng, and is finally made king. As we see, there are numerous elements in common with Shakespeare’s play such as fratricide, incestuous marriage, pretended insanity, delayed action and revenge apart from very specific scenes that find clear parallels in the play. But Shakespeare probably had access to Amleth’s story through Francois Belleforest’s French version of Saxo’s narration as the third story of the fifth series of Histoires Tragiques in 1570. There were at least ten editions of the fifth volume of Histoires Tragiques. An edition in Paris in 1582 was used as the basis for the anonymous English translation of the story called The Hystorie of Hamblet in 1608.9 9

At certain points of this translation, we observe how the translator had probably seen Shakespeare’s Hamlet on stage. For example, the spying counsellor conceals, not under the quilt as in Belleforest, but “behind the hangings”, once even “behind the arras” as it happens in Hamlet (3.3.28; 4.1.9). Also, without any equivalent in Belleforest, the English version makes Hamblet cry “A rat, a rat?” In Shakespeare’s Hamlet we find references to rats in 3.4.23 and 4.1.10.

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There are elements in Belleforest that differentiate his narration from that of Saxo and that are reflected in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. First of all, Belleforest is interested in justifying the revenge act on the part of Amleth not as a savage retaliation but as a reflection of God’s vengeance. Amleth’s revenge is not viewed as treason or as a crime but as the punishment of a treacherous subject by a legitimate prince. Vengeance turns then into an act of justice. As we will see, the contemporary debate about revenge is central in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.10 Belleforest also emphasises the contrast between Horvendile and Fengon (Horwendil and Feng in Saxo) as husbands to Geruth. Belleforest reiterates the fact that Geruth has abandoned the virtuous for the bad man. Shakespeare presents this antithesis from the beginning of the play (1.2.139-57; 1.5.47-52). Belleforest also introduces in his narration a clear assault upon the worthless and deceitful nature of women. In the French version of Saxo’s story, Geruth becomes an adulteress before her husband’s death. Since in Shakespeare’s Hamlet Gertrude’s unfaithfulness before Claudius’s murder is not made explicit, the Queen’s adultery has been sometimes disputed. However, there are certain moments in the play in which the playwright is clearly pointing to such an issue (1.5.42; 3.4.42-48; 3.4.66-76; 5.2.64) not mentioned by Saxo. Finally, as Harold Jenkins remarks in the Introduction to The Arden Shakespeare edition of Hamlet, the popular “To be or not to be” soliloquy could have derived from Belleforest. When Amleth swears to revenge his father’s death, he asks his mother: “What is the good of living when shame torments our conscience and cowardice holds us back from gallant enterprises?” (in Jenkins 1982:95). Shakespeare’s Hamlet says: Hamlet

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all ... And enterprises of great pitch and moment ... their currents turn awry (3.1.83-7)

Belleforest’s words could have inspired Shakespeare to write Hamlet’s but the philosophical depth of Hamlet’s disquisitions are far away from the simple, bloody and vengeful attitude of Amleth. As Jenkins states: Belleforest does not regard such failures as the common lot of men. The choice he offers Amleth is between two kinds of glory, either a glorious death or by the use of arms (les armes au poing) a glorious triumph over foes: the alternatives Hamlet debates, ‘to suffer’ life’s misfortunes or ‘to take arms’ in a hopeless cause, afford no such simple heroics. Belleforest, following Saxo, likens Amleth to Hercules; the

10

See section on Contemporary Critical Approaches to Hamlet.

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comparison persists in Shakespeare, but those who were like are now unlike (I.ii.152-3). The mind of Hamlet, confronting the enigma of man’s life, is not in Belleforest at all. (1982: 95)

The Ur-Hamlet Certain critics, such as Anne Barton, in her Introduction to The New Penguin Shakespeare edition of Hamlet (1980), consider that “there is no evidence to suggest that Shakespeare had read about Hamlet in Saxo, and only a remote possibility that he was familiar with Belleforest” (1996: 15). If that is the case, the basic source of Shakespeare’s Hamlet would be a lost, and apparently never printed, Elizabethan play known as Ur-Hamlet (old Hamlet) probably based on Belleforest’s narration. There are three pieces of textual evidence for the existence of this play. First, in his address “To the Gentlemen Students of Both Universities” printed before Greene’s romance Menaphon in 1589, Thomas Nashe warned the students against bad translators and Senecan dramatists whom he attacks bitterly: It is a common practice nowadays amongst a sort of shifting companions, that run through every Art and thrive by none, to leave the trade of Noverint, whereto they were born, and busy themselves with the endeavours of art, that could scarcely Latinize their neck-verse if they should have need; yet English Seneca read by Candlelight yields many good sentences, as Blood is a begger and so forth, and if you intreate him faire in a frostie morning hee will affoord you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls, of Tragical speeches ... Seneca, let blood line by line and page by page, at length must needes die to our Stage; which makes his famished followers to imitate the Kid in Aesop, who, enamoured with the Foxes newfangles, forsooke all hopes of life to leap into a newe occupation; and these men, renouncing all possibilities of credit or estimation, to intermeddle with Italian Translations. (in Bullough 1978: 15)

This text has been used as an evidence of Thomas Kyd’s authorship of Ur-Hamlet. First of all, he was the son of a scrivener (“trade of Noverint”). He abandoned such a trade to take literary composition instead. Second, the reference to “the Kid in Aesop” seems, as Jenkins states, “to be brought in less for its aptness than for the pun on a writer’s name” (1982: 83).11 As we know from the reading of The Spanish Tragedy, Thomas Kyd was very 11 Nashe is here probably referring to a revision of Aesop’s fable of the wolf and the kid by Spenser in his “May Eclogue” of The Shepherd’s Calendar. In Spenser the wolf is substituted for a fox and the kid, who outwits the wolf and ends up unharmed in Aesop’s version, is deceived and devoured by the fox.

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much influenced by Seneca and also devoted his time to Italian translations from 1588.12 These pieces of evidence point to Kyd as the author of the Ur-Hamlet but they are not definitive. Thomas Nashe does not make the link explicitly. However, these textual hints and the fact that The Spanish Tragedy has so many elements in common with the Hamlet referred to by Nashe - as its clear Senecan style and rhetoric, themes such as murder, madness, revenge and even the presence of a ghost as we will see later - make Kyd’s authorship quite likely though not conclusive. The second reference to the Ur-Hamlet was found in the theatrical entrepreneur Philip Henslowe’s records of 9 June 1594. Henslowe registers a performance in London of a play called Hamlet, which could have been a revival of the Hamlet referred to by Nashe in 1589. Finally, the third allusion is by Thomas Lodge in Wits Miserie and the World’s Madness (1596) where he describes one who “walks for the most part in black under cover of gravity, and looks as pale as the vizard of the ghost who cried so miserably at the Theatre like an oyster-wife, Hamlet, revenge!” This allusion gives us the little information we have about that Senecan play, according to Nashe: it was about revenge, about the story of Hamlet and it had the presence of a ghost. It is interesting to mention, as Bullough does, the topicality of a play on Hamlet at the time. First of all, in 1585 a Danish embassy arrived in Edinburgh requesting the return to Danish rule of the Scottish isles of Orkney and Shetland and also proposing a marriage between James VI of Scotland, future James I of England, and Anne of Denmark, second daughter of King Frederick II of Denmark and Norway. Queen Elizabeth opposed such a proposal. However, they finally got married in August 1589. Fortinbras’s demand for the return of his father’s lands may have reminded the spectator of this event. Also, the political relations between Denmark, Scotland and England would make a play about a Danish court interesting at the time. There are also other possible connections between certain political events in Denmark, Scotland and England and Hamlet’s story. For example, the rivalry between brothers can be seen as related to the events that took place after Anne’s father’s death in 1588. His brother Duke John tried to get the crown even though the heir was his eldest son Christian IV. The idea of a son’s revenge could have also reminded the audience of the fact that in 1587 James VI was encouraged by many Scottish nobles to revenge his mother’s murder by Queen Elizabeth. Mary Queen of Scots, James’s mother, was Queen Elizabeth’s cousin and prisoner. Mary was thought to have murdered her husband Lord Darnley. 12

See Literatura inglesa hasta el siglo XVII (2002: 261-64).

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She was imprisoned, first in Scotland, and later on in England for nineteen years. She plotted against Elizabeth I to get her freedom and was condemned to death in 1587. James never took revenge. He was conscious of Elizabeth’s power and he knew he would be her heir. Bullough considers that though James did not appear as his mother’s avenger he was described in a Latin poem by John Gordon after Mary’s death as the avenger of his father Lord Darnley’s death. Bullough points out the fact that in the poem the ghost of Darnley brings to James’s mind his mother’s adultery, her participation in the murder and the earl of Bothwell’s cruelty. Bothwell killed Lord Darnley and a few months later married Mary. The word “Vindicta” (revenge) appears in the poems several times. However, Darnley’s ghost considers that Mary’s execution has served as an act of revenge and does not ask James to act as an avenger. As a conclusion, Bullough considers that it seems likely therefore that between 1587 and 1589 the Danish negotiations, the Scottish royal tragedy, and even maybe the inadequacy of James VI as an avenger, suggested to Kyd a play somewhat in the manner of his Spanish Tragedy, based not on recent Scottish history, which would be politically impossible, but on the Danish story in Belleforest. (1978: 20)

The multiple similarities between Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy have been taken as another evidence of Kyd’s probable authority of Ur-Hamlet and of Shakespeare’s use of both plays when composing his own. There has traditionally been a great critical debate about which play was composed in the first place, whether The Spanish Tragedy or the Ur-Hamlet, in order to ascertain in which way they could have influenced Shakespeare’s composition of his play. It is impossible to prove the order of composition though there are numerous hypotheses supporting both theories.13 Once we read The Spanish Tragedy, we realise that there are numerous points of resemblance between Kyd’s play and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Among many others,14 notice for example the presence of the revenge and the delay themes in both plays, the presence of the play-within-the-play, the issue of madness, the protagonism of the Ghost or the presence of two revengeful plot lines in both plays. That is, in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet desires to take revenge on Claudius, and

13 See for example Philip Edwards’s theory about the order of composition of The Spanish Tragedy and the Ur-Hamlet in the Introduction to The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Hamlet (2003: 3). 14 For a complete list of the points of resemblance between the two plays see Bullough (1978: 16-17).

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Laertes on the prince. In Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, Andrea wants to take revenge on Balthasar and Hieronimo on Horatio’s murderers. Some critics such as Edwards, consider that many of those elements could have already been present in Ur-Hamlet (2003: 4). However, except for the appearance of the ghost, we have no evidence to prove it. The location of thematic or structural similarities between Hamlet and The Spanish Tragedy is of great importance to perceive the values of Shakespeare’s work. Once we read both plays, we realise the magnificent reshaping of the sources that takes place in Shakespeare’s play. Shakespeare’s creative imagination offers us a dramatic richness that turns Hamlet into a superb work of art that has nothing to do with Kyd’s play. The Spanish Tragedy is a revenge play that offered the spectator popular theatrical conventions of the end of the sixteenth century, such as Senecan sensationalism, a classical rhetoric and a flat characterisation in contrast to the moral and psychological depth of Shakespeare’s characters. Kyd intended to shock the audience with bloody and artificial scenes that were turned by Shakespeare into a suggestive naturalism that presents the inner debate of a hero who philosophically reflects on the nature of human beings and of the world that surrounds them. Jenkins’s comparison between Hieronimo’s and Hamlet’s disquisitions and madness and his view about Ophelia’s role in Hamlet as compared with Isabella, her counterpart in The Spanish Tragedy, is a clear example of Shakespeare’s transformation of his sources: Hieronimo’s soliloquies, rhetorical and histrionic, apart from an occasional ‘sentence’ have few of those reflections on life and death which Hamlet’s predicament evokes. His madness though it may sometimes combine the theatrical and the plausible lacks the ‘method’ whereby Hamlet glances at truths that sanity cannot discover. Ophelia’s madness is also used to reveal what reason would not: but by contrast with that of Isabella, it is in no sense a variation on the hero’s; and her ‘doubtful’ death, with all the ripples that it stirs in the world of Elsinore, is the direct antithesis of Isabella’s stagy suicide. Rightly understood, the wreckage of her mind through a devoted and rejected love is supremely moving. Her sufferings, both a counterpoint to and a consequence of Hamlet’s, add an important dimension to his tragedy. (1982: 99)

3.2. CRITICAL APPROACHES TO HAMLET This section offers a selection of some of the most significant critical commentaries on Hamlet over the centuries. Hamlet has traditionally been

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defined as a “problem play”15 since it presents life as a complex experience whose difficulties, in most cases, are not solved by satisfactory resolutions. Certain issues such as the real motives of Hamlet’s delay, the nature of his pretended or real insanity or his ambiguous relationship with Ophelia have traditionally been considered as problematic in Hamlet. Observe, for example, how the inquiries about the reasons of Hamlet’s delay are central in many of the analyses we are going to examine and how they all try to “pluck out the heart” of Hamlet’s “mystery” (3.2.331). Note the different points of view shown by the humanist criticism, represented by Coleridge’s or Bradley’s analyses of Hamlet’s personality and the emphasis that contemporary critics such as Belsey, Tennenhouse or Showalter place on the subject as a product of social forces. Remember that in Unit 1 and 2 you can find texts by Coleridge, Freud, Jones and Holland that centre on Hamlet. If you want to expand your knowledge about critical views on the play I recommend you to read the introduction to The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition by Philip Edwards (2003: 32-40; 77-82).

3.2.1. Some critical approaches from the eighteenth to the first half of the twentieth century In his general observations on Hamlet in his edition to the plays of Shakespeare in 1765, Samuel Johnson admires the variety of the play, with its abundant events and its mixture of amusement and grandeur. To him, the richness of the play also lies in its numerous characters and their different types of speech and ways of life. As a clear contrast to later criticism, concerned about Hamlet’s mental state, Johnson considers Hamlet’s pretended madness as a mere cause of merriment and does not understand the reason why he is feigning to be insane. The critic considers that “he does nothing which he might not have done with the reputation of sanity” (1998: 204). He points out Hamlet’s role as a mere instrument and not agent in the play since the king’s final death is not a result of Hamlet’s actions and indicates his inability to carry out the Ghost’s command. He considers Hamlet’s attitude towards Ophelia as a “rudeness, which seems to be useless and wanton cruelty” (204). He also calls attention to the absence of poetical justice in the play. That is, he considers that Ophelia’s death, whom he describes as “the young, the beautiful, the harmless, and the pious” (204), diminishes the mirth that would have

15

The first critic to define Hamlet as a “problem play” was F.S. Boas in Shakspere and His Predecessors (1896). He also considered “problem plays”: All’s Well that End’s Well, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida.

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provoked Claudius’s death, which was expected by the spectator instead. In his Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare (1818), Samuel Taylor Coleridge brings up the theme of the incongruity of Hamlet’s conduct and character. Coleridge attacks the idea that such irregularities result from Shakespeare’s fluctuating and unpredictable genius. Coleridge tries to demonstrate that Hamlet’s character “may be traced to Shakespeare’s deep and accurate science in mental philosophy” (1985: 272). He considers that Hamlet’s mental process can be compared to the functioning of a human mind. According to the critic, the fact that we can identify with him is the reason why Hamlet has traditionally provoked general fascination all around the world.16 Consequently, in order to understand Hamlet’s reactions we must first study the mechanisms of our own minds. Coleridge considers that a healthy mind must have a balance between the mental contact with external objects and mental introspection, what he calls the contemplative faculty. If an individual’s mind inclines towards mere meditation, this will result in an incapacity to act. Hamlet’s problem is that such mental equilibrium does not exist. He is immersed in his own thoughts and his mind does not centre on outer perceptions. Therefore, that is the reason why we observe in Hamlet a frenetic intellectual activity that leads him to procrastination and to a final refusal to act, says Coleridge.17 This intellectual activity is reflected in Hamlet’s soliloquies where we can see a man obsessed with his inner world, isolated from the external one and, accordingly, unable to act. In his Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1815), A.W. Schlegel had also defined Hamlet as a tragedy of thought. But he considers that Hamlet’s meditative attitude impedes the action because he constantly doubts about the real value of action. His scepticism reaches all aspects of life. In Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), A.C. Bradley begins his analysis of Hamlet by opposing certain previous critical ideas on one of the central problems of the play: Hamlet’s delay to revenge his father’s death. First, Bradley rejects the theories that claim that he does not act because of external difficulties such as, for example, the presence of courtiers and bodyguards who protect Claudius or the difficulty to prove his uncle’s criminal acts. According to Bradley there are numerous pieces of textual evidence that show us that these are not the reasons why Hamlet does not act. Second, he does not agree with those theories that consider that the hero’s reason for not acting is based on moral scruple or conscience. A 16

In fact Coleridge identified himself with Hamlet. See The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Hamlet (2003: 33). 17 See Text 2 of section 1.3.

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close reading of the text shows us, according to Bradley, that from the beginning of the play Hamlet is determined to revenge his father’s death and when he ponders over the reasons for his delay he never alludes to moral scruples. Third, he does not accept the sentimental view of Hamlet, whose origin he finds in a famous, and according to Bradley unfortunate, phrase in Goethe’s book Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship) (1795-96) in which one of the characters says about Hamlet: “a lovely, pure and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a hero, sinks beneath a burden which it cannot bear and must not cast away” (in Bradley 1992: 84). Bradley considers that this theory turns Hamlet into a weak and frail character, for whom we feel pity, and reduces the tragedy into mere pathos. And fourth, Bradley sets against the Schlegel-Coleridge theory that views Hamlet as a tragedy of thought, of reflection. Though Bradley considers that this theory is based on a close reading of the play and that it shows real aspects of Hamlet, it fails to find out the real reason for his irresolution. For Bradley the motive is the hero’s melancholy (2.2.554). Melancholy was classified during the Renaissance period as a disease. On the basis of medical knowledge on Hippocratic and Galenic medicine, it was considered that mental and physical health depended on the perfect equilibrium between the bodily fluids known as the four humours: yellow bile, black bile, phlegm and blood. The preponderance of black bile resulted in melancholy. Victims of melancholy suffered from a temperamental hypersensitivity and thoughtfulness, and it was thought that it was a consequence of genius. Timothy Bright’s popular Treatise of Melancholy (1586) described in detail the symptoms of this disease. The melancholy man was doubtful, suspicious, despaired, sad, cynical, contemplative and not given to action. Melancholy, also known as the Elizabethan malady, was an issue of great interest at the time. The inclusion of a melancholy character in Hamlet reflects such an interest. However, Hamlet’s character is not merely based on the image of the melancholy man since, as we have already noted, Saxo’s and Belleforest’s protagonists already present similar traits. They also procrastinate, feign madness, show a sardonic attitude and devote their time to meditation in order to plan their revenge. However, we cannot deny that the influence of Bright’s text is obvious in certain passages of Hamlet. Jenkins gives us several instances that show how Shakespeare knew Bright’s text. For example, Bright states that the melancholy man is “given to fearful and terrible dreams”18. Hamlet confesses to Rosencratz to have had “bad dreams” (2.2.244). According to Bright, the melancholy man’s house seems 18

Bright’s quotations are taken from Jenkins (1982: 107-108).

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“a prison or dungeon, rather than a place of assured repose and rest.” Hamlet defines Denmark as “a prison” (2.2.234) where “there are many confines, wards, and dungeons” (236-37). Bright asserts that “the air meet for melancholic folk ought to be ... open and patent to all winds ... especially to the south and south-east”. Hamlet tells Guildernstern: “I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw” (2.2.347-48). Finally, according to Bright, the melancholy “obscureth the sun and moon and all the comfortable planets of our natures” so that “they appear ... more than half eclipsed of this mist of blackness”. These words could have inspired Shakespeare when Hamlet states that “this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire ... appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours” (2.2.283-86). Bradley applies psychological realism to the study of Hamlet and analyses his personality as if he were offering a psychological diagnosis of a real human being. Bradley observes in Hamlet certain traits that, under stress, could develop into melancholy. First, he identifies in Hamlet a clear melancholic temperament that results in nervous fluctuations, and quick and extreme changes of mood. Second he also detects in the character a moral sensibility and an enjoyment and belief in everything pleasant and beautiful in nature (2.2.284-85) and in man (2.2.286-90). The negative side of this positive attitude is that a man with Hamlet’s sensibility would suffer immensely after a great shock. Third, Bradley points out, following in this case the Schlegel-Coleridge theory, Hamlet’s intellectual genius. He indicates Hamlet’s quick perceptions and sudden changes of mental attitudes, his great capacity of observation and analysis, and his intelligent humour. That is, his enormous ability to turn his surrounding world into mere thought. Again, after a psychological trauma, this imaginative habit of mind would sink him into a complete gloomy meditative attitude. And that is exactly what happens to Hamlet who, in the “O, that this too too solid flesh would melt” (1.2.129-58) soliloquy, reveals the reason why his words reflect now the negative side of life and his thoughts of suicide. His extreme sorrow does not come from his father’s death or his loss of the crown. Bradley considers that the real shock comes from the knowledge of his mother’s adultery. The critic indicates that after the realisation of his mother’s nature, any man of a great sensibility, an outof-the-ordinary intellectual genius, psychologically weakened after his father’s death and traditionally closely attached to his mother as Hamlet, would immerse himself, as a necessary consequence, into utter melancholy. Bradley constantly thinks of Hamlet as a real human being with natural

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reactions using expressions such as: “Is it possible to conceive an experience more desolating to a man such as we have seen Hamlet to be, and is its result anything but perfectly natural?” (1992: 99) or “the man that suffers as Hamlet suffers ...” (101). In his analysis, Bradley follows the humanist belief in a transcendental, universal and common essence in all human beings. He even states that Hamlet’s fascination lies in the fact that his story is the symbol of “a tragic mystery inherent in human nature” (107). This humanist position will be later rejected by poststructuralist literary approaches. For these approaches, as we have already mentioned in Unit 2, the term “difference” when analysing the subject is essential. That is, the different materialist conditions around human beings, namely, their social, political, historical, economic or religious circumstances are essential when analysing their thoughts, feelings, acts, etc. In this sense they are anti-humanist lines of thought.19 Bradley makes clear that melancholy in Hamlet is not synonymous with madness. In fact, he never shows signs of insanity when he is alone or with Horatio. His melancholy is reflected in Hamlet’s bad temper, selfabsorption, obduracy, insensibility to his enemies’ fates and to his loved one’s feelings, his aversion to life and everything in it, his self-detestation, his yearning for death, and his impassivity. Consequently, his indifference translates itself into inaction. This idleness is increased by a constant reflection, also product of his melancholy, on the task he has to carry out and on the reasons why he procrastinates. Bradley sums up Hamlet’s questions as follows: Was I deceived by the Ghost? How am I to do the deed? When? Where? What will be the consequence of attempting it: success, my death, utter misunderstanding, mere mischief to the State? Can it be right to do it, or noble to kill a defenceless man? What is the good of doing it in such a world as this? (103) Why do I linger? Can the cause be cowardice? Can it be sloth? Can it be thinking too precisely of the event? And does that again means cowardice? What is it that makes me sit idle when I feel it is shameful to do so, and when I have cause, and will, and strength, and means, to act? (106)

In his soliloquy in 4.4. Hamlet refers to two causes for his deferment. One is precisely, “some craven scruple / Of thinking too precisely on th’event” (4.4.40-41). Another one is “bestial oblivion” (40). Forgetfulness of his task or, as Hamlet says, that letting all asleep (4.4.59), that neglect 19

See sections 1.4.2. and 2.3.

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of his duty to revenge his father’s death is one of the main reasons why Hamlet does not act. Hamlet reflects on this idleness when he states: Hamlet

What is a man, If this chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? A beast no more. (4.4.33-35)

Bradley indicates that Hamlet seems to forget about his task in the play from the Ghost’s appearance to the events in the Second Act. The critic mentions the Ghost’s last words to Hamlet “Remember me” (1.5.91) and the first ones when he reappears “Do not forget” (3.4.109). As Bradley remarks, “these little things in Shakespeare are not accidents” (106). As a conclusion to his analysis, Bradley states that, from the psychological point of view, Hamlet’s melancholy “is the centre of the tragedy, and to omit it from consideration or to underrate its intensity is to make Shakespeare’s story unintelligible” (106). But from a tragic point of view, Bradley considers that Hamlet’s melancholy would have aroused little interest if he had not presented the intellectual genius that the Schlegel-Coleridge theory stressed. In 1919, T. S. Eliot wrote a brief essay on Hamlet in which he considered that “far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure” (1965: 100). Apart from mentioning what he considers “superfluous and inconsistent scenes” (100) and a variable versification, he believes that the main dramatic flaw of the play is that Hamlet’s emotions do not find what he calls an “objective correlative.” That is, a “set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion” (102). Eliot considers that Hamlet is controlled by an emotion, mainly provoked by his feelings towards his guilty mother, that cannot be expressed “because it is in excess of the facts as they appear” (102). Hamlet, according to Eliot, cannot understand his feelings, cannot express them and consequently cannot take any action. Eliot’s essay has also a psychological touch since he judges that the fact that the play shows an incapacity to express in words and actions what Hamlet feels is a reflection of Shakespeare’s inner conflicts. As Eliot himself states: We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him. Why he attempted it at all is an insoluble puzzle; under compulsion of what experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know. We need a great many facts in his biography. (103)

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As we can observe, this type of analysis reminds us of Freud, Ernest Jones and Holland’s psychoanalytical views of the play. George Wilson Knight’s essay “The Embassy of Death” in his work The Wheel of Fire (1930) was one of the most important examinations of Hamlet in the first half of the twentieth century. Wilson Knight finds in Hamlet, a play that he considers as “baffling and difficult in its totality” (1995: 17), a clear contrast between a “pale, black-robed Hamlet, mourning” (17) and “the gay glitter of the court, silhouetted against brilliance, robustness, health, and happiness” (17). Knight describes Hamlet’s soul as sick and considers that this sickness is produced not only by his father’s death, the knowledge of his mother’s adultery or his loss of the crown. He believes that Ophelia, Hamlet’s only remaining contact with life, could have saved him. However, her refusal to see him takes this last hope from Hamlet and finally isolates the prince from the rest of the world. Knight contends that, though Hamlet’s grief evidently results from various causes, his extreme suffering lies in what Polonius calls “neglected love” (3.1.172). Throughout his essay, Knight points out Hamlet’s cynicism, his bitterness, his disillusionment, his indifference, his inaction, his coarse humour, his self-hatred, his wicked pleasure in others’ suffering, his denial of love, which he identifies with sex and uncleanness, his pessimistic view of life as a prison and of everything around him as corrupt, his disgust at the human physical body, his obsession with the decay of flesh and the deceit of physical and spiritual beauty and his horror at death and eternity. Knight then declares that death is the central theme of the play. It is present in physical terms in the play, but, above all, Knight considers that death is mainly in Hamlet’s mind and spirit. By stressing Hamlet’s sickness, Knight intends, as many other critics had tried to do before him, to “pluck out the heart of his mystery” (29). But Knight emphasises the fact that the atmosphere of the whole play is not so depressing as the main theme. If that had been the case, Knight affirms, the play would not have been so popular. On the one hand, Hamlet never completely abandons his gentleness, his humour, his friendliness. There are moments in which we observe a positive attitude in Hamlet but, as Knight states, “then suddenly the whole universe is blackened, goes out, leaves utter vacancy. This is, indeed, the secret of the play’s fascination ... Hamlet is a dualized personality, wavering, oscillating between grace and the hell of cynicism” (41). On the other hand, Knight considers that Denmark is a happy and healthy realm, and against this blissful state is the figure of Hamlet, whom Knight calls “the ambassador of death walking amid life” (32).

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The most striking element in Knight’s analysis is the fact that he considers Claudius as one of the positive elements of Denmark, in obvious opposition to what Hamlet represents in the play. For Knight, Claudius is a good, confident and efficient king (1.2.33-39), kind to his subordinates. He is also, according to Knight, a good uncle to Hamlet and his advice is product of common sense and sincere affection (1.2.101-106). To Knight, it is an error to consider Claudius as a reprobate criminal since he feels genuine remorse (3.1.49-54; 3.3.43-47). But even more incredible is Knight’s assertion that “Claudius can hardly be blamed for his later actions. They are forced on him” (35). Claudius, who is human and benevolent for Knight, acts against Hamlet because the prince is dangerous to the state. He is “an inhuman – or superhuman – presence, whose consciousness ... is centred on death” (35). Consequently, he is feared by everyone around him and is identified by Knight as a poison whose venom spreads throughout the whole kingdom disrupting the health of the state. For Knight, Hamlet is “an element of evil in the state of Denmark” (38). The Ghost is considered by him as a demon, as “the devil of the knowledge of death, which possesses Hamlet and drives him from misery and pain to increasing bitterness, cynicism, murder and madness” (39).20 Knight argues that the fact that Claudius, the villain, turns into the nice uncle and the prince into the image of cynicism sets the elemental problem in this play, that is, the question of who represents spiritual good and who represents evil. But, though Knight clearly inclines to represent Hamlet as evil and Claudius, and the rest of the kingdom, as the image of goodness and stability, he has to accept that no matter how much we may like the rest of characters in the play, it is Hamlet who is right. He has discovered the truth of humanity, not just of Denmark. That is, he has seen that hypocrisy, deceit and cruelty are behind apparent benevolence and he has discovered that death and decay are the ends that reach everybody, from king to beggar (4.3.16-34). This discovery makes him the only conflicting element of the play, the only obstacle to happiness in Denmark. Though, as Philip Edwards reveals in the introduction to The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition to Hamlet, Knight’s analysis of the play was not generally accepted and though Knight revised it in a later essay called

20 Compare Wilson Knight’s interpretation of the Ghost with Bradley’s following words: “ ... the Ghost affects imagination not simply as the apparition of a dead king who desires the accomplishment of his purposes, but also as the representative of that hidden ultimate power, the messenger of divine justice set upon the expiation of offences which it appeared impossible for man to discover and avenge, a reminder of a symbol of the connection of the limited world of ordinary experience with the vaster life of which it is but a partial appearance” (1992: 147).

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“Hamlet Reconsidered” in 1947, his first study “swiftly and silently infused itself into the consciousness of literary criticism” (2003: 38). One of the most complete and important analyses of Hamlet is Dover Wilson’s What Happens in Hamlet? (1935). Wilson offers in this book a careful analysis of all the dramatic elements of the play and a detailed exposition of the background of certain Elizabethan beliefs necessary to understand some aspects of the play. In a section of his book called “The heart of the mystery”, Wilson rejects the ideas of those critics that had applied psychological realism such as Bradley and had analysed Hamlet’s behaviour as the result of mental disorder. He clearly opposes Freud and Ernest Jones’s oedipal theory about Hamlet. He considers that Hamlet’s suffering is provoked “by the burden which fate lays upon his shoulders” (1979: 217-18) and indicates that critics should centre on the text and should not make up a hero’s life out of it. Shakespeare was not thinking in psychoanalytical terms, he was not dealing with childhood traumas and Hamlet should be analysed, not as a real human being, but as a character in a play. We are facing art and dramatic illusion, which have completely different parameters than the ones in real life. Wilson observes how, despite the fact that Hamlet’s mind could appear as damaged, its grandeur remains intact. He acknowledges the fact that for many critics this could represent a contradiction, however, “we are not moving in the realm of logic” (219), he argues. On stage, we see characters that are able to endure the unbearable and we accept this process of extreme suffering with amazement and admiration. Shakespeare’s task was not to create a psychologically balanced being. It was to give shape to a being able to provoke such wonder and emotion in the spectators that would at the same time accept such being as entirely human. Wilson agrees with Robert Bridges’s opinion in The Testament of Beauty (1929) about the ceaseless debate about Hamlet’s character. He asserts that it was Shakespeare’s decision to leave the question of Hamlet’s madness, that is, whether it was feigned or not, unresolved. To Wilson, there is not a psychological explanation to Hamlet’s reaction. In Hamlet we observe what Bridges calls “an artful balance”, that the critic defines as: a dramatic artifice by means of which the magician secures for the hero the understanding and indulgence which madness claims when the afflicted person is very dear or much admired, without at any moment allowing us to experience the alienation, disgust or horror which the spectacle of such madness might excite. Nor is the artifice peculiar to Hamlet, it is only a specially striking example of Shakespeare’s general mode of working, of his tragic method. (221)

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As we can see this position is radically opposed to Wilson Knight’s view of Hamlet as the symbol of evil in the play. Wilson considers that, though there are many comments on Hamlet’s insanity in the play, he never appears as completely mad. On the contrary, he considers that Ophelia really goes mad and that her mental state is presented on stage in order to be compared with Hamlet’s. The prince talks about his madness as follows: Hamlet

Was’t Hamlet wronged Laertes? Never Hamlet. If Hamlet from himself be tane away, And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes, Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it. Who does it then? His madness. (5.2.205-209)

In these lines, Wilson perceives how Hamlet makes a clear distinction between himself and his madness as something not really his own, as an occasional state of mind. That would not be the case of Ophelia. Wilson alleges that Shakespeare does not let us see the truth of Hamlet’s madness. And one of the devices the playwright uses in order to impede us from knowing where Hamlet’s mental health ends and insanity begins is his “antic disposition” (1.5.172). This dramatic strategy helps Hamlet to beguile his enemies but it also confuses us regarding the question of his madness since it blurs the line that separates feigned madness from real insanity. Wilson also alludes to the question of the Elizabethan notion of melancholy. However, though Shakespeare was obviously influenced by those notions in his construction of Hamlet, as he was influenced by the contemporary ideas about ghosts when giving shape to the ghost of Hamlet’s father, Wilson contends that they are not “composed according to any prescribed pattern or recipe; and they are as greatly mistaken who seek the origin of Hamlet’s character in Elizabethan psychology as those who attempt to fathom it in terms of Freudian psychopathology” (227).21 Wilson acknowledges that Shakespeare read Timothy Bright’s A Treatise of Melancholy. But he also demonstrates that there are excerpts that do not correspond to Hamlet’s character such as: “firme in opinion, and hardly remoued wher it is resolued” (in Wilson 227). As he concludes, Hamlet is Shakespeare’s dramatic creation and does not merely represent psychological conceptions of the time.

21

For contemporary ideas about ghosts see section on Textual Analysis.

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Wilson has a curious theory that links Hamlet’s nature with the personality of the “brilliant, melancholy and ill-fated Earl of Essex” (228).22 Essex died on the scaffold six or twelve months before Hamlet was first performed on stage.23 Wilson argues that this theory would explain the mystery surrounding the image of the prince in Hamlet. The critic states that Essex was also an enigma at the time and his personality was widely debated. He affirms that if the Elizabethan spectators had recognised in Hamlet traits of Essex they would have understood the question of the protagonist’s mystery. However, Wilson acknowledges that his theory merely offers the historical origin of Hamlet’s mystery since the real nature of such a mystery is dramatically constructed. We must never forget Hamlet is a tragedy and not historical fact. Wilson’s conclusion is self-explanatory: In fine, we were never intended to reach the heart of the mystery. That it has a heart is an illusion; the mystery itself is an illusion; Hamlet is an illusion. The secret that lies behind it all is not Hamlet’s, but Shakespeare’s: the technical devices he employed to create this supreme illusion of a great and mysterious character, who is at once mad and the sanest of geniuses, at once procrastinator and a vigorous man of action,24 at once a miserable failure and the most adorable of heroes. The character of Hamlet, like the appearance of his successive impersonators on the stage, is a matter of “make up.” (229)

3.2.2. Contemporary Critical Approaches to Hamlet: Catherine Belsey, Leonard Tennenhouse and Elaine Showalter Catherine Belsey and Leonard Tennenhouse: Political Approaches to Hamlet In this section we will centre our attention on two of the most important analyses of Hamlet from a political point of view. Catherine Belsey and Leonard Tennenhouse analyse the play taking into 22

See section 3.1. about the date of the play. In The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Hamlet, Edwards considers that the only evidence of how the play was first performed in The Globe can be found in the Q1 of 1603 since it could have derived from a stage version performed one or two years before (2003: 24, 61). Wilson considers that the first performance of Hamlet was in 1601 since he believes it was after Essex’s death in 25 February 1601. 24 Here Wilson refers to the fact that Hamlet carries out impulsive and unpremeditated actions: “Hamlet often acts, but never upon deliberation. The assumption of the ‘antic disposition’, the decision to test his uncle by means of the play, the murder of Polonius, the substitution of the ‘changeling’ letter, the scene with Laertes in the grave-yard, and the killing of the King at the last are all actions taken on the spur of the moment” (225). 23

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consideration the political, historical and social circumstances of the period. For both critics Hamlet presents current political debates about the nature of revenge, about the individual’s autonomy to administer justice and act against the monarch’s will or about the legitimisation of power. The Shakespearean stage is thus viewed as having an essential role in the political life of Renaissance England. In the case of Belsey’s cultural materialist analysis, Hamlet is a play in which, though political orthodoxy dominates the play, there are elements that point to new emergent discourses. Tennenhouse’s new historicist analysis centres mainly on the way the play reinforces the dominant ideas about the monarch’s body as both natural and politic.25 In her work The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (1985), the cultural materialist Catherine Belsey dedicates a section of chapter 4, called “Autonomy”, to what she calls “The limits of sovereignty.” In this chapter she analyses the theme of revenge in Hamlet not just as a moral dilemma but as a political question. As an introduction to this analysis she offers a set of ideas about the theory of absolutism and the relationship between the monarch and the subjects.26 Belsey highlights the fact that, despite the monarch’s absolute power, challenges to authority existed during the age in different forms. She alludes to the fact that the subject was not compelled to obey the king when his order was against divine precepts. In 1528, William Tyndale, in his Obedience of a Christen Man, remarked that when this situation arose, the subject had to passively disobey the monarch and submissively accept the punishment. The subject was not then entitled to actively resist the king’s commands. However, the fact that the subject could overstep the

25 As Marie Axton points out in The Queen’s Two Bodies. Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (1977) the images of the state and the monarch were indivisible, “for the purposes of the law it was found necessary by 1561 to endow the Queen with two bodies: a body natural and a body politic. (This body politic should not be confused with the old metaphor of the realm as a great body composed of many with the king as a head. The ideas are related but distinct.) The body politic was supposed to be contained within the natural body of the Queen. When lawyers spoke of this body politic they referred to a specific quality: the essence of a corporate perpetuity. The Queen’s natural body was subject to infancy, error, and old age; her body politic ... was held to be unerring and immortal” (12). 26 Belsey offers in her work a post-structuralist definition of the subject as an individual placed within discourse, an individual that speaks. The individual is subjected to the discursive meanings that surround him or her. Subjectivity is determined by language, by what is allowed to be said and how it is allowed to be said. Consequently, the subject is a product of a social formation created by a dominant ideology, a dominant discourse. But Belsey also notes the fact that there can be other alternative discourses that can resist the dominant one. The subject can then take part of these new discourses and adopt new subjectpositions that could challenge the norm, the orthodoxy of the dominant discourse. See section 2.3 and the tenets of cultural materialism.

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monarch’s will was for the Puritans a way of highlighting the freedom of the individual conscience, able to ascertain divine will and to oppose royal designs. The Anglican position was different. They did not accept disobedience but they considered that the monarch had to follow human and divine rules. The observation of that law was what made the king’s government and his succession possible. Belsey reminds us that James I’s son, Charles I, was executed by his people for breaking the law of the kingdom. Therefore, Belsey points out that the prevalent political theory of the period unequivocally established the limits of the monarch’s authority. However, there was confusion about the extent to which the subject could exert his or her own autonomy and enforce the legal system when the king did not do it. Belsey considers that this political debate was present on stage when the theme of revenge was central since it “involved precisely the question of the obligations and responsibilities of the subject in the implementation of divine and human justice” (1985: 111). Theatre for Belsey is then a political site. Before examining Belsey’s conclusions it is interesting to note that the contradictions about the nature of revenge that she finds in Hamlet are a clear reflection of what was happening at the time. Fredson Bowers, in his book Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy (1940) states that revenge was not wholly rejected at the time: While it is impossible to deny the immense force of the ethical condemnation of revenge by certain classes among the Elizabethans, yet the writings of the preachers, philosophers, and moralists of the age cannot be wholly depended upon to afford an accurate cross-section of the views of the dramatists or of the audience, both of whom were swayed by equally strong influences from another direction. (1971: 35)

Lily B. Campbell in “Theories of Revenge in Renaissance England” (1931) offers a great variety of religious, philosophical, literary and ethical writings that showed a general opposition to revenge. For example, on a religious level, Paul’s Epistle to the Romans clearly opposed revenge: “Recompense to no man evil for evil ... Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath; for it is written, Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord” (Rom. 12). In writings such as the French Academie (1586) the arguments that opposed the use of revenge were based on such religious ideas: “Therefore wee may well conclude, that all private Revenge proceeding of envy, or of hatred, or of anger, is vicious and forbidden by God, who commaundeth us to render good for evill, and not evill for evill” (in Campbell 1931: 287). Only God could take revenge. The only way to punish the offender was through God’s

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representatives on earth, the king and the judges, or through what they sometimes considered divine punishments such as epidemics, wars, famine etc. Everybody was watched by God and even the monarch could be punished if he acted against the law. Since, as The Mirror for Magistrates (1559) remarked, the king “is undoubtedly chosen by God to be his deputie: and whosoever resisteth any such, resisteth agaynst God him selfe, and is a ranke traytour and rebell” (in Campbell 1931: 291), the monarch could only receive a divine punishment. Despite the fact that these texts reject private revenge, Bowers indicates how there are other pieces of textual evidence showing that revenge was accepted on numerous occasions. Vengeance was admitted in cases of murder, rape, when the king or judge was not there to act or when there was not a law that would regulate the punishment of a certain offence. According to Bowers: There can be little question that many an Elizabethan gentleman disregarded without a qualm the ethical and religious opinion of his day which condemned private revenge, and felt obliged by the more powerful code of honor to revenge any injury offered him ... The frequency with which open assaults, even with disparity of numbers, and “honourable” duels were pardoned by the rulers of England in the seventeenth century indicates strongly that – no matter what the position of the law – it was the method and not the act itself which was largely called in question. (1971: 37)

A basic text about revenge during the period is the one written by Count Romei and translated by Keper as The Courtiers Academie (1598). It proclaims that revenge is admissible when a son, father, brother or friend is offended as an attack on the whole family. Also in England, Bowers observes, it was decreed that when a father was murdered his son could not receive the inheritance before taking revenge on the murderers. Therefore, against maxims such as Francis Bacon’s, who in a essay on revenge states that “in taking revenge a man is but even with his enemy, but in passing it over he is superior; for it is a prince’s part to pardon; and Solomon, I am sure, saith, ‘It is the glory of a man to pass by an offence’” (1857: 45), there was also a line of thought that accepted revenge under certain circumstances. In fact, the document known as Bond of Association (1584) allowed people to take revenge on anyone who might plot against the Queen and her successors.27 According to Bowers, “the audience at 27 Anne Barton states that “this vow made before ‘the eternal and ever-living God’ violates one of the most explicit commandments received from God. To ask how it was that so many of Elizabeth’s subjects could put their names to such a document is to confront an enigma. It is also to penetrate to the heart of that contradiction in attitude towards private revenge upon which a number of plays in the period, including Hamlet, are built” (1996: 10-11).

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the theaters seems to have made the customary compromise between a formal set of religious and moral ethics and an informal set of native convictions” (1971: 40). Revenge is a central theme in numerous plays of the period. One of the main influences on the Renaissance stage was Seneca and his tragedies of violence, cruelty and revenge. Revenge is also central in the Italian “novelles”, especially those of Bandello. They were known in England through compilations such as Belleforest’s Les Histories Tragiques (1559-70) or William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1567-68). The Elizabethan spectator would then be familiar with stories where jealousy, murder, brutality and revenge were the main ingredients. The Spanish Tragedy (1592) is known as the play that inaugurates a new theatrical genre in England, the revenge tragedy. However, we have to bear in mind that Kyd is just developing a tradition whose origin can be found in the late morality plays such as Comedy Concernynge Three Lawes (1535) by John Bale or the anonymous Respublica (1553). In both plays we can find characters such as Vindicta Dei or Nemesis, whose main purpose is to punish the Vice’s attitude.28 Therefore, the authors of revenge plays find in the Classics, in Italian texts and in the English theatrical tradition a great source of inspiration and turn these tragedies into one of the most popular types of plays at the time. Apart from The Spanish Tragedy, the Ur-Hamlet and Hamlet, the most popular revenge tragedies were Titus Andronicus (1594), Antonio’s Revenge (1599) and The Malcontent (1604) by Marston, Hoffman (1602) by Chettle, The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606-07) and The Atheist’s Tragedy (1607-11) by Tourneur, Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois (1610) by Chapman and Valentinian (1610-14) by Fletcher. Returning to Belsey’s article, we must say that, first of all, she points out that in the revenge plays of the period, such as for example The Spanish Tragedy or Titus Andronicus, the ruler’s incapacity to apply the law urges the offended subject to seek revenge. In other cases, such as in Antonio’s Revenge, The Revenger’s Tragedy or Hamlet, the head of state is the offender. Therefore, and paradoxically, in order to achieve justice, the avenger must take an unjust action. He breaks the law since no one is entitled to administer justice except the state. The vacillations of the avenger depend 28

At the end of the fifteenth century the allegorical character of the Morality plays was progressively secularised. These new plays were called Interludes and had, in many cases, as their protagonist, a character known as the Vice, whose dramatic origin we can find in the vices of the Morality plays. This Vice was a mischievous, grotesque, comical, manipulative, witty, sardonic and very popular character. For more information about the Morality Plays and the Interludes see Literatura inglesa hasta el siglo XVII (2002: 140-47).

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on such discrepancy between revenge and justice. In Hamlet, though conscience “make cowards of us all” (3.1.83) and can stop action, its power could also be obliterated in order to allow the avenger to act. Belsey alludes to Laertes’s following lines in order to illustrate such abandonment of conscience: Laertes

To hell, allegiance, vows to the blackest devil, Conscience and grace to the profoundest pit! I dare damnation. To this point I stand, That both the worlds I give to negligence, Let come what comes; only I’ll be reveng’d Most throughly for my father. (4.5.131-36)

Following the Senecan way, the discourse of revenge is linked to horror and violence. We hear Hamlet say, for example, “Now could I drink hot blood, / And do such bitter business as the day / Would quake to look on” (3.2.351-53) and Claudius remark that “Revenge should have no bounds” (4.7.127). However, Belsey observes, this “act of vengeance, in excess of justice, a repudiation of conscience, hellish in its mode of operation, seems to the revenger (and to the audience?) an overriding imperative” (113). Despite the fact that Christians had to follow the biblical dictate that ordered the subjects to be patient: “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord” (Rom. 12: 19), the offence must be penalised and cruelty must be eradicated. Revenge in Hamlet, says Belsey, turns into a political and not just a moral question. Claudius is envisioned not just as the murderer of Hamlet’s father but also of Hamlet’s king and as a political usurper. Hamlet then justifies his revenge by telling Horatio: Hamlet

Does it not, think thee, stand me now upon – He that hath kill’d my king and whor’d my mother; Popp’d in between th’election and my hopes; Thrown out his angle for my proper life, And with such cozenage – is’t not perfect conscience To quit him with this arm? And is’t not to be damned To let this canker of our nature come In further evil? (5.2.63-70)

As Belsey observes, this question, as many others in the play, is not answered and that increases the sense of ambiguity about the validity of revenge. Hamlet’s reflections describe revenge not as a necessary equivalent to badness and damnation, but, on the contrary, as the only way to efface evil, as the only way to recover order. Damnation is seen in these lines,

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not as a result of Hamlet’s thoughts of suicide or vengeance, but as the consequence of not taking revenge and killing Claudius.29 The binary opposition between right and wrong, good and evil is then deconstructed in these lines. Is revenge, viewed as an unjust action in order to search for justice, right or wrong? The blurring of boundaries is also stated in Hamlet’s words to the Ghost: Hamlet

Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d, Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, Be thy intents wicked or charitable, Thou com’st in such a questionable shape That I will speak to thee. (1.4.40-44)

The confusion about the nature of the Ghost, common in these plays, could be compared to the confusion about the nature of revenge since, as Belsey remarks, “to uphold the law revengers are compelled to break it. The moral uncertainty persists to the end” (116). For Belsey, Hamlet is a clear example of a play that deals with the political debate about the legitimacy of vengeful acts at the time. That is, the debate about the relationship between passive and Christian obedience, divine will, the monarch’s authority and the subject’s autonomy to act against injustice. On the one hand, Belsey observes that, since revenge plays usually condemn revenge, their discourse could be located within a political orthodoxy that did not allow the subject to act when the king did not follow his legal obligations. However, these plays, by pointing out the contradictions that evolved around the theme of revenge and by offering a debate on the current political theory about the subject’s autonomy, “throw into relief the social and political weaknesses of this ethical and political position” and also “participate in the installation of the sovereign subject, entitled to take action in accordance with conscience and on behalf of law” (116). That is, though on the one hand the revenge play could be a reinforcement of royal power it also presents moments of transgression by opening the possibility for the subject to challenge authority by administering justice in his own way. The stage was then a location where new and emergent discourses, which opposed the dominant ones, could be given voice. In his book Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (1986), the new historicist Leonard Tennenhouse also examines Hamlet from a political point of view. His main purpose is to show how ideas about political power are embedded within the play. Tennenhouse portrays 29

See notes to line 68 in The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Hamlet (2003: 240).

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Hamlet as a play that shows a state “torn between two competitors” (88), between Hamlet and Claudius. To Tennenhouse, neither of them is a legitimate successor since both attack the aristocratic body. Taking into consideration a patrilineal system of descent, Hamlet, who is also drawn as the favourite of the people (4.3.4), would be the rightful successor on the Danish throne. On the other hand, and following a matrilineal system of descent, Claudius has also the right to the crown since he is married to Gertrude. But he has achieved such a position through force. However, Tennenhouse remarks, despite the fact that Claudius’s attack on the aristocratic body is obvious since he has committed fratricide, regicide and incest, he could have legitimised his power through displays of power. Throughout his essay, Tennenhouse establishes a continuous comparison between Hamlet and the history plays since he finds that these genres are linked through the political theme. In this case, he reminds us of the way illegitimate monarchs in the history plays pronounce lawful their succession through spectacles and rituals of power such as, for example, rituals of forgiveness that highlight the king’s benevolence and cover the question of their right to rule.30 However, in Hamlet, Claudius’s power is not sanctioned by these means. On the contrary, Claudius’s image as a bloody usurper is reinforced by Hamlet. The illegitimacy of his power is not masked as in the history plays through rites of power. In contrast, Claudius is revealed as: Hamlet

A murderer and a villain, A slave that is not twentieth part the tithe Of your precedent lord; a vice of kings, A cutpurse of the empire and the rule, That from a shelf the precious diadem stole, And put it in his pocket. (3.4.97-102)

In the same way, the popular support that also helps to authorise royal power is not on Claudius’s side. It is on Hamlet’s as I have already mentioned, and also on Laertes’s (4.5.102-108) as it was on the side of the heroes of the history plays. Tennenhouse analyses the play-within-the-play in Hamlet as “part of the official rituals of state” (91). The critic observes how this staging is aimed to pinpoint a perturbation within the aristocratic body. Following Foucault’s assertion in his influential work Discipline and Punish (1977)

30 On political legitimacy in the history plays see Literatura inglesa hasta el siglo XVII (2002: 324-35, 330-31).

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that “in criminal matters the establishment of truth was the absolute right and the exclusive power of the sovereign” (1991: 35), Tennenhouse considers that when Hamlet is staging the play, he is not behaving as an avenger, but as a future sovereign trying to uncover the truth. Shakespeare offers him the state’s power to detect and castigate Claudius’s offence against the king’s body, symbol of the whole body politic. Hamlet must turn the performance into a spectacle of punishment in order to establish his authority as a monarch. With the performance Hamlet wants to recreate Claudius’s crime and therefore exert his legitimate right to the crown: Hamlet

I’ll have these players Play something like the murder of my father Before mine uncle. I’ll observe his looks, I’ll tent him to the quick. If a do blench, I know my course. (2.2.547-51)

However, Tennenhouse considers that Hamlet fails to make his staging a spectacle of punishment. First, because it is not really an official ritual of state and therefore truth turns into a mere conjecture. Second, because Hamlet does not show the truth through political action but through “the purely symbolic plane of thought and art” (92). This fact reinforces Hamlet’s inability to rule and to take action. His force is in the intellect, in his reflective mind, not in his actions. But above, all, Tennenhouse argues, the staging does not really reflect the murderous death of Hamlet’s father. The Murder of Gonzago is the crime of a nephew against his uncle, not of a brother against his own brother (3.2.221). Against what it has traditionally been pointed out, Tennenhouse does not consider that this fact is alluding to Hamlet’s plans to kill Claudius. He believes that by diverging from the historical source on which the plot of The Murder of Gonzago is based, where the murderer was not the victim’s nephew,31 Shakespeare is comparing the nature of Hamlet’s revenge with Claudius’s crime. That is, through the play-withinthe-play, Hamlet tries to publicly denounce Claudius’s cruel assassination of his father by showing a story in which a nephew is killing his uncle. For Tennenhouse, Shakespeare is obviously identifying the illegitimacy of both, Claudius’s and Hamlet’s attacks on the aristocratic body. Both attacks represent an assault against the whole state:

31

See section on Textual Analysis.

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Shakespeare equated Hamlet’s punishment with Claudius’s crime. This is to say that both acts of violence assault the sovereign’s body rather than establish the absolute power of the aristocratic body over that of its subject. Both turn out to be self-inflicted wounds. As the play concludes by heaping up the bodies of the royal family where the banquet scene should have been, this truth materialises: that the murder of one member of the aristocracy by another is an assault on the entire body, in other words, an act of suicide. (92)

Since both Hamlet and Claudius wound the body politic, neither of them appear, according to Tennenhouse, as the legitimate sovereign. Hamlet’s aggression against the state is also reflected in the language he uses after the staging of the play, says Tennenhouse. The critic observes how the Senecan rhetoric of revenge that Hamlet appropriates (3.2.34953) associates him with Claudius’s recurrent criminal acts that turn his ruling practices into a Senecan tragedy. Also, Hamlet’s language of destruction differentiates his actions from the displays of power used to legitimise power in the history plays. But for Tennenhouse, the similitude between both genres of tragedy and history play lies in the fact that, in both, Shakespeare uses the image of the queen’s two bodies: the natural and the politic by highlighting the fact that an assault on the monarch’s body is an attack on the whole state.

Elaine Showalter: Feminist Approach to Hamlet In her essay “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism” (1985) Elaine Showalter32 begins her study by offering a revision of feminist analyses of Ophelia. According to French feminist theory,33 the analysis of Ophelia shows us how patriarchal discourse represents the feminine as synonymous with “madness, incoherence, fluidity, or silence” (1993: 78). Ophelia represents lack, nothingness in the following dialogue: Ophelia Hamlet Ophelia Hamlet

I think nothing my lord. That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs. What is, my lord? Nothing. (3.2.104-107)

32 See information about “Anglo-American criticism: Kate Millet and Elaine Showalter” in section 2.4.1. 33 See information about “French Criticism: Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva” in section 2.4.1.

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French feminist criticism would point out the fact that “nothing” in Elizabethan slang referred to the female sexual organs. According to Luce Irigaray, for men women’s sexual organs “represent the horror of having nothing to see” (in Showalter 79). Since male sexuality, the phallus, is symbol of power, of speech, of authority, Ophelia’s sexual organs are nothing, they represent the lack of the phallus, the absence of power, thought and speech. Later on a Gentleman will say that Ophelia’s speech is “nothing” (4.5.7). As Showalter remarks, “Ophelia’s story becomes the Story of 0 – the zero, the empty circle or mystery of feminine difference, the cipher of female sexuality to be deciphered by feminist interpretation” (79). Showalter considers that, though there are many interesting elements in this approach, by turning Ophelia into a symbol of absence this type of analysis espouses women’s marginality. Other critics, such as David Leverenz in “The Woman in Hamlet”, consider Ophelia’s story as a reflection of the repressed feelings of Hamlet. Leverenz’s argument highlights the fact that Hamlet’s aggressive attitude towards Ophelia mirrors the protagonist’s rejection of his own womanish inability to act. Women in general in the play, and Ophelia in particular, represent all that men cast aside. Showalter considers that this other type of examination of Ophelia downgrades her as a mere image of male experience. Some other feminist critics such as Carol Neely consider that feminist critics must speak for Ophelia, must tell her story. However, some other feminist critics such as Lee Edward state that it is difficult to reconstruct her story from the text since “we can imagine Hamlet’s story without Ophelia, but Ophelia literally has no story without Hamlet” (in Showalter 78). Showalter opposes this position and considers that Ophelia has a story of her own that she, as a feminist critic, can tell: the history of her representation. Ophelia’s invisibility and subordination to Hamlet in many critical texts is paradoxical if we take into account the fact that she “is probably the most frequently illustrated and cited of Shakespeare’s heroines” (78). She has been constantly made visible in literature, in popular culture or in painting. In her essay Showalter analyses “English and French painting, photography, psychiatry, and literature, as well as theatrical production” (80) and she shows, first, how these cultural representations present a link between female madness and female sexuality. Second, that there are multiple parallelisms between Ophelia’s different types of representation and the evolution of psychiatric theory. Third, the relevant influence of the different ways actresses have played Ophelia on feminist criticism. And finally, the differences between a male and a female representation of Ophelia. Her study, Showalter acknowledges, blends French feminist concepts and theories related to

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the female body and the female language and the more historical and critical approach of the American feminist criticism. Showalter observes that Ophelia has traditionally been analysed in iconographic terms always related to her femininity. That is, whereas Hamlet’s madness was metaphysical and cultural, Ophelia’s is a result of her female nature. Ophelia offers us Elizabethan conventions of female insanity traditionally linked with very specific messages about women and sexuality. Her white dress implies her virginal nature and contrasts with Hamlet’s black attire. The flowers on her head suggest, says Showalter, “the discordant double images of female sexuality as both innocent blossoming and whorish contamination” (81). The act of giving her flowers away could point to her sexual deflowering. Her disarranged hair meant on stage that she was mad or had been sexually violated and it denotes sensuality. Her bawdy songs and extravagant language signal female challenge to the patriarchal norm. Drowning has traditionally been the symbol of female death, of the returning to the female element. As Showalter remarks, “water is the profound and organic symbol of the liquid woman whose eyes are so easily drowned in tears, as her body is the repository of blood, amniotic fluid, and milk” (81). Whereas woman is symbol of fluidity, man corresponds to aridity. During the Elizabethan period a woman showing Ophelia’s symptoms would have been diagnosed with female love melancholy or erotomania. Whereas male melancholy was related to intellectual brilliancy, female melancholy was biological and emotional.34 Therefore, Ophelia’s madness was attributed to love melancholy and from 1660 the most acclaimed actresses representing Ophelia where those who were thought to have had love disappointments. During the eighteenth century, violence in the mad scene was omitted on stage, the emphasis on female sexuality was diminished and female love melancholy was sentimentalised and more decorously represented. Ophelia was seen as Samuel Johnson described her in his general observations to Hamlet. That is, as “the young, the beautiful, the harmless, and the pious” (1998: 204). Even on some occasions Ophelia’s bawdy language resulted in the cutting of many of her lines. Sometimes Ophelia’s part was censored and instead of being played by an actress she was, on occasions, played by a singer. 34 Latham points out this intellectual nature of male melancholy: “he melancholy man, says Sir Thomas Overbury is, ‘a strayer from the drove ... His imagination is never idle, it keeps his mind in a continuall motion, as the poise of a clock: he winds up his thoughts often, and as often unwinds them ... He’le seldome be found without the shade of some grove, in whose bottome a river dwels ... He thinkes businesse, but never does any: he is all contemplation, no action. He hews and fashions his thoughts, as if he meant them to some purpose; but they prove unprofitable, as a piece of wrought timber to no use” (2001: xlvii).

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During the romantic period Ophelia is a woman who “drowns in feeling” (Showalter 1993: 83) and the madwoman was linked to issues such as sexual victimisation, affliction and extreme stirring feelings. Showalter points out how the dazzling visual way the Irish actress Harriet Smithson played Ophelia in Paris in 1827 influenced the way Ophelia was acted for the next 150 years: In the mad scene, she entered in a long black veil, suggesting the standard imagery of female sexual mystery in the gothic novel, with scattered bedlamish wisps of straw in her hair. Spreading the veil on the ground as she sang, she spread flowers upon it in the shape of a cross, as if to make her father’s grave, and mimed a burial, a piece of stage business which remained in vogue for the rest of the century. (83)

Harriet Smithson as Ophelia in Hamlet

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Eugène Delacroix, La Mort d’Ophélie, 1844, Louvre, Paris

John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851-1852

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Showalter remarks the fact that for the Romantics, Ophelia had to be looked at as a piece of art. Claudius’s following lines stress Ophelia’s pictorial nature: “poor Ophelia / Divided from herself and her fair judgment, / Without the which we are pictures” (4.5.83-85). Showalter emphasises the fact that Smithson’s performance was the inspiration for a series of Delacroix’s pictures from 1830 to 1850 in which he shows the romantic concern about female sexuality and madness. Delacroix’s lithographs prepare for the later interest in the erotic rapture and the hysteric studied for example by Freud and also for the recurrence of the drowning scene in Pre-Raphaelites paintings such as the famous Ophelia depicted by John Everett Millais. Showalter points out that these paintings were part of a multiplicity of representations in nineteenth-century literature, psychiatry, drama and art in which there was an obvious link between madness and women. In the asylums, for example, Ophelia was taken as a model for adolescent hysteria in direct connection with sexual instability. Ophelia was considered as “a copy from nature” (86) and, as one of the superintendents of one asylum stated, in the wards one could find many Ophelias, that is, young pale beautiful girls singing interruptedly in fantastic dresses. Medical textbooks presented drawings of women resembling Ophelia, professional journals were illustrated with photographs of patients dressed and decked with Ophelia-like dresses and garlands, some of them were even hypnotised and ordered to play on the role of Shakespearean heroines such as Ophelia and their performances were captured on camera. Even actresses playing Ophelia were recommended to go to the asylums to enrich their performances. Showalter also examines the way Ophelia was represented by Victorian feminist revisions. She cites Mary Cowden Clarke’s The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (1852) where, by imagining Ophelia as a girl seduced and sometimes abused by her half-brother Ulf, the author seems to present “a pre-Freudian speculation on the traumatic sources of a female sexual identity” (89). Showalter also mentions Ellen Terry’s “daring and unconventional” (88) performance of Ophelia in 1878. She plays Ophelia from a feminist point of view presenting the character as a sexually intimidated and terrified woman. She was the first actress not to dress in white. Showalter remarks on the fact that whiteness in Ophelia signified for symbolists like Mallarmé “transparency, an absence that took on the colors of Hamlet’s moods” (89). In order to challenge Ophelia’s traditional invisibility, many actresses stressed Ophelia’s power on stage by wearing black, Hamlet’s colour.

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At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new discourse about Ophelia emerged, the female one as opposed to the male one. Showalter cites Bradley’s following statement in Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) as proof of the Victorian male tradition about Ophelia: “a large number of readers feel a kind of personal irritation against Ophelia; they seem unable to forgive her for not having been a heroine, and they fancy her much weaker than she was. They think she ought to have been able to help Hamlet to fulfil his task” (1992: 135).35 But Showalter also names a series of actresses whose views gave a new image of Ophelia as a strong and intelligent woman. Additionally, in women’s paintings of the time Ophelia is portrayed as “an inspiring, even sanctified emblem of righteousness” (89). Showalter also alludes to Freudian views of Ophelia. For example, Ernest Jones’s statement in Hamlet and Oedipus (1949) that Ophelia was “very aware of her body” (139) was the inspiration to many interpretations of the character as a promiscuous woman who even had sexual relations with Hamlet. Another extravagant Freudian analysis considers that incest is central in both Hamlet and Ophelia since the former is specially attached to his mother and the latter to her father. This analysis of Ophelia has been materialised on stage since 1950. Since the 1960s her insanity has been treated from a medical and biochemical perspective, and it has been compared to schizophrenia. From this perspective, Ophelia is then considered on stage a mere “graphic study of mental pathology” (Showalter 1993: 91) that silences her. However, since the 1970s feminism considers Ophelia’s madness as synonymous with resistance against the familial and social orders and gives her a voice that speaks a language different from the patriarchal one. Showalter singles out Melissa Murray’s play Ophelia, which she considers the most extreme reflection of these ideas on stage. In this play, Ophelia “becomes a lesbian and runs off with a woman to join a guerrilla commune” (91). Showalter remarks how the “defiant ideological gesture” (91) proposed by this production is the type of message feminist criticism should aim to transmit.

35 Bradley opposes such a view about Ophelia. He describes her as of a childlike nature, innocent, ignorant but able to feel the beauty of Hamlet’s mind, frightened but not weak since he finds in her signs of unselfishness and strength when helping to find out the mystery of Hamlet’s behaviour. He considers Ophelia a subordinate character for Shakespeare’s purposes: “If she had been an Imogen, a Cordelia, even a Portia or a Juliet, the story must have taken another shape. Hamlet would either have been stimulated to do his duty, or (which is more likely) he would have gone mad, or (which is likeliest) he would have killed himself in despair. Ophelia, therefore, was made a character who could not help Hamlet, and from whom on the other hand he would not naturally feel a passion so vehement or profound as to interfere with the main motive of the play” (1992: 135).

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Showalter concludes her essay by underlining the fact that the different interpretations of Ophelia throughout the centuries have been the result of different ideological stances. The different attitudes towards women and madness have shaped the various descriptions of Ophelia’s nature. Showalter infers then that “there is no ‘true’ Ophelia for whom feminist criticism must unambiguously speak, but perhaps a Cubist Ophelia of multiple perspectives, more than the sum of all her parts” (92).

3.3. TEXTUAL ANALYSIS 3.3.1. Hamlet and Metatheatricality Hamlet is a play that is constantly referring to itself as a theatrical artefact. In section 1 we have already mentioned the allusions to the war of the Theatres, the children’s companies (2.2.310-33) and the connotations of the conversation between Polonius and Hamlet about the former’s role as Caesar in a performance of Julius Caesar (3.2.87-94). There are numerous references to essential elements relating to the Elizabethan theatre such as the companies, the situation of the actors (2.2.486), the debate about dramatic genres at the time (2.2.363-67)36, the boy actors (2.2.387-91), acting techniques (3.2.1-36), the audience (3.2.9; 21; 33), the clowns (3.2.31-36) and the costumes (3.2.250-51). We even find references to the Globe Theatre itself (1.5.96-97; 2.2.333). But, on a deeper level, we will see how most of these theatrical self-references reproduce many of the play’s basic motifs. In the first conversation we witness between Hamlet and Gertrude in 1.2. the prince rejects the discrepancy between appearances and reality. After his mother asks him, since he accepts that his father’s death is a natural thing, “why seems it so particular with thee?” (1.2.75), Hamlet answers: Hamlet

36

Seems madam? nay it is, I know not seems. ‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forced breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected haviour of the visage, Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,

See note for line 365 in The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of the play (2003: 147). For an interesting debate on the isssue of Elizabethan generic categories see Jane E. Howard, “Shakespeare and Genre” (1999).

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That can denote me truly. These indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play, But I have that within which passes show – These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (1.2.76-86)

In Hamlet’s view, man is an actor that can perform a certain role by dressing in the right clothes and by showing the right feelings. However, his pain cannot be expressed by any outward expression since his pain is inexpressible. In his words, we observe a clear rejection of pretence and dissembling. However, paradoxically, after his encounter with the Ghost, Hamlet decides that the only way he has to carry out his revenge is by playing “actions that a man might play”, that is, by feigning to be mad and by putting “an antic disposition on” (1.5.172). Thus, Hamlet, metaphorically, plays the role of an actor in the play. But we also see Hamlet literally performing as a real actor when he recites the beginning of Pyrrhus’s story (2.2.408-22). Hamlet immerses himself in the world of the theatre since he considers that, through art, he will attain the real truth of life. Through the emotional effect provoked by a play he will “catch the conscience of the king” (2.2.558). For Hamlet, actors are “the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time” (2.2.481). Since his plans shape the action of the whole play, Hamlet changes such “chronicles” not just by taking the role of an actor, but also of a playwright. For example, on the voyage to England, Hamlet devises Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s deaths by acting as a playwright who changes the plot of another play not written by him but by Claudius: Hamlet

Being thus benetted round with villainies, Or I could make a prologue to my brains, They had begun the play. I sat me down, Devised a new commission, wrote it fair. (5.2.29-32)37

Hamlet’s role as an author is materialised when he asks the players to include some lines written by himself in the play they will perform for the court (2.2.493-95). There has been an unresolved critical debate about which the lines are that Hamlet introduces in the play. What is certain is that, since the play is intended to verify the Ghost’s revelations, these lines are probably aimed at reinforcing the theme of his mother’s sexual relations with Claudius and the picture of a king’s treacherous murder.

37

“Or” means here “before”.

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Before the actual performance, Hamlet also instructs the players about the way they have to play. He asks them to reject an artificial and stylised way of acting full of stock postures, gestures and reactions. Instead, they must adopt a more naturalistic way of performance ruled by “temperance” (3.2.6) and “smoothness” (7). Hamlet’s words reflect a change in the Elizabethan dramatic techniques at the beginning of the seventeenth century. As Andrew Gurr points out, “personation”, that is, a “new art of individual characterisation” (1999: 99), was being developed. In 1612, Heywood, in his Apology for Actors, stated that the actor had “to qualify everything according to the nature of the person personated: for in overacting tricks, and toiling too much in the antic habit of humours, men of the ripest desert, greatest opinions, and best reputations, may break into the most violent absurdities” (in Jenkins 1982: 499). However, the conditions in which the players had to work did not allow them to perform in such a natural way since, as Gurr remarks, Theatrical shorthand in the conventions of action that mimed the internal passion must have been essential to the Elizabethan actor. The repertory was hardly ever the same two days running, and the opportunities for rehearsal can have been few in comparison with modern standards. With a part in every play, the leading players can have had little time for doing more while studying their parts than the essential learning of the lines ... The temptation in such circumstances to introduce stock poses must have been strong, and would have been reinforced by the practice of allocating parts according to acting types. Such a procedure would have reduced the strain on the actor’s ability to `personate´ and left him to concentrate properly on his memory. (1999: 103)

Observe how Shakespeare integrates his play within the theatrical debates of its time and how he reflects in Hamlet’s words his own theatrical concerns. Notice how in 3.2.14-36, Hamlet makes references to common Renaissance ideas about the theatre which were adopted from the Classics. He mentions, for example, the Aristotelian and Horatian idea that players have “to suit the action to the word, the word to the action” (3.2.15) or the Ciceronian belief that drama is an image of actual life. In this case, this theatrical maxim acquires new significance since The Mousetrap is not merely an exact reflection of life, based on Claudius’s assassination of King Hamlet, but also an instrument that will have an essential role in fashioning the future events in the lives of the members of the Danish court. Hamlet also refers to the discrepancy between what the “unskilful” (21) groundlings liked to see on stage and what “judicious” (22) scholars

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considered appropriate.38 Moreover, he alludes to the traditional practice of some clowns who did not limit their performance to their lines and added certain gestures or words to the play in order to make the audience laugh.39 Although critics, such as Jenkins, consider that Hamlet’s words reflect Shakespeare’s ideas about how players should act, the attack on the groundlings, who were seeing the performance, is so bitter that these words may have been intended to be taken ironically. If that were the case, these theatrical views could also be taken as Shakespeare’s attack on those who, like Ben Jonson, strictly followed neo-classical dramatic rules when writing their plays while forgetting about the audience’s tastes, which was what made the plays successful and profitable. Hamlet appears as an actor and playwright, but also as a sharer in a company of players. When The Mousetrap is interrupted and Claudius leaves the room, Hamlet considers that the performance has been a success since it has finally caught “the conscience of the king” (2.2.558). We witness then this conversation between Hamlet and Horatio: Hamlet

Horatio Hamlet

Would not this, sir, and a forest of feathers, if the rest of my fortunes turn Turk with me, with Provincial roses on my razed shoes, get me a fellowship in a cry of players? Half a share. A whole one I. For thou dost know, O Damon dear, This realm dismantled was Of Jove himself, and now reigns here A very, very – pajock. (3.2.250-58)40

After the play’s success, says Hamlet to Horatio, and if things go wrong in his life, he could at least become a sharer in a company of players, that is, a joint owner of the company and thus participant in its profits. Halfsharers were also permitted and Horatio’s answer implies that the play’s success was not just Hamlet’s achievement but also the players’. But when Hamlet answers back to Horatio: “A whole one I” (254) his words immediately switch back to the central personal - and also political - issue of the play. We observe then how the prince is now seeing himself not as

38 He might be referring to scholars such as Philip Sidney and his Defense of Poesy (1595) and George Puttenham and his work The Art of English Poesie (1589). See Literatura inglesa hasta el siglo XVII (2000: 193-98; 211). 39 Richard Tarlton and William Kempe were two of the most famous Elizabethan actors in the role of clowns. For more information about them, see http://search.eb.com/shakespeare/ ind_bio.html. 40 See notes for these lines in The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition (2003: 177).

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a sharer of a company of players but as a central participant in the political events of the realm. The theatrical company is now transformed in Hamlet’s imagination into the Danish court. That is, Denmark, once ruled by Jove, Hamlet’s father, is now dominated by “a pajock”, that is, a despicable person, Claudius. Hamlet’s role in “set[ting] it right” (1.5.190) makes him worthy, in metaphorical terms, of the “fellowship” he aspires to and not of “half a share.” His role and responsibility in the welfare of his country is not shared with anyone else, he is the only one to revenge his father’s death. In Hamlet we also find references to the Globe Theatre itself, where the play was performed. When the Ghost orders Hamlet to remember him the prince answers: “Ay thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat / In this distracted globe. Remember thee?” (1.5.96-97). Though Edwards rejects the fact that there is a triple pun in the term “globe”, it is more than probable that this is the case. First, “globe” is here referring to Hamlet’s mental situation. Imagine Hamlet touching his head while saying these lines. Second, Hamlet’s mind is a microcosm of the whole world in disorder or “out of joint” (1.5.189) that Hamlet has to repair (1.5.190). But also, and third, for an Elizabethan audience seeing Hamlet at The Globe, this reference would have been a clear metatheatrical allusion to the theatre itself, especially in a play pervaded by so much stage imagery. The fact that this term also refers to the Globe Theatre is confirmed by a later allusion to this theatre when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are telling Hamlet about the war of the Theatres and the competition between the children companies and the men’s companies. When Hamlet asks Guildenstern if the children’s companies are being successful, Rosencrantz answers: “Ay that they do my lord, Hercules and his load too” (2.2.333). On the theatre flag at the Globe Theatre, property of Shakespeare’s company, the playgoers could see Hercules bearing a globe on his shoulders. Since Hercules was the emblem of the Globe Theatre, Rosencrantz’s answer implies that the children’s companies are being even more successful than Shakespeare’s own company. After Rosencrantz’s answer, Hamlet responds with a comparison between such unusual theatrical situation and the disordered political events in Denmark: Hamlet

It is not very strange, for my uncle is king of Denmark, and those that would make mouths at him while my father lived give twenty, forty, fifty, a hundred ducats apiece for his picture in little. ‘Sblood, there is something in this more than natural, if philosophy could find out. (334-37)

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As we see, metatheatrical allusions are always interconnected with the main motifs of the play. We find another example of such interrelation when Hamlet orders Polonius to give a warm welcome to the players: Polonius Hamlet

My lord, I will use them according to their desert. God’s bodkin, man, much better. Use every man after his desert, and who shall scape whipping? (2.2.484-86)

Here we see one of those moments in the play in which Hamlet takes Polonius’s words literally in order to make a philosophical generalisation about the corrupted nature of humankind. But the term “whipping” also denotes that Shakespeare is again reflecting on the world of the theatre since, as Jenkins points out, whipping was “the statutory punishment for unlicensed players, who were held to be vagabonds” (1982: 268). An analysis of the First Player’s speech in 2.2. also proves that theatre self-referentiality is always linked with the main issues of the play. The Player’s speech in 2.2. is not just the popular narration at the time of the story of Pyrrhus’s assassination of Priam and the description of Hecuba’s pain. The elements of these accounts are closely linked to Hamlet’s personal situation. Pyrrhus’s story is a story of revenge. Since his father Achilles was killed by Priam’s son Paris, Pyrrhus is now, as Hamlet, the image of a son avenging his father’s death. But Priam is also viewed as the father image who is killed and Hecuba as the wife who painfully mourns her husband’s death. Hecuba’s reaction is obviously contrasted to Gertrude’s. Additionally, Pyrrhus’s becomes, as Hamlet does when he kills Polonius, the image of both the avenging hero and the murderer. The following lines describing Pyrrhus, before he kills Priam, seem to establish an obvious comparison between Pyrrhus’s and Hamlet’s inactivity: “So, as a painted tyrant, Pyrrhus stood, / And like a neutral to his will and matter, / Did nothing” (2.2.438-40). However, a few lines later Pyrrhus’s momentary indecision turns into an avenging decisiveness since “after Pyrrhus’ pause, / A rousèd vengeance sets him new a-work” (445-46). Pyrrhus is now likened to Laertes’s and Fortinbras’s resoluteness. Metatheatricality is so central in the play that it is the First Player’s performance that makes Hamlet abandon, at least momentarily, his passivity. When Hamlet realises that Hecuba’s pain provokes the First Player’s tears, his soliloquy “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” (50258) shows us how drama acquires different connotations for someone like Hamlet, who can relate what he is seeing on stage with his own personal situation. Also, the fact that Hecuba’s fictional sorrow can provoke such an apparent deep emotion in the player makes Hamlet aware of his poor

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reaction after the Ghost’s revelations and commands. After accusing himself of cowardice and meekness he suddenly decides to use the passionate effects of drama on the spectators in order to make them proclaim “their malefactions” (545). The plot of The Murder of Gonzago was based on an actual event in Italy. The Duque of Urbino, Francesco Maria I della Rovere, was poisoned by a lotion poured in his ears in 1538 by the barber-surgeon, who was incited by Luigi Gonzaga, a blood relative of the Duchess. As we can see, the name of the murderer has been used in Hamlet to name the victim of The Murder of Gonzago, though Lucianus, the murderer’s name, could have been inspired by Luigi. Bullough remarks the relevance of Urbino in Italian cultural life in the fifteenth century and refers to the description of its court by Baldassare Castiglione in Il Cortegiano, published in 1528 and translated by Thomas Hoby into English in 1561. Among the characters we find Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duque of Urbino. The influence of Hoby’s The Book of the Courtier on Elizabethan poetry and drama is proven and Shakespeare must have been influenced by Castiglione’s description of courtly manners when Ophelia describes Hamlet as “the courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword” (3.1.145), that is, as the image, according to Castiglione, of the perfect courtier.41 Finally, we can find a possible link between the source of the plot of The Murder of Gonzago and the Ghost. According to Bullough, the description of several details about the Ghost’s appearance such as its “majestical” (1.1.143) and “portentous figure”(109), with “a fair and warlike form” (47), “in complete steel” (1.4.52), “armed at point exactly, cap-a-pe”, (1.2.200) with hand on truncheon (204) and a helmet with its “beaver up” (229), a “sable silver’d” (241), a “grizzled” beard (239) and “Hyperion’s curls” (3.4.56) could make us think that Shakespeare knew the portrait of the Duque of Urbino by Titian as engraved in some editions of Paolo Giovio’s Elogia Virorum Bellica Virtute Illustrium. The engraving was based on the following portrait at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence:

41

See Literatura inglesa hasta el siglo XVII (2002: 210, 222).

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Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino 1536-38, Galleria degli Uffïzi, Florence

3.3.2. The Ghost The main literary source of the ghost in an Elizabethan revenge play is the Senecan ghost. The main dramatic purpose of this character was to serve as prologue or chorus of the whole play and thus make the audience aware of the circumstances out of which the main action of the play results; in that way, the ghost prepared the atmosphere of revenge and horror. The ghost was an artificial and constrained convention since it did not have an essential dramatic function in the play and on most occasions it had pagan traits since it was believed to come from Hades, the mythological realm of the dead. Hamlet’s ghost also serves as prologue to the play and it introduces the theme of revenge. However, its construction was a groundbreaking dramatic novelty at the time since certain elements of its characterisation are closely related to main themes of the play and because it is the one who sets the plot of the play in motion. Additionally, Shakespeare’s ghost was highly appealing to the playgoer

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since it was christianised and depicted by following the current popular, philosophical and theological beliefs about ghosts at the time. “Who’s there?” (1.1.1) is the first of many questions that pervade Hamlet. Barnardo’s inquiry could be applied to the questionable nature of the Ghost. There has been critical discrepancy about this issue. For example, as we have already noted, whereas for Bradley he is a “messenger of divine justice” (1992: 147) for Wilson Knight it is a demon, “the devil of the knowledge of death, which possesses Hamlet” (1995: 39). This divergence of ideas is due to the fact that the Ghost is characterised as an enigmatic figure. Shakespeare presents its identity as a problematic issue since he offers us different theories regarding the ghosts’ origin and their purposes on earth. Shakespeare makes his play participant of one of the social debates at the time. Through the different perspectives offered by Marcellus, Barnardo, Horatio and Hamlet about the nature of the Ghost, Shakespeare is exposing the different theories about the philosophical and theological ideas about ghosts during the Elizabethan period. Dover Wilson argues that there were three main theses about the existence and origin of ghosts in England that in the play correspond, first, to Marcellus and Barnardo’s view about the Ghost, second, to Horatio’s and third, to Hamlet’s. The first theory referred to the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory. Ghosts were then considered as spirits of the dead that came back from Purgatory in order to ask a pious soul to solve a problem so that the ghosts could find eternal rest. The Catholics believed that the souls that returned to this world took the shape of dressed phantoms of air visible to men. Marcellus’s following words, when he is attacking the Ghost, reflect such a belief: Marcellus

We do it wrong being so majestical To offer it the show of violence, For it is as the air, invulnerable, And our vain blows malicious mockery. (1.1.143-46)

References to the Purgatory are made even by the Ghost itself when it states that he has been Ghost

Doomed for a certain term to walk the night And for the days confined to fast in fires, Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purged away. (1.5.10-13)

Another clear reference to the Purgatory is Hamlet’s allusion to “Saint Patrick” (1.5.136), the patron saint of Purgatory.42 42 For a fascinating analysis of the idea about the Purgatory in Elizabethan England and in Hamlet see Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory (2001).

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A second vision about ghosts would be the Protestant one. Since the Church of England had explicitly rejected the Roman Catholic conception of Purgatory it did not consider that ghosts were spirits of the departed. The dead went either to heaven or to hell. For Protestants, ghosts could be angels but most of the time they were devils who took the shape of dead friends or relatives. Their aim was to abuse those to whom they appeared. This is the view accepted by (the future) King James I in his Daemonologie (1596). The third view about ghosts was the one promulgated by Reginald Scot in Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584). He believed in the existence of spirits but he considered that they do not take any kind of visual form. Ghosts are mere hallucinations of melancholy minds. This sceptical view is the one adopted by Horatio initially in the play.43 As Marcellus states, “Horatio says ’tis but our fantasy / And will not let belief take hold of him / Touching this dreaded sight twice seen of us” (1.1.23-25). Barnardo clearly rejects such an idea by exclaiming to Horatio “Is not this something more than fantasy?” (1.1.54). Barnardo, Marcellus and Hamlet do not doubt the existence of the Ghost. But Hamlet’s attitude towards its nature and origin is one of hesitation. From the very beginning, he is conscious of the fact that it could be a hellish spirit, however he is determined to talk to it if it takes his father’s shape (1.2.243-45). When he actually sees the Ghost, his words epitomise the play’s debate about its nature and even the contemporary uncertainty about the nature of the ghosts. Are they good or bad spirits?: Hamlet

Angels and ministers of grace defend us! Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d, Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, Be thy intents wicked or charitable, Thou com’st in such a questionable shape That I will speak to thee. I’ll call thee Hamlet ... (1.4.39-44)

Though he first considers the possible source of the Ghost as hell (1.5.93) he finally assures Horatio that it is “an honest ghost” (1.5.138). However, Hamlet’s certainty about the Ghost’s nature turns into a hesitancy that does not allow him to carry out his revenge. The Ghost could have been the devil in disguise and its design could be to harm him. Shakespeare also mentions in Hamlet’s following words the current theory that melancholy men were prone to see apparitions. Since he cannot be sure about the Ghost’s real intentions he has to verify Claudius’s participation in his father’s death by setting up the play: 43 Notice Horatio’s change of attitude regarding the nature of the Ghost before and after he sees it in 1.1.29 and 1.1.56-58.

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Hamlet.

The spirit that I have seen May be a devil, and the devil hath power T’assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps, Out of my weakness and my melancholy, As he is very potent with such spirits, Abuses me to damn me. I’ll have grounds More relative than this. The play’s the thing Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king. (2.2.551-58)

As we can see, the Ghost is here presented as an essential element within the dramatic structure of the play. The uncertainty about its nature leads Hamlet to devise new plans in order to check whether “it is a damned ghost that we have seen, / And my imaginations are as foul / As Vulcan’s stithy” (3.2.72-74)44. Despite the fact that Hamlet describes life after death as “the undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns” (3.1.79-80), denying in this case the good nature of the Ghost, Claudius’s reaction to the play finally makes Hamlet believe the Ghost’s accusations and he tells Horatio: “O good Horatio, I’ll take the ghost’s word for a thousand pound” (3.2.260-61). However, the nature of the Ghost is again called into question when in 3.4 the Ghost is presented in a different way. It is just Hamlet who sees it. Gertrude’s explanation of Hamlet’s reaction is that “this is the very coinage of your brain” (3.4.138). Again, Shakespeare alludes to the belief that melancholy men were liable to see hallucinations. The nature of the Ghost is so variable throughout the play that every single playgoer would recognise his or her own idea about the existence of ghosts at a certain point during the performance. What is clear is that, despite the fact that the play is setting an obvious debate about the nature and origin of ghosts, the dramatic existence and relevance of the Ghost is beyond doubt. It is central to the development of the play and especially to Shakespeare’s depiction of Hamlet’s mental functioning. The encounter with the Ghost, the remembrance of its murderous revelations and the assigned task of revenge are the centre of the entire dramatic action. The apparition of the Ghost is for example linked to Denmark’s political disorder. Horatio considers that “this bodes some strange eruption to our state” (1.1.69). The term “eruption” inaugurates one of the most important images in Hamlet, that is, the state as an infirm body is viewed as the metaphor for political corruption. Marcellus’s expression after Horatio’s question about the motive of the Ghost’s presence “something is rotten in 44

156).

See note for line 3.2.74 in The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of the play (2000:

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the state of Denmark” (1.4.90) confirms such an idea. Barnardo considers that the presence of the Ghost is due to Fortinbras’s intention to attack Denmark in order to recover his father’s lands (1.1.80-111). Notice how by relating the Ghost to the story of Fortinbras taking revenge for King Hamlet’s murder of his father, the play is clearly anticipating its main theme, that is, a son’s revenge of his father’s murder and its political implications. However, Fortinbras is described as an “unimprovèd mettle hot and full” (96). His resoluteness, and later on Laertes’s, will clearly contrast with Hamlet’s diffident nature. The Ghost is described as a sign of ill omen. Horatio describes the portents preceding Caesar’s death (114-25) and compares the Ghost’s apparition to one of them. That is, it is as a prophetic indication of negative events in their “country’s fate” (133), the “precurse of feared events” (121). Hamlet is the last one to confirm the idea that the Ghost’s presence is a clear sign that “all is not well” (1.2.254). It has been stated that the references to the eclipses were allusions to the fact that between 1598 and 1602 there were numerous solar and lunar eclipses. These were associated with Essex’s rebellion in February 1601. If this is the case, we can observe in what a subtle way Shakespeare alluded to the political issues of the Elizabethan reign. Hamlet’s conversation with the Ghost shapes, anticipates and reinforces several of the most important themes in the play. The Ghost’s description of King Hamlet’s death highlights the comparison between the king’s body and the body of the state. Hamlet’s father dies because Claudius pours a venom in his ear. The Ghost’s statement that “the whole ear of Denmark / Is by a forgèd process of my death / Rankly abused” (1.5.36-37) establishes an obvious link between the king’s body and the body politic. Taking this idea into account, the description of the decomposition of the king’s body provoked by the poison (70-73) must also be interpreted in political terms. By poisoning the king’s body, Claudius contaminates the state. Hamlet’s knowledge of the circumstances of his father’s death is also important since Hamlet’s resolutions in 3.3.73-96 will depend on it. Hamlet’s father dies, as the Ghost reveals, Ghost

Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled; No reckoning made, but sent to my account With all my imperfections on my head – Oh horrible, oh horrible, most horrible! (1.5.76-80)45

45 Jenkins’s note for line 1.5.77 in the Arden edition of the play is as follows: “Collectively, deprived of the last rites. Unhousel’d, not having received the ‘housel’ or Eucharist; unanel’d,

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That is, when Hamlet’s father is murdered, he dies without receiving the sacrament, confession or extreme unction. Thus, he dies in a sinful state. When Hamlet, after testing Claudius’s guilt in his father’s death, finds him praying, that is “in the purging of his soul” (3.3.85), he decides not to kill him because he would send him to heaven. Hamlet wishes for Claudius the same death that he gave his father, who was killed when he was “grossly, full of bread, / With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May” (3.3.80-81), that is, when he was not purified or prepared for death and ready to go to heaven. Hamlet decides to wait till the right moment comes to kill Claudius in an unpurified condition: Hamlet

Up sword, and know thou a more horrid hent, When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage, Or in th’incestuous pleasure of his bed, At game a-swearing, or about some act That has no relish of salvation in’t – Then trip him that his heels may kick at heaven, And that his soul may be as damned and black As hell whereto it goes. (3.3.88-95)

The Ghost’s words to Hamlet about Claudius’s sexual relationship with Gertrude (1.5.42-57) have been considered by critics such as Bradley, Wilson, Jenkins or Edwards as the first textual reference that points to Gertrude’s sexual relationship with Claudius before her husband’s death. Remember that that was the case in Belleforest’s text. Hamlet’s bleak mood and his aggressive attitude towards his mother in 3.4. could be explained not by the fact that she has married Claudius after her husband’s death but by the fact that she already was an adulteress when King Hamlet died. When Gertrude asks her sons “what have I done, that thou dar’st wag thy tongue / In noise so rude against me? (3.4.38-39), Hamlet’s answer alludes to her promiscuous and dissembling nature: Hamlet

Such an act That blurs the grace and blush of modesty, Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose From the fair forehead of an innocent love And sets a blister there, makes marriage vows As false as dicers’ oaths. (3.4.40-45)46

not having been anointed with holy oil (i.e. without extreme unction); disappointed, not having made proper ‘appointment’ ... or preparation, and hence referring inclusively to such rites (e.g. confession and absolution) as are not specified in the other two words” (1982: 220). 46 Notice the alliterations in these lines.

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Hamlet never accuses his mother directly of adultery but his words, the Ghost’s and his statement that Claudius “hath killed my king, and whored my mother” (5.2.64) seem to confirm that Claudius and Gertrude had sexual relations before the king died.47 In fact the reference to the blister on the forehead could have also been a direct allusion to prostitution since whores were traditionally branded on the forehead as punishment.48 If this were the case, Gertrude is described as a hypocrite and her attitude will shape Hamlet’s later reaction towards Ophelia. But we should also take into account different views about Gertrude’s nature such as Carolyn G. Heilbrun’s in her book Hamlet’s Mother and Other Women (1990). Heilbrun opposes the traditional idea that has seen in Gertrude “not one weakness, or passion in the Elizabethan sense, but a character of which weakness and lack of depth and vigorous intelligence are the entire explanation” (10). The critic believes that most critics, “unable to explain her marriage to Claudius as the act of any but a weak-minded vacillating woman, … fail to see Gertrude for the strong-minded, intelligent, succinct, and, apart from this passion, sensible woman that she is” (11). Heilbrun considers that Hamlet’s aggressive attitude against his mother is due mainly to the fact that her “passion” for Claudius “keeps him from the throne” (11). Heilbrun also rejects the idea that Gertrude was unfaithful to her husband before he died. She considers that it has been a traditional critical error not to take into account that the Elizabethan word “adultery,” however, was not restricted to its modern meaning, but was used to define any sexual relationship which could be called unchaste, including of course an incestuous one. Certainly the elder Hamlet considered the marriage of Claudius and Gertrude to be unchaste and unseemly, and while his use of the word “adulterate” indicates his very strong feelings about the marriage, it would not to an Elizabethan audience necessarily mean that he believed Gertrude to have been false to him before his death. It is important to notice, too, that the Ghost does not apply the term “adulterate” to Gertrude, and he may well have considered the term a just description of Claudius’ entire sexual life. (16)49

But what is certain is that the Ghost’s description of Gertrude as a “most seeming-virtuous queen” (1.5.46) and Hamlet’s assertion that “one may smile, and smile, and be a villain” (108) reinforce one of the key issues 47

In Hamlet it is never specified whether Gertrude was unfaithful to her husband before his death or not. But there are references, such as this one, that make us think that Hamlet considers that this could have been the case. 48 See also 4.5.119-20. 49 Another interesting feminist analysis of Gertrude is Rebecca Smith’s “A Heart Cleft in Twain: The Dilemma of Shakespeare’s Gertrude” (1980).

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in Hamlet. That is, the discordance between reality and appearance and the fact that everybody in Denmark, except Horatio, seems to be playing a role, at the same time that everybody acts as an audience, as a witness of everybody else’s actions. The Ghost’s revelations confirm Hamlet’s suspicions about his uncle’s nature. Hamlet is given the task of taking revenge, which he will have to carry out after the Ghost leaves him. Hamlet is left in an agitated state that makes him see the world as “out of joint” (1.5.189) and himself as “born to set it right” (190).

3.3.3. Ophelia and Hamlet The nature of the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia has traditionally been one of the mysteries of the play. For some critics, such as Dover Wilson, “the attitude of Hamlet towards Ophelia is without doubt the greatest of all the puzzles in the play, greater even than that of the delay itself” (1979: 101); for Bullough, “Hamlet’s relations with Ophelia are left mysterious” (1978: 51). For other critics, such as Jenkins, the relationship between Ophelia and Hamlet has a clear structural and dramatic role and he considers that the character of Ophelia “has generally been misunderstood” (1982: 149). This sections aims to explain, through a close reading of the scenes in which Ophelia and her relationship with Hamlet are central, the relevance that the connection between these two characters has within the whole construction of the play. Laertes, Polonius and Ophelia (Act 1 Scene 3) The first time we see Ophelia is in the third scene of Act 1. Before leaving for France, Laertes is warning her sister about Hamlet. Laertes does not deny Hamlet’s love for her, as Polonius will do later in the scene. Ophelia’s brother points out the political implications of such a relationship. In Laertes’s view, Hamlet’s responsibilities as a prince, and future king, oblige him always to think first of Denmark’s welfare and not about his own feelings towards Ophelia. Her social status does not make her suitable to be Hamlet’s wife. Laertes’s words establish a clear link between marriage and politics. That is, Hamlet’s personal decisions will affect the state’s political situation. Laertes

His greatness weighed, his will is not his own, For he himself is subject to his birth. He may not, as unvalued persons do, Carve for himself, for on his choice depends The sanctity and health of this whole state,

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239 And therefore must his choice be circumscribed Unto the voice and yielding of that body Whereof he is the head. Then if he says he loves you, It fits your wisdom so far to believe it As he in his peculiar sect and force May give his saying deed, which is no further Than the main voice of Denmark goes withal. (1.3.17-28)

The scene is pointing out one of the main issues in Hamlet. Namely, the correspondence between the union of Claudius and Gertrude and the sense of chaos in Denmark. Remember that from the beginning we are told by Marcellus: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (1.4.90). The health of the body politic depends on the legitimisation of the royal authority, of the lawfulness of its head. Denmark’s head, that is Claudius, is guilty of fratricide and incest. As we can see, the personal and the political are intimately linked. The illegitimate bond between Claudius and Gertrude provokes disorder in Denmark; Laertes considers that the bond between Hamlet and Ophelia would not bring, in the future, political order either. The centrality of the image of a healthy state makes this scene an essential component of a play which is permeated with terms that refer to diseases, rottenness and corruption. The image of a decayed nature also prevails in this scene. Hamlet’s love is compared to the ephemeral nature of a violet (1.3.7-10). Laertes advises Ophelia to keep her chastity by not opening her “chaste treasure” (31) and by keeping “out of the shot and danger of desire” (35) and compares his sister with a bud that can be easily corrupted and destroyed by a canker-worm or a caterpillar (39-40) – observe the sexual innuendo of such an image - and as the “morn and liquid dew of youth” (41) threatened by “contagious blastments” (42). These images reinforce some central themes of the play such as fleetingness, the inexorability of time and the fact that even the most beautiful and innocent thing can become corrupted. These images strengthen Hamlet’s vision of Denmark as “an unweeded garden / That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely” (1.2.135-37). Polonius’s advice to his daughter acquires different connotations. When Ophelia tells her father that Hamlet has “made me many tenders / Of his affection to me” (1.3.99-100), Polonius answers that Hamlet does not love her, he just desires her sexually (116) and defines his vows as “mere implorators of unholy suits” (129). In this context, the term “tender” is understood as an offer in connection with expressions of feelings such as love. However, the term “tender” is given a completely different meaning when expressed by Polonius, for whom it means an offer of money or

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other thing as payment when he states: “you have tane these tenders for true pay / Which are not sterling” (106-107). What for Ophelia is a love encounter, for Polonius is a mere commercial transaction. The terms “true pay” (106), “sterling” (107), “higher rate” (122), “brokers” (127) or “investments” (128) reinforce such monetary nature of Polonius’s intervention. If Laertes turns a love story into a political issue, now Polonius turns the image of Ophelia as a lover into a mere object of exchange. In a way, she turns into a prostitute, as she will be later treated by Hamlet. Love is then viewed as superficial, cold, frivolous, shallow. Love is also liable to corruption. Remember how this is exactly Hamlet’s idea about love after his mother marries his uncle. Shakespeare makes Polonius switch the meaning of Ophelia’s words in order to highlight certain themes that are central in the play. We find another example in the use of the term “fashion.” Ophelia tells her father that Hamlet has “importuned me with love / In honourable fashion” (110-11). Polonius answers: “Ay, fashion you may call it. Go to, go to” (112). Whereas for Ophelia “fashion” means “manner, way”, for her father it means “pretence or mere form.” For Polonius, Hamlet is just pretending to love her when what he wants is just a sexual encounter. Again, the relationship between reality and appearances, which is essential in Hamlet, is once more referred to in an apparently insignificant commentary by Polonius. Observe the importance of the multiplicity of meanings of the terms used by Shakespeare in every scene and how these terms make every single line of Hamlet an essential element that reinforces central themes of the play.

Hamlet and Ophelia – The closet-scene (Act 2 Scene 1) The encounter between Hamlet and Ophelia in the latter’s closet has been widely analysed by the critics. We could give an obvious explanation to this scene by asserting that Ophelia’s description of Hamlet (2.1.75-82) is that of the countenance of a man mad for love according to Elizabethan beliefs. That is the reason why Polonius deduces that Hamlet’s reaction is due to the “the very ecstasy of love” (100) and also to Ophelia’s rejection of his letters (106-109). However we still could ask ourselves whether Hamlet is feigning lunacy and just putting “an antic disposition on” (1.5.172) in order to make everybody believe he is mad or whether his reaction is a true demonstration of love-madness. Is he, once more, performing a role or is he just being himself? As with many of the questions presented by the play, we do not know. However, Jenkins gives us an interesting explanation of the significance of the encounter based on mythological references with which, not just Shakespeare, but also

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great part of the Elizabethan audience were familiar. Jenkins observes in Ophelia’s description of Hamlet’s parting with his eyes turned back upon herself (2.1.96-98) a possible allusion to Ovid’s description in the Metamorphoses of the moment Orpheus looks at Eurydice for the last time when escaping from hell: For why what had shee to complayne, onlesse it were of love Which made her husband backe agen his eyes uppon her move? Her last farewell shee spake so soft, that scarce he heard the sound, And then revolted to the place in which he had her found. (X, 65-68)50

According to Jenkins, this scene represents “Hamlet’s despairing farewell to Ophelia, and emblematically to his hopes of love and marriage” (1982: 462). Again, we cannot be sure about this interpretation of the scene, but it is important to have Jenkins’s theory in mind since the play is imbued with numerous mythological allusions that Shakespeare appropriates and manipulates to emphasise certain aspects of the play such as, in this case, Hamlet’s attitude towards women and love after her mother’s marriage to Claudius. A great number of Elizabethan playgoers, who had been trained in the grammar schools to memorise Ovid’s Metamorphoses would have quickly recognised these types of allusions. The nunnery-scene (Act 3 Scene 1) The reasons why Hamlet treats Ophelia as a prostitute in what has been called “the nunnery-scene” have constituted another source of critical debate. In this section we will focus our attention on Wilson’s explanation of Hamlet’s behaviour in this scene. That is, Wilson considers that Hamlet knows that Claudius and Polonius are watching them both behind the arras. Despite the fact that Wilson’s thesis has been rejected by later editors of the play such as Jenkins and Edwards,51 it should not be completely disregarded. Its value lies in the fact that it gives us an explanation based on the actual performance of the play and on the essential role of the stage directions. The reading of the play does not allow us to perceive certain elements that would have been obvious to the Elizabethan playgoer who was actually seeing what was happening on stage. 50

Eurydice was the wife of Orpheus. She was bitten by a snake and died. Orpheus followed her to the Underworld and convinced Hades to allow him to rescue his wife on the condition that he could not look round at her before he reached the upper world. He looked back and lost her forever. 51 See for example note for line 3.1.126 in The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Hamlet (2003: 161).

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Wilson finds the evidence of Hamlet’s knowledge of Polonius and Claudius’s plans in 2.2. Polonius tells Claudius that, since Hamlet “walks four hours together / Here in the lobby” (158-59), he will “loose his daughter to him” (160). For Wilson, Polonius’s words “here in the lobby” and his more than probable indication to the audience to look at the inner-stage while Claudius, Gertrude and himself were looking at the audience would have functioned as a stagedirection. Hamlet would enter the inner-stage from the door at the back reading a book while they were on the outer-stage. As Wilson then explains: Between the King’s question “How may we try it further?” and his resolve “We will try it” there lie eight lines of dialogue. They just give Hamlet time to enter the lobby, grow conscious of voices in the larger chamber beyond, pause for a moment beside the entrance thereto, compose his features, and come forward. But brief as the period is, it is long enough for him to take in the whole eavesdropping plot and to implicate Ophelia beyond possibility of doubt in his ears as one of his uncle’s minions. (1979: 107)

Wilson states that Polonius’s expression “I’ll loose my daughter to him” (2.2.160), which he finds in other plays by Shakespeare, would have been associated by an Elizabethan audience with the breeding of horses and cattle. A meaning that is reinforced by the expression used a few lines later by Polonius when he states that if Hamlet’s lunacy is not the result of his love for Ophelia, as he firmly declares, he will quit his office as an “assistant for a state” (163) and will “keep a farm and carters” (164) instead. Hamlet enters immediately after Claudius and Polonius’s conversation and Wilson considers that his words denote that he has been listening to it. It is the first time we witness Hamlet’s “antic disposition” and his superb control of witty, grim, grotesque and revolting puns. Observe how in this scene Hamlet plays the traditional role of the Fool, under whose apparent nonsense truth is hidden. First of all, he calls Polonius “fishmonger” (172). As Anne Barton states, Hamlet could be referring to the smell of corruption in the state, supported by Polonius (1996: 251). However, if we consider that “fishmonger” was also a name for a bawd and that, as Jenkins remarks, it was also used to name those men “whose daughter had a more than ordinary propensity to breed” (1982: 246) the sexual connotations are clear. Sexual references are also found in the term “carrion” (2.2.180), which referred not only to a dead carcass but also to live flesh available for sexual pleasure (Jenkins 246) and in the term “conception” (2.2.182). In order to understand the full meaning of Hamlet’s sexual innuendoes in these lines we must point out that there is also a pun on “sun” (179) meaning both “son” and “king”, already mentioned in 1.2.67.52 That is, the sun is alluding to Hamlet, prince 52

The sun was considered a royal emblem.

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of Denmark himself. Consequently, what Hamlet is telling Polonius is that as “the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a good kissing carrion” (2.2.179-80), a son, or a prince, that is, himself, can make his daughter breed. When he advises Polonius not to let Ophelia “walk i’th’sun” (182) he is obviously telling him not to “loose” his daughter to him. All these references, according to Wilson, make it obvious that Hamlet had overheard Polonius and Claudius’s conversation. If that were the case, Hamlet’s reaction in the nunnery-scene would acquire different connotations since what Hamlet is doing is consciously performing for an audience composed of Claudius and Polonius. By being aware of their presence, Hamlet can control and give shape to their conclusions about the reasons for his madness. If that is not the case, this scene, as we are now going to observe, presents a series of themes that strengthen central aspects of the play, which make Hamlet’s treatment of Ophelia a bit more comprehensible. Hamlet’s assertion that honesty is incompatible with beauty (3.1.107-14) and his conclusion that “now the time gives it proof” (114) could allude both to Ophelia’s complicity in Polonius’s plans and to Gertrude’s adultery. Hamlet’s treatment of Ophelia in this scene is a reflection of his attitude towards women in general after his mother’s marriage to Claudius.53 If we consider that Hamlet knows that Polonius and Claudius are hiding behind the arras, what Hamlet is doing is accusing Ophelia of betraying him, of being dishonest and of not being sincere and truthful. Once again Shakespeare is pointing out the opposition between reality and appearances reinforced by Hamlet’s allusion to Ophelia’s face-paintings (137) and his idea that “God hath given you one face and you make yourselves another” (137-38). Other elements in the scene whose significance would change if we accept the theory that Hamlet is just performing would be his attack on Polonius whom he calls a “fool” (128) and his assertion that “those that are married already, all but one shall live, the rest shall keep as they are” (142) as an obvious message to Claudius. Since Hamlet knows that the reason why they are spying on him is to find out the reason for his lunacy, he gives them one: Ophelia’s attitude has been what has made him mad (137-41). Also, the fact that he accuses himself of being “proud, revengeful, ambitious” (122) has an ironic undertone. He is probably making the king feel uncomfortable by showing himself as a clear political danger. But, this scene is also pointing, on a deeper level of signification, to other important issues that refer to central aspects of the play. “Honest” also means “chaste” in this scene, which has as a central theme Hamlet’s 53

See 1.2.146 and 3.2.134-35.

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rejection of marriage, sexuality and reproduction. Hamlet alludes to the unfaithful nature of women that turns their husbands into “monsters” (134), that is, into “horned cuckolds”, making a clear reference to Gertrude’s adulterous nature, a theme that obsesses him. But, in his conversation with Ophelia he is not referring to women’s sins but to the sinful nature of all humankind. His bleak view of life makes him believe that women can only become “breeder[s] of sinners” (119-20) such as himself, and that Ophelia’s only way of escaping from the world’s corruption is by going to a nunnery in order to avoid sexual temptation. Marriage then must be discarded (141).54 That way, the end of sexual relations will bring the end of sinful humankind. As we can see, Shakespeare offers in this scene different levels of signification. First, if we consider Wilson’s theory correct, we observe the ironic sense of Hamlet’s comments. Second, the sexual undertones are obvious, especially if we take the second meaning of “nunnery” at the time as a “house of ill fame” or “brothel.”55 Third, his desolation after his mother’s marriage to his uncle makes him present a negative view of women that causes him to reject Ophelia as his lover. And fourth, the ironic and sexual tones of the scene are also mingled with Hamlet’s disheartening view of the tones of human beings, which constitutes a central aspect of the play. Ophelia’s madness (Act 4 Scene 5): Songs and flowers Whereas Hamlet’s madness has a “method” (2.2.200), meaning that it is calculated and has an obvious purpose, Ophelia’s madness is real. Note how the contrast between these two different types of lunacy is set on stage in order to highlight the dissimilarities between them and to reinforce the complexity of Hamlet’s behaviour as opposed to Ophelia’s evident and true mental distraction. Ophelia’s madness, her songs and flowers, will incorporate a new world within the play, a simple, rural and pastoral world as opposed to the political and corrupted world of Elsinore. Her language will be mainly musical and songs will uncover for us the reasons for her

54 Observe how later in 3.4.40-45 Hamlet will again attack marital union when talking to Gertrude. Pay attention to the notes in The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition for these lines (2003: 188). 55 The sexual innuendoes and the consideration of Ophelia as a sexual object will continue in 3.2. when the play is being performed. Pay attention to the notes for lines 103 and 107 in The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition (2003: 169). “Lap” in lines 99 and 101 had a bawdy sense and “show” in line 126 is a pun on “shoe” which also referred to the woman’s sexual part. In line 225 “keen” also meant sexually sharp-set and manifesting intense desire and in line 226 “groaning” refers to the woman’s cry when losing her maidenhead. “Edge”, in the same line, alludes to man’s sexual desire or erection.

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mental state. Music turns then into Ophelia’s discourse in the play. Such a language has also hidden meanings that we have to dig up through a textual analysis.56 We are already advised of such a difficulty by the Gentleman who states that Ophelia “speaks things in doubt / That carry but half sense” (4.5.6-7). Madness and music liberate Ophelia from any rational control and offer us her real desires and feelings. The songs, which deal with death and love, alert us to the main reasons for her desperation; that is, Polonius’s death and Hamlet’s rejection. As Laertes rightly states, Ophelia’s songs will turn her “thought and affliction, passion, hell itself” (183) into “favour and prettiness” (184)57. Ophelia merges beauty with death in a world which is dominated by Hamlet’s idea of total dissolution and despair. The first song “How should I your true love know” (23-40) is about a woman who looks for her departed lover whom she finally considers as dead. The song finally turns into a funeral elegy and the singer laments the fact that the dead lover has not been appropriately mourned. As we see, death and love blend in this song. Ophelia addresses this song to Gertrude. The implications are obvious, Gertrude has been unable to distinguish her “true love” (23) from “another one” (24) and has failed to mourn her dead husband by marrying her brother-in-law. The second song “Tomorrow is Saint Valentine’s day” (48-66) deals with disappointed love and seduction. It is also significant that the song is addressed to Claudius, the play’s seducer. Once the man takes his lover’s honour he leaves her. As Jenkins states, this is the idea that “we have seen impressed upon her mind by her brother and her father ... Yet the irony is not that the singer of the song has suffered what they feared and it narrates, but that she has not. Hamlet, far from despoiling, has rejected her” (1982: 533). This song has several sexual references58 that are linked to the connotations of Ophelia’s assertion that “they say the owl was a baker’s daughter” (42). Apart from referring to a story of transformation and metamorphosis59, which can allude to her mental distress, Jenkins notes that, since owls were considered at the time to be birds that mourned the death of love and that as the owl’s cry was thought to announce disaster, Ophelia’s reference could also allude to the loss of maidenhead. The third song “They 56 For those interested in the feminist approaches that analyse music as a “feminine discourse” the following studies may be of interest: Leslie C. Dunn, “Ophelia’s Songs in Hamlet: Music, Madness, and the Feminine” (1994); Jacquelyn A. Fox-Good, “Ophelia’s Mad Songs: Music, Gender, Power”(1995); Toshiko Oshio, “Ophelia: Experience into Song” (1995). You can find abstracts of such essays at http://www.hamlet.com/ophelia.html. 57 “Thought” meaning “melancholy” and “favour” meaning “beauty”. 58 See notes for lines 61 and 62 in The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition (2003: 207). 59 See note for line 42 in The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition (2003: 206).

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bore him bare-faced on the bier” (164-66) and the fifth one “And will a not come again?” (185-94) are again mainly referring to Polonius’s death but also to love.60 The line “For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy” (181) belonged to a very popular song at the time. Robin could allude to Robin Hood and his relationship with Maid Marian, who delivered flowers in the May Games61 as Ophelia has just done. Shakespeare could be establishing a link here between Ophelia and Maid Marian. If this is the case, and if we take into consideration the fact that Maid Marian was associated with obscene jests and gestures, Ophelia’s obsession with sex seems to be evident. Also, “Robin” was used to name a man’s penis at the time. Not only do Ophelia’s songs express her feelings of desolation after her father’s death and Hamlet’s rejection but her fantasies about sex. As we mentioned above, sex was identified by Hamlet with sin, death and extinction and Ophelia’s songs make these same links. As we can observe, sex and pain are intimately connected in the play. Death is also closely related to nature and flowers in Hamlet. Death, madness, sex and also flowers are central to this scene. The other way Ophelia, who is described as the “rose of May” (157), has to communicate with the rest of the world is by distributing flowers to Gertrude, Claudius, Horatio and Laertes. The main problem with this scene is that we do not know the recipients of the flowers since we do not have stage directions to indicate it. But if we consider the emblematic meanings of the flowers at the time, we can deduce that the rosemary, symbol of remembrance, and the pansies, symbols of thought, are given to Laertes. As Edwards remarks, in her madness, she can be mistaking Laertes for Hamlet, the character of thought and the one who constantly remembers Claudius’s acts and his father’s death. It would be another way of identifying the similarities of both characters as avenging sons whose main task is to remember their filial duty and thus revenge their father’s deaths. Also, remembrance could refer to the nature of eternal love. The fennel was associated with flattery and dissembling, and columbines with adultery and infidelity. According to Edwards, the fennel would be given to Claudius; according to Jenkins, to Gertrude. What is more obvious is that the recipient of columbine would be Gertrude. Rue symbolised guilt, repentance and sadness, and it would have been given to Claudius. Violets were the symbol of faithfulness and would be appropriate for Horatio. 60

212).

See notes for lines 164-5 and 170 in The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition (2003:

61 Maid Marian was the companion of Robin Hood in the later forms of the story. The May Game was a set performance in the Mayday festivities, in which Robin Hood and Maid Marian figured. May Day was celebrated on the first day of May with dances and games, and flowers were central.

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Note, however, how the fact that the violets “withered” (180) when Polonius died is also referring to Laertes’s assertion in 1.3. that Hamlet’s love would be as ephemeral as a violet’s life. Ophelia is again showing us the double motive of her desolation: rejected love and Polonius’s death. The daisy, symbol of love or forsaken love, Ophelia would probably keep for herself. As we can see, in a few lines the emblematic meaning of the flowers and their recipients offer us a summary of the main themes of the play. Revenge, remembrance, love, dissembling, repentance, adultery and loyalty constitute the main thematic lines of Hamlet. Nature and flowers are central in Ophelia’s characterisation till her death. She dies drowned in a brook. The circumstances of her death are also presented as a mystery, as another “doubtful” (5.1.194) element of the play. But what is certain is that she dies out of love. Jenkins reminds us that the willow (4.7.166) and the way Ophelia dies were emblematic at the time. By tradition the willow is considered as a doleful tree from which those who have lost their love make mourning garlands. That is exactly what Ophelia is doing when she dies surrounded by “crow-flowers, nettles, daisies and long purples” (169). Jenkins identifies “crow-flowers” with dejection, “nettles” with pain, poison and betrayal and “daisies” with forsaken love. The reference to “long purples” is sexual.62 The merging of images about love, betrayal, sexuality and death summarises Ophelia’s love story. During her funeral, Ophelia’s corpse will be finally covered by “virgin crants” (5.1.199) and “maiden strewments” (200) and her final image will symbolise the union between honesty and beauty that Hamlet once considered incompatible when Laertes affirms: “Lay her i’th’earth, / And from her fair and unpolluted flesh / May violets spring” (204-206). As we can see, the symbol of faithfulness will emanate from Ophelia’s tomb. Hamlet’s final desolate exclamation “I loved Ophelia” (236), when he sees her dead, restores her image as a loving being. Ophelia is no longer the sexual object he has made of her up to this point in the play.

3.3.4. Hamlet’s World In his analysis of Hamlet in The Invention of the Human (1999) Harold Bloom states that “Shakespeare’s previous tragedies only partly foreshadow it, and his later works, though they echo it, are very different from Hamlet, in spirit and in tonality. No other single character in the plays, not even Falstaff or Cleopatra, matches Hamlet’s infinite reverberations” (384). In this section, we will see how critical opinions 62

See notes for lines 169-71 in The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition (2003: 223).

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about Hamlet such as Bloom’s are mainly based on the constant reflections that the play offers on the nature of man, of the world he lives in and of death. These observations make Bloom define Hamlet as “theatre of the world” (383). Hamlet introduces us into a world defined as “weary, stale, flat and unprofitable”(1.2.133), into an “unweeded garden” (135) pervaded by “things rank and gross in nature” (136). It is a diseased world that must be cured by abandoning corruption and upholding honesty. The play is pervaded by images of an ulcerous country in need of healing.63 Occasionally, the disease imagery is closely linked to images related to withering plants and spreading weeds, metaphors that indicate personal and also political decadence and corruption.64 For example, in his encounter with his mother, Hamlet tells her that to think that his anger is the result of his madness and not of her faults is a fatal error and Hamlet

It will but skin and film the ulcerous place Whilst rank corruption, mining all within, Infects unseen. Confess yourself to heaven. Repent what’s past. Avoid what is to come; And do not spread the compost o’er the weeds To make them ranker. (3.4.148-53)

Since, as Hamlet states, “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” (2.2.239-40),65 Denmark, turned into a microcosm of the whole universe in Hamlet’s mind, turns into a mental cankered prison to Hamlet (2.2.234); a prison from which he can escape only through his brilliant and ironic use of language. Through his witty rhetoric, Hamlet rejects political disorder and corruption in certain scenes where references to the king’s usurpation of power acquire a comic nature. Remember the scene in which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are asking Hamlet about the location of Polonius’s corpse: Hamlet Guildenstern Hamlet

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The body is with the King, but the King is not with the body. The King is a thing – A thing, my lord? Of nothing. (4.2.24-27)

You can find disease imagery for example in 3.1.85, 3.3.96, 3.4.51, 3.4.73, 3.4.80, 4.1.21, 4.3.9, 4.3.61-63, 4.4.27, 4.5.17, 4.7.115-17, 4.7.122. 64 See also the analysis of this type of imagery in section on Textual Analysis in Unit 4. 65 This idea had already been stated by Montaigne in his essay “That the taste of goods or evils doth greatly depend on the opinion we have of them” (I.40). Quotations from Montaigne are taken from http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/montaigne/.

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As we can see, in this case, the reference to Polonius’s real body is turned by Hamlet’s language into an image of the political corporality of the state. Hamlet is here referring to the king’s two bodies, the natural, that is, the mortal one, and the politic, the one that cannot be seen but that represents kingship. However, Claudius’s usurping nature impedes the rightful correspondence between those two bodies. His natural body is not, in Hamlet’s view, the politic one since he is not the legitimate king. If, according to Jenkins, the expression that the king is “a thing of nothing” derives from the Psalms: “Man is like a thing of nought: his time passeth away like a shadow” (in Jenkins 1982: 526), Hamlet’s words would then “hint that the King’s days are numbered” (526). The fact that Claudius is not considered by Hamlet as the representative of the body politic makes it easier for him to kill his uncle since it would not be considered then a crime against the state. But Hamlet’s idea about Claudius’s political legitimisation will be later opposed by the king’s own words to Gertrude after being threatened by Laertes. Claudius considers that his divine role as a king protects him from any danger: Claudius Do not fear our person. There’s such divinity doth hedge a king That treason can but peep to what it would, Acts little of his will. (4.5.123-26)66

These words sound ironic in a play in which the idea that kings and beggars all share the same fate is recurrent.67 In Hamlet, political ideas switch into general conceptions about the nature of humankind. His expression “a man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm” (4.3.25-26) is probably inspired by Montaigne’s philosophical statement that “the heart and life of a mighty and triumphant emperor is but the break-fast of a seely little worme” (II.12). Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s questions about the whereabouts of Polonius’s body give Hamlet the opportunity to reflect on death as the negation of social hierarchies and on the fragility of human nature. As we will now see, by following Montaigne’s sceptical views about human

66 In relation to this political belief at the time, Jenkins states that “Chettle gives an account of Queen Elizabeth, who, after a shot had struck her barge and all were crying ‘Treason’, ‘bade them never fear, for if the shot were made at her, they durst not shoot again: such majesty had her presence ... that she ... was as all princes are, or should be, so full of divine fullness, that guilty mortality durst not behold her but with dazzled eyes’ (England’s Mourning Garment, E2v-3)” (1982: 534). 67 Read carefully the grave-diggers scene (5.1.1-159).

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nature, Hamlet considers that not only is the king “a thing of nothing”; all human beings turn ultimately into dust, into nothing, since “a man’s life’s no more than to say ‘one’” (5.2.74). Hamlet’s reflections on the nature of human beings combine divergent ideas about men expressed by different writers and philosophers at the time, such as Pico della Mirandola or Montaigne.68 Hamlet’s following words about the nature of human beings reflect the contemporary Renaissance ideas of Pico della Mirandola in his “Oration on the Dignity of Man” (1486) which glorify the superiority of human beings over other creatures: Hamlet

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. (2.2.286-89)69

Compare Hamlet’s words with Pico della Mirandola’s initial words in his oration in which he describes man as the intermediary between creatures, that he is the familiar of the gods above him as he is the lord of the beings beneath him; that, by the acuteness of his senses, the inquiry of his reason and the light of his intelligence, he is the interpreter of nature, set midway between the timeless unchanging and the flux of time; the living union (as the Persians say), the very marriage hymn of the world, and, by David’s testimony but little lower than the angels.70

However, Shakespeare replaces Pico della Mirandola’s optimistic view about human being with Montaigne’s more negative views about humanity when Hamlet finishes the sentence by asserting that “yet to me, what is

68

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-94) was an Italian humanist and philosopher. His famous “Oration on the Dignity of Man” is one of the most important philosophical works of the fifteenth century in which he explores human nature and humanity’s role in the universe. His optimistic view about man opposes the more sceptical ideas promulgated by Montaigne, especially in his essay “An Apology of Raymond Sebond”(II.12). 69 In the Introduction to The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Hamlet, Edwards considers that these lines should not be analysed as “a brilliant perception of the anguish of Renaissance man in general and of Hamlet in particular” but as “a glorious blind, a flight of rhetoric by which a divided and distressed soul conceals the true nature of his distress” (47). Hamlet is obviously hiding the reasons of his lunatic attitude. However, even when his language is most ironic in most cases it reflects philosophical ideas about human nature current at the time which we should always bear in mind when analysing the text and Shakespeare’s manipulation of his sources. 70 You can find the whole text in http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Mirandola/.

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this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me – no, nor woman neither” (290-91). Hamlet places man and woman within a universe that he calls a “goodly frame” (282), a “most excellent canopy” (283), a “brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire” (28384).71 It was a classical Renaissance thought to describe the magnificence of the universe in contrast with the pettiness of human beings. Hamlet’s words, for example, resemble Montaigne’s description of the universe as “this admirable moving of heaven vaults”, “the eternal light of these lamps”, “this infinite vaste ocean” (II.12) in which man, considered as “anything so ridiculous as this miserable and wretched creature” (II.12), lives. However, Montaigne’s majestic description of the universe is transformed in Hamlet’s mind. Since, as we mentioned above, Hamlet considers that “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” (2.2.23940) he observes how such “goodly frame” “appeareth no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours” (2.2.285-86). His father’s murder and his mother’s sexual alliance with his cold-blooded murderer make him see the world around him as contagious and contaminated since it is ruled by the “canker of our nature” (5.2.69). Hamlet’s descriptions of his father and uncle exemplify two different views of the nature of the human being as a god and as a beast, who respectively rule two different types of world; one ordered, the other infected. We have already mentioned that the contrast between the two brothers is highlighted in Belleforest and intensified by Shakespeare. In his first soliloquy in 1.2., Hamlet states that his father, in comparison to Claudius, was “Hyperion to a satyr” (1.2.140).72 Hyperion was one of the Titans and the father of Helios, the sun-god. If we take into account the recurrent identification that Shakespeare makes in his plays between the image of the sun as the metaphor of royal power, we observe how Hamlet is endowing his father with legitimate power as monarch. On the contrary, a satyr was a deformed creature half-human and half-goat, and symbol of sexual promiscuity. The opposition between the description of man as godlike but also as a grotesque beast introduces into the play the relevant theme of the complexity of defining human nature. Hamlet considers his 71

When analysing these words by Hamlet, Jenkins states that “it is sometimes suggested that the Shakespearean imagery derived from, and could apply to, the playhouse in which the words would be spoken: the actor of Hamlet on the platform stage actually appeared as on a promontory, while the ‘heavens’, the roof covering the rear part of the stage, with stars painted on its under-side made visible the o’erhanging firmament” (1982: 468). Given the metatheatrical nature of this play, this interpretation could be considered as valid. See also the similar metatheatrical interpretations of lines 2.4.5-10 of Macbeth in the section on Textual Analysis of Unit 4. 72 This comparison is elaborated in 3.4.53-65.

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father as symbol of divine perfection when he tells his mother that King Hamlet was: Hamlet

A combination and a form indeed, Where every god did seem to set his seal To give the world assurance of a man. This was your husband. (3.4.60-63)

However, man’s actions can turn him into a beast. But it is not just Claudius who is identified with a beast in the play, it is Hamlet himself who considers that his passivity is a sign of his nature as a beast. Hamlet

How all occasions do inform against me, And spur my dull revenge! What is a man If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more. Sure he that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and god-like reason To fust in us unused. (4.4.32-39)

Hamlet’s knowledge of Fortinbras’s warlike and courageous nature makes him reflect, once more, on the reasons for his delay. His soliloquy begins by depicting himself as a beast since his reason is unable to give him an explanation of why “yet I live to say this thing’s to do” (4.4.44). Reason is considered as a godlike trait and when man is deprived of it, he turns into a beast. Reason makes man “look before and after”, that is, connect past and future events and reflect upon the motives and consequences of our actions. Since beasts do not have that quality, they are always stuck in the present moment. That is the reason why Hamlet wonders whether he does not carry out his revenge out of a “bestial oblivion” (40). As we see, Hamlet’s reflections depict a human being that shares both divine and brutal qualities. Such a portrayal of the human nature had already been stated by Pico della Mirandola who considered that, since humans were given both divine and earthly qualities, their actions could turn them into either gods or beasts. According to the philosopher, God said to humanity: We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.

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Montaigne, on the contrary, considers that it is man’s vanity what makes him “equall himself to God, that he ascribeth divine conditions unto himself, that he selecteth and separateth himself from out the ranke of other creatures” (II.12). In fact, when Montaigne analyses the relationship between men and animals he states that “it is a matter of divination to guesse in whom the fault is that we understand not one another. For we understand them no more than they us. By the same reason, may they as well esteeme us beasts as we them ... We must note the parity that is betweene us” (II.12). Hamlet’s depiction of human beings occassionally appropriates Montaigne’s idea that “of all creatures man is the most miserable and fraile, and therewithall the proudest and disdainfullest” (II.12). To Hamlet, human beings can become inferior to beasts. He, for example, laments that even “a beast that wants discourse of reason / Would have mourned longer” (1.2.150-51) than his mother did when his father died. In this case, Hamlet’s lament points to Montaigne’s description of human nature as sometimes lower than the nature of animals. Hamlet’s description of his father as a god and Claudius as a beast draws the picture of a world in which the bestial part of human nature has defeated the godlike one by creating a world pervaded by “carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts” (5.2.360). A possible escape from such a world is death. In his most famous soliloquy, “To be, or not to be, that is the question” (3.1.56) he develops such an idea. Jenkins offers us a summary of the multiple interpretations that this soliloquy has received. The text could be referring to Hamlet’s own suicide, to suicide in general terms, to the advantages and disadvantages of human existence, to whether Hamlet should kill the king or not, or to whether he should go on with his plans to make the king confess (1982: 484-86). As with many other issues in the play, this text is open to multiple interpretations but what is certain is that it is a philosophical reflection about death and suicide. The only way to escape “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” (3.1.58) is by committing suicide, a theme that he had already mentioned in 1.2.132. The identification between death and sleep was also made by Montaigne in his essay “Of Physiognomy.” Observe also how the term “consummation” is used by both Shakespeare and the French philosopher. Referring to death, Montaigne states that “if it be a consummation of ones being, it is also an amendment and entrance into a long and quiet night. Wee finde nothing so sweete in life as a quiet rest and gentle sleepe, and without dreames”(III, 12). Though Shakespeare compares death with sleep, it is not a dreamless one. Suicide would lead to damnation and it would turn sleep into a nightmare. Thus, the fear of “what dreams may come” (3.1.66) “must give us pause” (68) and “the dread of something after death” (78) “puzzles the will” (81).

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Consequently, death is out of man’s control. The only right attitude towards death is to be ready to die. In Hamlet we find the idea that “our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own” (3.2.194) since “there is a divinity that shapes our ends” (5.2.10). God, and not man, is entitled to end one’s life. Therefore, according to Hamlet, the correct way to face death is as follows: “If it be now, ‘tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all” (5.2.19395). Again, Shakespeare goes back to Montaigne’s philosophical ideas about death. In his essay “That to Philosophise is to Learn how to Die” we can read: Cicero saith, that to Philosophise is no other thing than for a man to prepare himselfe to death: which is the reason that studie and contemplation doth in some sort withdraw our soule from us and severally employ it from the body, which is a kind of apprentisage and resemblance of death; or else it is, that all the wisdome and discourse of the world, doth in the end resolve upon this point, to teach us not to feare to die. (I.19)

In this chapter we have observed how Hamlet presents Renaissance ideas about man, the world and death that had already been predicated by philosophers such as, for instance, Montaigne and Pico della Mirandola. It is interesting to observe how Shakespeare’s mingling of opposing ideas about human nature adds dramatic richness to a play in which complexity is an essential ingredient. The intricate nature of man is exemplified in Hamlet’s characterisation. Hamlet is presented as a madman, a philosopher, a lover, a son, an avenger, a clown, an actor, a playwright, a prince. But we cannot really define his nature, since he, as the nature of human beings, is multiple and resists labels. As Bloom concludes: Like the play, the prince stands apart from the rest of Shakespeare, partly because custom has not staled his infinite variety. He is a hero who pragmatically can be regarded as a villain: cold, murderous, solipsistic, nihilistic, manipulative. We can recognize Iago by those modifiers, but not Hamlet, since pragmatic tests do not accommodate him. Consciousness is his salient characteristic; he is the most aware and knowing figure ever conceived. We have the illusion that nothing is lost upon this fictive personage. Hamlet is a Henry James who is also a swordsman, a philosopher in line to become a king, a prophet of a sensibility still out ahead of us, in an era to come. (1999: 404)

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RECOMMENDED BIBLIOGRAPHY BELSEY, Catherine 1985: The Subject of Tragedy. London and New York: Routledge. BLOOM, Harold (1999): Shakespeare. The Invention of the Human. London: Fourth Estate. BRADLEY, A. C. 1992 (1904): “Lecture III. Shakespeare’s Tragic Period. Hamlet.” Shakespearean Tragedy. London: MacMillan. 64-107. BULLOUGH, Geoffrey ed. 1978 (1973): Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Vol.VII. Routledge and Kegan Paul: London and Henley. COLERIDGE, Samuel Taylor 1985 (1818): Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare. Poems and Prose. Ed. Kathleen Raine. London: Penguin Books. EDWARDS, Philip ed. 2003 (1985): Hamlet. Prince of Denmark. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ELIOT, T. S. 1965 (1953): “Hamlet.” Selected Prose. Ed. John Hayward. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 98-103. JENKINS, Harold ed. (1982): Hamlet. The Arden Shakespeare. Surrey: Methuen. KNIGHT, G.Wilson 1995 (1930): “The Embassy of Death: An Essay on Hamlet.” The Wheel of Fire. Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy. London and New York: Routledge. 17-46. SHOWALTER, Elaine 1993 (1985): “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism.” Shakespeare and The Question of Theory. Eds. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. New York and London: Routledge. 77-94. TENNENHOUSE, Leonard 1986: Power on Display. The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres. New York and London: Methuen. WILSON, John Dover 1979 (1935): What Happens in Hamlet? Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

RECOMMENDED WEBSITES 1. Enotes.com. Hamlet: http://www.hamlet.org/ 2. Hamlet’s Soliloquies : http://shakespeare.about.com/library/weekly/aa061500b.htm 3. Hamlet. Discussion Questions : http://www.studyguide.org/hamlet.htm 4. Hamlet Haven. Genre Studies: http://www.hamlethaven.com/genre.html#bell

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5. Legends. Shakespeare’s Stories: http://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/hamlet/ 6. Spark notes. Hamlet: http://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/hamlet/

KEY TERMS These are the main themes, concepts, critical approaches, critics and images analysed in this Unit. Ask yourself whether you are able to give a brief and concise account of what they refer to and of the main ideas presented by each critic. Date Sources: Saxo, Belleforest, The Ur-Hamlet, Thomas Kyd and The Spanish Tragedy Critical Approaches Johnson, Coleridge, Bradley, T. S. Eliot, Wilson Knight, Dover Wilson. Contemporary Critical Approaches Catherine Belsey and cultural materialism: Hamlet and Revenge Leonard Tennenhouse and new historicism: Hamlet and Power Elaine Showalter and feminism: Ophelia throughout history Textual Analysis Hamlet and metatheatricality Hamlet and the Ghost Ophelia and Hamlet Hamlet’s world: Montaigne and Pico della Mirandola

SELF-ASSESSMENT QUESTIONS Answer ONE of the following questions: 1. Give a brief account of the main critical theories regarding the reasons for Hamlet’s delay. 2. According to a cultural materialist point of view such as Belsey’s, in what way is the theme of revenge in Hamlet inserted within the political debate of its age?

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3. According to Hamlet, actors “are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time” (2.2.481) In what way is metatheatricality important in Hamlet?

FURTHER KNOWLEDGE EXERCISE 1. Comment on the following text by answering the questions below: Hamlet To be, or not to be, that is the question – Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep – No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to – ‘tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep – To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub, For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause. There’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life, For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of disprized love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of th’unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pitch and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action. (3.1.56-88)

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2. What is Hamlet reflecting upon in this text? What is the preceding scene about? What happens after this soliloquy? Are the events before and after this soliloquy important for the understanding of the text? In what way? In line 58 there is a reference to “outrageous fortune”. In your reading of the play, have you found other allusions to the role of Fortune in man’s life? In which contexts? What is the relationship between death and sleep in this text? What is the main difference in this text between Shakespeare’s and Montaigne’s view of death? What is the relationship you find between lines 79-80 and the nature of the Ghost in the play? In lines 85 and 88 Hamlet refers to “thought” and “action”, what is the relevance of these two concepts in this play? Is Hamlet a man of thought or a man of action? 3. What kind of metaphors do you find in this text? What are they emphasising? Can you find any image of disease in the text? What is it stressing? In what way are images of disease important within the whole context of the play? Can you find any metrical irregularities? What are they highlighting?

Unit 4 MACBETH

PROGRAMME 4.1. Macbeth: Historical and Literary Contexts. 4.1.1. Date. 4.1.2. The interest in Macbeth’s story during Shakespeare’s time. 4.1.3. Main Sources of Macbeth. 4.2. Critical Approaches to Macbeth. 4.2.1. Some critical approaches from the seventeenth to the first half of the twentieth century. 4.2.2. Contemporary Critical Approaches to Macbeth: Janet Adelman and Alan Sinfield. 4.3. Textual Analysis

INTRODUCTION Aims and objectives Unit 4 is devoted to the analysis of one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies: Macbeth. We have divided the unit in three parts. The first one offers information about the historical and textual contexts of the play. The analysis of Macbeth and its contexts will always try to locate the play within the social and political circumstances of the period in which it was composed. In this way, we will make the play a living participant of its age. The second section deals with a selection of critical studies about Macbeth since the seventeenth century. Traditional analyses such as Bradley’s and Knight’s are of great interest since they give a complete overview of the main themes and images uses by Shakespeare and, therefore, they work as excellent introductions to the play. As regards the contemporary approaches to the play, I have chosen to offer a summary of the critical writings about Macbeth by two very important Shakespearean critics, Janet Adelman and Alan Sinfield, representatives of the way contemporary critical approaches such as gender studies, psychoanalysis or cultural materialism examine Macbeth. The third section is entirely devoted to the textual analysis of Macbeth. We will analyse the

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main themes and images offering a great deal of textual evidences to illustrate the arguments.

Study guidelines As in the case of Hamlet, my first recommendation is that you read the play before reading the unit since a great deal of information will not make any sense if you have not read the play. After reading the unit, I strongly recommend reading the play again since you will enjoy this second reading much more and will discover new things which you did not perceive the first time. The assimilation of the information of the first two units is also vital in order to study the section on critical approaches to Macbeth. The footnotes are also another very important source of information. They try to make clear certain issues and they point out the sources from which you can obtain more information about some themes. They also refer to lines of the play that illustrate the topics we are dealing with. Many of the footnotes will direct you to the introduction to The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Macbeth by A. R. Braunmuller (2001) (ISBN 0521 29455x). This is the edition we will be using in the unit and its notes are essential in order to properly understand many scenes. I strongly recommend that you do not skip over the notes to the play. You will also find a great deal of information about the play in the web. Regardless of whether you choose to comment on the text of the Further Knowledge Exercise or not, I recommend consulting the sample commentary since a text will have to be commented upon in the exam.

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The Catalogue of Plays in the First Folio

4.1. MACBETH: HISTORICAL AND LITERARY CONTEXTS 4.1.1. Date Macbeth, the shortest of the completed tragedies, was first printed in the First Folio (1623). As we can see in the illustration of the Catalogue of Plays above, it follows Julius Caesar and precedes Hamlet. There is no definitive evidence that could give us a precise date of the composition of the play. However, there are certain elements that lead us to think that the play was written after King James I’s accession to the English throne in March 1603 and before 1607. First of all, Macbeth’s reference to the “two-fold balls and treble sceptres” (4.1.120), which are carried by one of the monarchs that he sees in the show of kings, alludes directly to the coronations of King James. The balls hint at the orbs that the king held at the Scottish and English coronations. We must remember that King James I of England was first King James VI of Scotland. The sceptres are three because King James held one during the Scottish celebration and two during the English one.1 Also, three of the main themes of the play are directly related to James I. First, the centrality of Banquo in the play places the debate about the king’s royal ancestry as the focal point. The king believed the legend that claimed that he was descended from one Banquo, a Scottish feudal lord in the eleventh century, when Macbeth was king of Scotland. The legend was invented when the Stewarts first ruled. They needed to legitimise their royal ascendency and they made up the stories of Banquo and his son Fleance. The latter escaped to Wales and married a princess. Their son, Walter, on his return to Scotland reached the post of Royal Steward, the senior court official, as a reward for his military success. Walter was considered the 1 See note for line 120 (2001: 197) and supplementary note for line 4.1.120 (243-44) in The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Macbeth.

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historical founder of the Stewart royal family. His post, which was hereditary, gave them their name («Steward» and later «Stuart»). Second, the reference to the King’s Evil (4.3.148), and to Edward the Confessor’s ability to cure it, is also an allusion to James I’s powers to heal.2 The King’s Evil was the name given to scrofula, a disease that affected the skin. It was called the King’s Evil because it was thought to be cured by the king’s touch. At the time it was believed that the French and English monarchs had the divine power to cure it and that this healing power was bestowed on the king during the coronation ceremonies when he was anointed with holy oil. In England, Edward the Confessor (104266 AD) was thought to be the first king to possess such power. As Malcolm remarks, this power is inherited by his successors since “To the succeeding royalty he leaves/ The healing benediction” (4.3.157-58). Finally, the play’s concern about the supernatural and witchcraft is also directly related to King James’s interest in these issues.3 We must remember the publication of James’s book Daemonologie in 1596 in Scotland and later in 1603 in England. In this book the king offered his views on witchcraft and accepted the existence of witches and their evil powers. During his reign thousands of women were falsely accused of witchcraft, tortured and burnt to death. If we consider that the sleepwalking-scene in the play Lingua or the ghosts, like Banquo’s, that appear in the plays The Puritaine or The Knight of the Burning Pestle are based on Macbeth’s scenes, we could conclude that Shakespeare’s play was composed between 1603, the year of King James’s accession to the English throne, and 1607, the year these plays were composed. The editor Edmund Malone dated Macbeth in 1606 at the end of the eighteenth century.4 He considered Macbeth as one of the three plays performed at court when James’s brother-in-law, King Christian IV of Denmark, visited England in July and August 1606. Though Malone considers that the play was composed for this special occasion, there is no evidence to support this thesis. Braunmuller, in his introduction to The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Macbeth, argues against Malone’s postulation. For Braunmuller, the 1606 plague and the closing of the theatres could have led the theatrical company of the King’s Men to present Macbeth at court for mere economic reasons. As he states, “nothing stronger than hypothesis and circumstantial evidence joins Macbeth with either James’s accession or Christian’s visit” (2001: 9). 2 See note for line 148 (2001: 211) and supplementary note for line 4.3.148 (244) in The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Macbeth. 3 See Literatura inglesa hasta el siglo XVII (2002: 436). 4 See the list of eighteenth-century Shakespearean editors in section 1.2.

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However, there are several textual references that still situate the play’s composition around 1606. Let’s remember the following line of the Porterscene in Act 2, Scene 3: Here is a farmer that hanged himself on th’expectation of plenty. Come in time – have napkins enough about you, here you’ll sweat for’t. (Knock) Knock, knock. Who’s there in th’other devil’s name? Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to Heaven: O come in equivocator. (2.3.3-10)

As we will see in the section devoted to critical approaches to Macbeth, critics such as Coleridge considered the Porter-scene as just an interpolation. However, it is now viewed as a central scene of the play that, as Geoffrey Bullough remarks in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (1973), “both relieves and intensified the tragedy” (1978: 424).5 Though in a comic and grotesque tone, this scene points out issues that are central to the play as a whole such as the themes of disloyalty, duplicity and murder. It was William Warburton who, in the eighteenth century, pointed out the relationship between this passage and the trials following the Gunpowder Plot, which had intended to blow up the king in Parliament on 5 November 1605.6 The mention of treason and equivocation is primarily referring to the trial of one of the plotters, the jesuit Superior in England, Father Henry Garnet in March 1606. During his self-defence, Garnet, who used the alias “Farmer”, justified the use of the doctrine of equivocation under oath and gave origin to a public debate in England on the issue. In the New Penguin English Dictionary we read that “to equivocate” is “to use equivocal or evasive language, especially with intent to deceive or to avoid committing oneself” (2001: 470). According to the Catholic doctrine of equivocation, an ambiguous speech could be used when someone was forced to swear what he or she considered an unjust oath. The doctrine of equivocation essentially means one can give an evasive answer in order to protect a secret. Garnet was accused of perjury, found guilty of treason and hanged on 3 May 1606. Nicholas Brooke, in The Oxford Shakespeare edition of Macbeth, also points out that Garnet used to drink wine in his cell and was accused of fornication with his friend Mrs Vaux (1994: 60). According to Brooke, the following lines, also included in the Porterscene, would hint at such events: “Therefore much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery: it makes him, and it mars him … in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and giving him the lie, leaves 5 6

See Thomas De Quincey’s interpretation of this scene in section 4.2.1. See Literatura inglesa hasta el siglo XVII (2002: 435).

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him” (2.3.25-30). The idea of equivocation is central, not only to the scene, but also to the play in general. As Graham Holderness argues in “’Come in, equivocator’: Tragic Ambivalence in Macbeth” (1988) and, as it will be developed in the section on textual analysis, the concept of equivocation is more than a topical allusion welding the play to Jacobean politics: it can also be recognised as the fundamental ‘deep structure’ of the play itself, which is based on a principle of ‘even-handed’ ambivalence. Macbeth can be said to ‘equivocate’ with its dangerous material: to palter with its audience in a double sense, to swear to the reality of its experience in a double sense, and to lie like truth. (1991: 62)7

The second most important textual reference that has been traditionally quoted in order to date the play around 1606 is implicit in the lines of Act 1, Scene 3 in which the witches plan to take revenge on a sailor’s wife who had insulted them. The sailor is called “master o’th’Tiger” (1.3.6). This allusion to the Tiger, a common name for ships at the time, could allude to two voyages that took place in the period. One of these voyages set out for the Far East from the Isle of Wight on 5 December 1604. A smaller ship, called the Tiger’s Whelp survived a tempest and, though initially it seemed to have disappeared, it finally rejoined the fleet. The two following lines, that refer to the limited power of the witches, could allude to such an incident: “Though his bark cannot be lost, / Yet it shall be tempest-tossed” (23-24). The fleet arrived at Wales on 27 June 1606. E. A. Loomis, in “The Master of the Tiger” (1956), pointed out that if we discount the day the fleet set out and the day it entered the harbour, they were absent for 567 days. If we multiply seven by nine and this result is multiplied again by nine, the numbers mentioned by the witches in their chant, we find a remarkable coincidence: the result will equal the days the fleet was away: “Weary sev’n nights, nine times nine, / Shall he dwindle, peak, and pine” (21-22). If we accept this fact as more than mere coincidence and consider that these lines are a clear allusion to that voyage, Macbeth could not have been written before July 1606.

4.1.2. The interest in Macbeth’s story during Shakespeare’s time The story of Macbeth was very popular at the time. On one of the king’s visits to Oxford, on 27 August 1605, the monarch heard a short Latin dialogue of welcome where three Sibyls saluted King James as the 7

These last words are an allusion to the lines where Shakespeare uses once more the term “equivocation” in the play: “I pull in resolution, and begin / To doubt th’equivocation of the fiend / That lies like truth” (5.5.41-43).

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descendant of Banquo while he was acclaimed the unifier of Britain. Macbeth’s story was not alluded to. It was the images of Banquo and his son Fleance as founders of the royal line of the Stuarts that mattered. Whether Shakespeare was witness to such an event or not we cannot be sure. However, it gives us an idea of the currency of Banquo’s story when Macbeth was composed. Though it is not clear whether it was influenced by Macbeth or served as an influence on the play, another clear example of the English interest in the history of Scotland is William Warner’s 1606 edition of A Continuance of Albion. Warner deals with issues such as the unity of Great Britain, the Stuart claim to the Scottish and the English throne, the Gunpowder Plot, the story of Macbeth, the origin of the lines of the Stuarts in Fleance’s marriage with the daughter of King Griffith of Wales and the prophecy of what he calls the “Fairies.” The composition of plays about the history of Scotland also shows the interest of this issue in England at the time. For example, we know the Children of the Queen’s Chapel played a tragedy about the King of Scotland in 1567-68. There are records of another play about Robert II, the first king of the line of the Stuarts, and referred to as “Robert the second Kinge of scottes tragedie” or “the scottes tragedi” in 1599. In 1602, Charles Massey composed Malcolm King and, finally, The Tragedy of Gowrie was twice performed by the King’s Men in 1604. This last play dealt with the Earl of Gowrie’s failed attempt to assassinate the king in Edinburgh on 5 August 1600. The performance of this play was forbidden since the Master of the Revels, in charge of theatrical censorship, prohibited the representation of a living monarch on stage. However, the representation of this play shows how the theme of regicide, central to Macbeth, was of actuality at the time. In fact, on 22 March 1606 there was a rumour that there had been a conspiracy to kill James. Also, later in July a plot was discovered to induce Captain William Neuce to murder the king when he was hunting at Royston. He finally did not do it. The fact that Macbeth deals with issues such as royal descent, legitimacy, loyalty, regicide and Scottish history demonstrates the play’s connection with the social and political atmosphere at the time in England. The debate about who is the lawful king to rule Scotland in Macbeth in the eleventh century could be interpreted as a political mirror of what was really happening in James’s court. James strove to demonstrate his hereditary right to the English and the Scottish crowns in order to gain complete political support in England. In a speech to the Parliament in 1603 he mentioned his “Descent lineally out of the Loynes of Henry the

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Seventh” (in Bullough 1978: 443).8 He also desired to unite both crowns in peace. Bullough states that Shakespeare reflects in his play James’s interests. First, the scene in which the English King Edward is helping Malcolm, a Scottish heir, shows a peaceful relation between both countries. Second, the line in which Macbeth sees as a future king, a monarch holding “two-fold balls and treble sceptres” (4.1.120), in a way accepts James’s accession to the English throne. Despite the fact that James was recognized as king in England, especially because he had a male heir, the derisive view that the English had about the Scottish nature impeded his rapid integration within the English political and social environment. For example, in 1603, the year of the accession, the English Parliament still refused to consider the Scots as equal citizens. In 1606, James had still not been able to enforce free trade between Scotland and England. In a theatrical context, we must take into account the fact that Scotsmen had usually been used for comic effects. They were described as following the stereotype that had traditionally viewed Scotsmen as uncivilised, violent, uncultured, thieves and allies to France, eternal enemy of England.9 In fact, even after James’s accession to the English throne and despite censorship, several plays satirised more or less openly the king’s nation and himself. For example, that was the case of Ben Jonson, George Chapman and John Marston’s Eastward Ho in 1605. Jonson and Chapman were both imprisoned. Another play whose author also got into trouble for the same motives was The Isle of Gulls by John Day in 1606. As we can see, Scotland was present in the English social, political and theatrical imagination at the time Shakespeare decided to write Macbeth. He probably knew the play would be appealing to the public since the audience knew the story and since it dealt with issues that could be related to current political debates. Consequently, the play would probably be successful, and most important at the time, profitable. We should never forget the commercial side of Shakespearean theatrical productions.

4.1.3. Main Sources of Macbeth The story of Macbeth is a mixture of history and legend, the result of the work of many chroniclers throughout history. First of all, we should 8 Henry VII, who reigned in England from 1485 to 1509, had a daughter called Margaret. She married James IV of Scotland, who ruled from 1488 to 1513. They had a son, James V, who was king of Scotland from 1513 to 1542. Their daughter was Mary, Queen of Scots, mother of James VI of Scotland and I of England. Consequently, James I claimed his English ascendancy from Henry VII. 9 See The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Macbeth (2001: 9-13).

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situate Macbeth’s story in the eleventh century in Scotland. The Scottish king Malcolm II had two daughters. One of them married Lord of Dunkeld and they had one son, Duncan. The king’s second daughter married Lord Finlay, their son was called Macbeth. Duncan ruled Scotland from 1034 to 1040. He was an unpopular and ineffective king who was eventually murdered by Macbeth and his nobles. Macbeth succeeded his cousin Duncan and, for a period of ten years, his reign was peaceful and successful. Macbeth turned out to be a competent king. However, Malcolm Canmore, one of Duncan’s sons, invaded Scotland in 1054 with the help of the English king Edward the Confessor and killed Macbeth in 1057. Though Macbeth had violently usurped Duncan’s throne, he was a good king. However, future chronicles treated him as a king who, after ten years of success and efficiency, became a villain and a tyrant. The earliest accounts that we have of Macbeth are dated in the fourteenth century. They were Andrew Wyntoun’s chronicle of world and Scottish history and John Fordum’s Chronica Gentis Scotorum. However, since they were printed after Shakespeare’s time they were not sources for Macbeth. Likely sources of the play could be found in George Buchanan’s Rerum Scoticarum Historia (1582) and John Leslie’s De Origine Scotorum (1578).10 But Shakespeare’s main source for Macbeth was Holinshed’s Chronicle of England and Scotland, first edited in 1577 and extended in 1587. Shakespeare’s plot is mainly based on the second volume of the chronicle called “The Chronicle of Scotland.” It was a free translation of Hector Boece’s Latin Chronicle of Scotland (c.1527). Holinshed’s translation was based on Bellenden’s Scots translation of Boece’s chronicle printed in 1536. Shakespeare first compressed a period of 17 years of Macbeth’s reign into a few weeks and he then invented numerous scenes that were not based on events from the chronicles, such as the Porterscene, the dagger-scene, the banquet-scene and Banquo’s ghost, and Lady Macbeth sleep-walking scene. But the base of the story he found mainly in Holinshed. Shakespeare did not limit his reading to just one story, he adapted, changed and gave new shape to elements from two different accounts of Holinshed’s chronicle. The first one is the reign and murder of King Duff by his lieutenant Donwald in 967 A.D. The second account centres on Macbeth’s usurpation story around 1040 A.D. The origin of Lady Macbeth’s characterisation can be found in Donwald’s ambitious and revengeful wife, especially in Boece’s account. Donwald was encouraged by his wife to kill King Duff. Boece, more than Holinshed, develops the character of Donwald’s wife. Her machinations 10

See section on Critical Approaches and especially Alan Sinfield’s analysis on Macbeth.

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make her husband feel enraged at King Duff’s order to execute some of his friends and finally convince him to kill the monarch. Boece also mentions Lady Macbeth’s pressure on her husband to kill Duncan rapidly. His description of Lady Macbeth’s attitude has made certain critics believe that Shakespeare knew the chronicle either in Latin or in translation. From Holinshed, Shakespeare could have adapted the description of the warlike nature of Scottish women and their insistence on suckling their children. But we should not ignore the fact that the dramatic construction of Lady Macbeth is also influenced by traits of Senecan powerful female characters such as Medea and Clytemnestra in Seneca’s plays Medea and Agamemnon. Macbeth is a play with multiple Senecan resonances as a detailed reading of the play and its notes will show us. In 1581 all Senecan plays were translated into English and became very popular. Shakespeare must have read them also in Latin. The Senecan universe, in which murder, treason, revenge, darkness, a constant presence of the supernatural and the disruption of family values are central, was appropriated by Shakespeare in Macbeth. Lady Macbeth’s rejection of her own children and maternal functions and her invocations of the spirits remind us specially of Medea’s story, a mother that kills his children in order to take revenge on her husband Jason after leaving her. Medea’s invocations of the powers of evil, her desire to abandon all female fear and pity and become unsexed in order to kill her sons, and her utter cruelty seem to foreshadow Lady Macbeth’s traits. Medea has also been linked to the witches since she prepares a hellish brew that resembles the witches’ cauldron and she also invokes Hecate. In Boece, Donwald’s hypocrisy, his repentant internal struggle and his eventual flight are all highlighted. Holinshed also describes the mental conflicts, troubled sleep and remorseful hallucinations of another Scottish king, Kenneth II, after murdering King Duff’s son, Malcolm Duff. Kenneth’s tormented mind was also highlighted by Buchanan in his Rerum Scoticarum Historia. Donwald’s and Kenneth’s disturbed minds could have influenced Shakespeare’s description of Macbeth. Boece and Holinshed are mere starting points from where Shakespeare widely and brilliantly develops the psychological effects of Duncan’s murder on Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Macbeth, in Holinshed’s account, does not present the constant doubts, vacillations and guilt that we observe in Shakespeare’s protagonist. Also, in Holinshed, Lady Macbeth does not have the relevant role she has in Shakespeare. Though Holinshed’s Macbeth is also encouraged by his wife to kill Duncan, he rapidly decides to carry out the deed. In the same way, Lady Macbeth’s powerful characterisation at the beginning of the play and her later mental disturbance are Shakespeare’s unique creation.

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In the story of Donwald’s murder, the witches also play an important role and after Donwald’s death there are multiple allusions to strange phenomena that Shakespeare will later adapt after Duncan’s death.11 In Holinshed, the witches are not just present in the story of Macbeth or Donwald but also in the accounts of other Scottish kings such as King Natholocus (A.D. 280) and his reverence for prophecies. Consequently, as Bullough remarks, No doubt such episodes in the grim series of conspiracies, ambushes and treacherous attacks related by Holinshed helped to fill Shakespeare’s mind with the horrific images with which he surrounded the Macbeth story. In that story he found much that was dramatic, but there were gaps and details that had to be altered. (1978: 448)

One of the most significant changes from Holinshed is the degree of Banquo’s participation in Duncan’s murder. Shakespeare centres on the implications of Duncan’s murder for Macbeth and Lady Macbeth and turns the deed into a private act in which no one but the couple participates. In Holinshed, Donwald’s servants help him to kill King Duff, and Macbeth is helped by his friends, one of them being Banquo, to kill Duncan. In Holinshed, Banquo participates in Macbeth’s murderous plans. In Shakespeare, Banquo has nothing to do with them. At this point, Shakespeare gets closer to Boece’s version than to Holinshed’s. Boece does not make explicit Banquo’s knowledge of Macbeth’s intentions to murder the king. If in Shakespeare’s version Banquo would have acted as accomplice to Macbeth, it would have been an insult to King James I who considered himself descended from Banquo. James would have been linked to a disloyal and murderous character if Banquo had had knowledge of Macbeth’s plans. However, many critics have argued that, though Banquo does not participate in the murder, his behaviour is ambiguous since he knows about the prophecies and remains silent.12 Also, in Holinshed, Macbeth kills Banquo because he fears he could be murdered by him, this 11

This theme is developed in the section on Textual Analysis. For example, Bradley, in Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), argues that, after Duncan’s murder Banquo “is profoundly shocked, full of indignation, and determined to play the part of a brave and honest man. But he plays no such part. When we next we see him, on the last day of his life, we find that he has yielded to evil. The Witches and his own ambition have conquered him. He alone of the lords knew of the prophecies, but he has said nothing of them. He has acquiesced in Macbeth’s accession, and in the official theory that Duncan’s sons had suborned the chamberlains to murder him” (1992: 339). See also section on Critical Approaches and the critical stance of Wilson Knight and Alan Sinfield. They are just two of the numerous critics that share this opinion about Banquo. See Banquo’s interventions in 1.3.119-25, 2.1.6-9, 2.1.27-30 and 3.1.1-10 and reflect on whether Banquo’s position in the play presents certain ambiguity or not. 12

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is not the case in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In Boece and in Shakespeare, Banquo is murdered only because Macbeth, following the Witches’ prophecies, fears his posterity (3.1.54-72). Another relevant change from Holinshed is the description of Duncan. Whereas in Holinshed Duncan is described as a young and inefficient monarch, in Shakespeare, he is described as an old and respected king. Consequently, Macbeth’s crime is seen as more cruel in Shakespeare than in Holinshed. In the same way, the fact that Macbeth rightfully claimed the throne since, first, he was of royal ascendancy and, second, his wife was the descendant of another Scottish king, Kenneth III, is not mentioned in Shakespeare. Therefore, after Duncan’s proclamation of his son Malcolm as his successor in the kingdom, Macbeth’s claims to the throne appear as a much more ambitious desire than in Holinshed.13 Shakespeare adapts his source in order to make Macbeth a murderous figure. The playwright omits any allusion to Macbeth’s ten years of just, peaceful and bounteous government described in Holinshed in order to focus on the later period in which Macbeth turned into a tyrant. As we can see, the analysis of the play’s sources is essential in order to understand the way the playwright worked with them. He selected material from different accounts of the chronicles and gave them a new form. The description of Shakespeare’s characters was inspired by traits that were present in different protagonists of the chronicles. He altered elements in order to give a different perspective of the same event, and, above all, from certain allusions he found in his sources he developed, in a splendid way, the mental disturbances of his characters and gave them a completely different light. One of the elements that made a play successful at the time was the fact that the spectator was familiar with the story he or she would be told on stage, but at the same time the manipulation of such a story and the breaking of the audience’s expectations had a positive effect on the Elizabethan playgoer who wished to be entertained and surprised.

4.2. CRITICAL APPROACHES TO MACBETH In this section we offer a selection of critical approaches to Macbeth since the seventeenth century to our own days. We will observe how Macbeth has been analysed from various points of view that offer different, contradictory and sometimes complementary perspectives of the play. Observe the emphasis that critics have placed on language, as is the case 13 The question of the process of Scottish royal succession is also examined in the section on Textual Analysis.

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of Wilson Knight, and on psychological realism, as for example in the case of Johnson, Coleridge and Bradley. But notice how Bradley does also centre on other issues of the play such as the role of the Witches or the main images and dramatic atmosphere of the play. These Bradleian analyses have traditionally been ignored by the critics that have attacked Bradley’s work since they consider it as a mere reflection of the psychology of the characters analysed as human beings and not as dramatic creations. The second part of this section, which is devoted to contemporary criticism on Macbeth, focuses on two of the most significant articles on the play. Janet Adelman’s approach is mainly psychoanalytical and based on gender relations. Alan Sinfield analyses the play from a materialist point of view. He views the play as a reflection of the workings of social and political forces on the subject, who appears as a mere cultural artifice. Sinfield’s study is a direct attack on those readings of Macbeth that consider the play as reverential to James I. It is interesting to contrast Tillyard’s view of the political import of Macbeth with Sinfield’s position.

4.2.1. Some critical approaches from the seventeenth to the first half of the twentieth century Early critics of Macbeth such as Ben Jonson and Dryden considered the language of the play as a “horror” full of “bombast speeches … which are not to be understood” (in Braunmuller 2001: 43). However, in his notes and general observations on Macbeth in his edition to the plays of Shakespeare in 1765, Samuel Johnson asserts the “solemnity, grandeur and variety of its action” (1998: 194) and underlines the fact that scenes such as 1.7., in which Lady Macbeth persuades her husband to commit the murder, clearly reflects “Shakespeare’s knowledge of human nature” (189). However, to Johnson, Macbeth has “no nice discriminations of character” (194).14 He calls attention to the detestation of Lady Macbeth and the general celebration of Macbeth’s fall on the part of the readers. As a central issue he points out the danger of ambition and he develops the theme of witchcraft in a note on the play’s opening stage direction. Johnson offers a summary of the attitudes towards witchcraft from antiquity to his own time. He shows how views have changed throughout history and asserts that the right interpretation of the Witches’ role in the play depends on the knowledge of the position of Shakespeare’s contemporaries about such issues. He states that the interpretation of the Witches as supernatural agents would be censured during the eighteenth 14

The term “nice” means in this sentence “precise”.

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century since it would transgress the bounds of probability. However, as he remarks, “Shakespeare was in no danger of such censures, since he only turned the system that was then universally admitted to his advantage and was far from overburdening the credulity of his audience” (187). Johnson also comments on King James’s accounts about witchcraft in his dialogues of Daemonologie, on the Parliament’s law that condemned to death all those found guilty of sorcery, and on the general belief in England during Shakespeare’s time in the existence of evil spirits and witches: Thus, in the time of Shakespeare, was the doctrine of witchcraft at once established by law and by the fashion, and it became not only unpolite, but criminal, to doubt it … Upon this general infatuation Shakespeare might be easily allowed to found a play, especially since he has followed with great exactness such histories as were then thought true; nor can it be doubted that the scenes of enchantment, however they may now be ridiculed, were both by himself and his audience thought awful and affecting. (189)

In his Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare (1818), Samuel Taylor Coleridge also remarks on the dramatic relevance of the Witches in the play and their power to act on an audience which was familiar with them. After a detailed analysis of the play one is surprised by Coleridge’s vision of Macbeth especially when he asserts he does not find a single pun on words except in the Porter-scene and that the play is purely tragic and devoid of any traits of comedy, or irony or philosophic reflections. He analyses Macbeth in comparison with Hamlet. Whereas, for the critic, it is the appeal to the intellect which prevails in Hamlet, it is the invocation of the imagination and the emotions which predominates in Macbeth. Hamlet’s vacillation makes slowness a central characteristic of this tragedy whereas rapidity is central to Macbeth. Both plays begin with scenes of superstition. But their connotations are quite different. In Hamlet, this sense of superstition is related to honourable feelings. In Macbeth, it is linked to tumultuous and gloomy desires of the tragic hero’s will. In Macbeth’s mind Coleridge finds a mixture of thoughts that relate the outcome of a certain deed to the intervention of chance and individual action. Coleridge offers a psychological insight into Macbeth’s behaviour in the play. He reflects on Macbeth’s mistranslation of his own feelings. Before the murder, he mistranslates foreboding instincts into more cautious and selfish thoughts and after Duncan’s death, he misinterprets his panic and remorse, directly linked to his previous murderous action, into fear of outer menaces. As regards Lady Macbeth, Coleridge defines her as a mind misguided by ambition and only familiar with imagination, fantasy, shadows but not realities. In her plans of murder, she does not observe the consequences of a feeling of guilt and remorse which finally kills her.

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Coleridge regards the scene of the Porter as disgusting and as a mere interpolation of the actors. But in 1823, Thomas De Quincey, in his essay “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”, refutes such an idea.15 De Quincey argues that, though in real life, after a murder our sympathy is directed to the murdered person, in the case of Macbeth, the poet directs our attention to the murderers and the complexity of their passions. Our sympathy for Macbeth and Lady Macbeth is not, as De Quincey asserts, of pity or approbation, but a sympathy of comprehension, we are led to understand their feelings and motives: jealousy, ambition, vengeance and hatred. De Quincey describes the transition in the play from a feeling of human nature, love and mercy before Duncan’s death to a feeling of fiendish nature after his murder. When Macbeth and Lady Macbeth step into the region of evil they are both transfigured. Whereas the latter is unsexed, the former forgets he is born of woman and both make the world of evil more evident. De Quincey considers that, in order to make this world palpable in the play, it must disappear for a time. There must be a clear separation of the world of evil from the ordinary life in order to make us more aware of the new world of horror that takes the lead in the play after Duncan’s murder. The knocking at the gate symbolises for De Quincey that moment in which ordinary life seems to come back on stage; a moment in which “the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them” (in Bratchell 1990: 142). Consequently, the dramatic value of the Porter-scene is crucial since it serves as a turning point in the play that marks a clear barrier between the world of human affairs and the world of darkness and horror. In Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), A. C. Bradley points out the sublimity of the whole tragedy, the energy of its language, the grandeur of its diction, the supernatural stature of its characters and the intensity of the entire play. Its dramatic atmosphere is pervaded by images of darkness; blackness and night-scenes prevail in the play, always in direct relation to fear and horror which make up the spirit of this tragedy. But also, Bradley argues, blackness is broken by moments when colour and light take the lead.16 15 D. F. Bratchell in his work Shakespearean Tragedy (1990) states: “T. S. Eliot described De Quincey’s essay on Macbeth as perhaps the best-known single piece of criticism of Shakespeare that has been written. It is a remarkable record of an intuitive reaction to a scene in the play being translated into a meaningful insight into the heart of the tragedy. For all its ornate prose De Quincey’s personal testimony is probably worth more than a great deal of academic erudition, and he makes the important critical point of there being clear evidence of design behind what may appear to some as casual interpolation” (139). 16 Bradley remarks: “They are the lights and colours of the thunderstorm in the first scene; of the dagger hanging before Macbeth’s eyes and glittering alone in the midnight air; of the torch borne by the servant when he and his lord come upon Banquo crossing the

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The predominant colour is the colour of blood. The imagery of Macbeth is vivid, grand and violent usually related to savage and ominous animals and an aggressive nature.17 As Bradley states, images “keep the imagination moving on a ‘wild and violent sea’, while it is scarcely for a moment permitted to dwell on thoughts of peace and beauty” (1992: 294).18 All these constituents of the atmosphere of the play are intimately linked to the appearances and the language of the Witches that bring about horror and supernatural dread. Bradley points out the fear of the presence of evil all through and around our mysterious nature and argues that Shakespeare has focused his attention on the “obscurer region of man’s being” (295); that is, on those forces that seem to control man’s will. Bradley alludes, for example, to the centrality of sleep as “man’s strange half conscious life” (296).19 As opposed to Coleridge’s view, irony on the part of the author is also central in the play according to Bradley. Ironical comments are constantly located by Bradley in the play, especially those in which the character’s words have a further and ominous sense to the audience which is ignored by such a character and others on stage. Among the many examples of irony offered by Bradley we could highlight Duncan’s comment on the treachery of Cawdor interrupted by the entrance of Macbeth, who will betray and murder him: Duncan There’s no art To find the mind’s construction in the face: He was a gentleman on whom I built An absolute trust. (1.4.12-15)20

castle-court to his room; of the torch, again, which Fleance carried to light his father to death, and which was dashed out by one of the murderers; of the torches that flared in the hall on the face of the Ghost and the blanched cheeks of Macbeth; of the flames beneath the boiling caldron from which the apparitions in the cavern rose; of the taper which showed to the Doctor and Gentlewoman the wasted face and blank eyes of Lady Macbeth” (293). 17 The dramatic meaning of birds of omen and savage animals is analysed in the section on Textual Analysis. 18 See 4.2.21. 19 See section on Textual Analysis for an explanation of the meanings of sleep in Macbeth. 20 Bradley gives us other instances of irony in the play and refers, for example, to “the ironical effect of the beautiful lines in which Duncan and Banquo describe the castle they are about to enter. To the reader Lady Macbeth’s light words, ‘A little water clears us of this deed: / How easy is it then’ summon up the picture of the sleep-walking scene. The idea of the Porter’s speech, in which he imagines himself the keeper of the hell-gate, shows the same irony. So does the contrast between the obvious and the hidden meanings of the apparitions of the armed head, the bloody child, and the child with the tree in his hand. It would be easy to add further examples. Perhaps the most striking is the answer which Banquo, as he rides away, never to return alive, gives to Macbeth’s reminder, ‘Fail not our feast.’ ‘My lord, I will not,’ he replies, and he keeps his promise. It cannot be by accident that Shakespeare so frequently in this play uses a device which contributes to excite the vague fear of hidden forces operating on minds unconscious of their influence” (297).

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Bradley also offers his own particular analysis of the dramatic function of the Witches, who, according to the critic, intensify the sense of fear, horror and mystery in the play. He opposes those critics who describe them as goddesses or fates whom Macbeth is powerless to resist. Bradley considers that Shakespeare’s construction of the Witches is based primarily on the testimony of people around him and in books like Reginald Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft (1584). To Bradley, the Witches are not viewed in Macbeth as goddesses, fates or supernatural beings, as were described in Holinshed, but as old women, poor and hideous, who, according to popular belief, had received supernatural powers from evil spirits.21 According to Bradley, the Witches’ prophecies work just as an influence on Macbeth. He is not obliged to act murderously by external powers; he is tempted. As Bradley states, he is “free to accept or resist the temptation but the temptation is already within him” (301). Bradley also criticises those critics who consider the Witches as symbolic representations of Macbeth’s inner struggles and feelings of guilt and remorse. For the critic, this is not always the case. Though prophecies such as the one of the crown or the one that advises to beware Macduff could be analysed as reflections of Macbeth’s desires or fears, some others, such as the prophecies about Birnam Wood or the man not born of woman, answer to nothing inward. Also, Bradley considers that the Witches do not just work sometimes as symbols of Macbeth’s inner life but of outer conflicts, “of the obscurer influences of the evil around him in the world which aid his own ambition and the incitements of his wife” (304). Bradley analyses the psychology of the characters of the play, and most especially the characterisation of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Both characters, led by thoughts of power and ambition, are to Bradley sublime and awe-inspiring even at the end of the play. Their main characteristics are closely linked to the atmosphere of darkness, blood and remorse that surround them. To Bradley, Macbeth is the more complex character. He points out the force of his poetic imagination, which is “productive of violent disturbance both of mind and body” (308). His imaginative mind evolves around fearful thoughts of the supernatural and, according to Bradley, his imagination is more powerful than his conscious thoughts. Bradley highlights the fact that Macbeth has been variously interpreted as a coward, as cold-blooded, as calculating and pitiless. As someone who is hesitant to murder Duncan because it is dangerous and who is scared of being discovered. Incapable of Hamlet’s musings on the noble qualities

21

The ambiguous identity of the Witches is also examined in the section on Textual Analysis.

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of human beings, we are not inclined to love him or pity him but to be in awe of him. Bradley observes that “psychologically it is perhaps the most remarkable exhibition of the development of a character to be found in Shakespeare’s tragedies” (315). First of all, we witness how his consciousness of guilt is more powerful than the consciousness of failure. However, ambition and the love of power will be finally more potent in Macbeth. Eventually he will turn “domineering, even brutal, or he becomes a cool pitiless hypocrite” (312). The psychological development of Lady Macbeth is the inverse of Macbeth’s. In the first half of the play, she is the leading figure. Bradley argues that her main trait is her “inflexibility of will” (322) and she takes the control of the whole situation. She reverses moral distinctions since “good” means for her the crown and “evil” is identified with everything that blocks her way to power. In contrast to Macbeth, she does not have an imaginative mind. Bradley remarks what he calls “the literalism of her mind” (328). The Witches are nothing to her, the noises are simple facts, the knocking has no mystery. She is realistic, and such realism, says Bradley, is fatal to her. She is unable to imagine the act and cruelty of Duncan’s murder and she is unable to foresee the inward consequences of the deed. As Bradley states: She never suspects that these deeds must be thought after these ways; that her facile realism, ‘A little water clears us of this deed’, will one day be answered by herself, ‘Will these hands ne’er be clean?’ or that the fatal commonplace, ‘What’s done is done’, will make way for her last despairing sentence, ‘What’s done cannot be undone.’ (329-30)

When the deed is done, she suddenly realises its hideous outcome and she begins to sink. Bradley observes how “her husband comes into the foreground and she retires” (330). After the banquet scene, despair and disillusion take hold of her. Bradley describes her as a perfect wife and highlights the fact that Lady Macbeth’s mental confusion is not a sign of repentance. Bradley opposes Johnson’s view that Lady Macbeth is merely detested. To Bradley, “Shakespeare meant the predominant impression to be one of awe, grandeur and horror and he never meant this impression to be lost” (333). In the essay “Macbeth and the Metaphysic of Evil” in his book The Wheel of Fire (1930), G. Wilson Knight defines the play as “Shakespeare’s most profound and mature vision of evil” (1995: 140). Such evil is described as inhuman, supernatural, suffocating and conquering. Wilson Knight acknowledges the influence of Bradley’s analysis of the play on parts of his own interpretation. He observes an enveloping atmosphere in the whole play that provokes a total imaginative effect. The Macbeth

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universe is dark and controlled by evil. Wilson Knight points out the constant presence of questions in the play. For example, in the opening line of the play we hear the Witches ask “When shall we three meet again?” (1.1.1). The presence of such questions emphasises the sense of amazement, surprise, uncertainty, mystery, irrationality, disorder and doubt of a play where “nothing is, / But what is not” (1.3.140-41) from its very beginning. There is a continual lack of certainty in the play, which is increased by second-hand knowledge, since rumours and fears are alive throughout the play. Pay attention for example to Ross’s words: Ross I dare not speak much further, But cruel are the times, when we are traitors And do not know ourselves; when we hold rumour From what we fear, yet know not what we fear, But float upon a wild and violent sea Each way and move. (4.2.17-22)

Like Bradley, Wilson Knight refers to the relevance of darkness and night in the play, to the appearance of threatening, ominous and hideous animal imagery that increases the horrifying and abnormal universe of the play. To Wilson Knight, all these references point to fear and terror as the central emotions of the play. The critic argues that the effect of the play is comparable to nightmare and delirium and stresses the fact that the principal deed of the play is a gruesome murder of sleep. Wilson Knight describes the poetry of Macbeth as the poetry of intensity. Also influenced by Bradley, he emphasises the presence of colour and brightness in the play in combination with darkness and the constant references to blood. He highlights the brilliance in the fire-imagery, the thunder, the lightning or the fire of the cauldron, for example. Wilson Knight observes in the blackness of the play, a moral darkness that is also “shot with imagery of bright purity and virtue” (148). The clearest example of such dichotomy would be the contrast between Malcolm’s description in 4.3 of England’s holy king, Edward the Confessor, able to confront the evil, as opposed to Macbeth’s unholy nature.22 Therefore, Wilson Knight considers the sense of uncertainty and the sense of fear and horror as the most important and complementary peculiarities in the Macbeth universe. Two elements, according to the critic, 22 He gives other examples of purity and virtue such as “’the temple-haunting martlet’ (I.vi.4) to contrast with evil creatures. We have the early personation of the sainted Duncan, whose body is ‘the Lord’s anointed temple’ (ii.iii.74), the bright limning of his virtues by Macbeth (i.vii.16-20), and Macduff (iv.iii.108); the latter’s lovely words on Malcolm’s mother who, ‘oftener upon her knees than on her feet, died every day she lived’ (iv.iii.110); the prayer of Lennox for ‘some holy angel’ (III.vi.45) to fly to England’s court for saving help...” (148).

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can be found in Macbeth; that is, “(i) ignorance of his own motive, and (ii) horror of the deed to which he is being driven” (150). Macbeth’s crime is defined as a deed of disorder, of confusion (2.3.59-62). Consequently, human action is closely related to the evil of the entire universe of the play. Evil is so pervasive in the play that it is active in all characters, not just the protagonists. For example, Wilson Knight argues that Banquo’s knowledge of the Witches’ prophecies and his secrecy are signs of his complicity with Macbeth’s crime. The characters are conscious of the presence of evil in and outside them and they are all stupefied by evil as they all lack will-power. In the case of Lady Macbeth, Wilson Knight defines her as a woman “possessed of evil passion” (152) and as a reflection “of evil absolute and extreme” (152). Absolute evil and crime brings Macbeth into isolation from the outer world. He enters into an unreal world, the world of the Witches, the world of nightmare. But Wilson Knight depicts Macbeth as finally triumphant when he acknowledges his evil nature. He then becomes fearless and hypocrisy and secrecy disappear: Macbeth I have almost forgot the taste of fears: The time has been, my senses would have cooled To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir As life were in’t; I have supped full with horrors; Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts, Cannot once start me. (5.5.9-15)

Once Macbeth acknowledges that he is a tyrant the dream is over and the darkness disappears. Wilson Knight observes that now “there is, as it were, a paean of triumph as the Macbeth universe, having struggled darkly upward, now climbs into radiance” (156). In his book Shakespeare’s History Plays (1944), E. M. W. Tillyard defines Macbeth as the “epilogue of the Histories” (1991: 318). He considers that the personal tragedy of Macbeth, whose corruption and ambition lead him to stand against Providence and provoke natural, divine and personal disorder, is more relevant than the political theme. However, this theme is also central since he considers that the instrument Providence uses in order to defeat Macbeth is the body politic. Following his theory of the corresponding planes Tillyard makes an analysis of the play in which disorder is present in all different planes: the divine, the cosmic, the personal and the political. Chaos in one of the planes provokes the dislocation of the other three. This correspondence of planes makes Tillyard affirm that Macbeth “represents its age in showing how all these things should be blended and proportioned” (322). Tillyard ignores in Macbeth the presence of all other types of emergent or disruptive discourses that

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could oppose the Elizabethan dominant discourse of political order and hegemony of the royal power. According to Tillyard, Macbeth clearly shows that Shakespeare faithfully reflected in his plays the Elizabethan world picture that was described in Unit 1. As we will see in the section on contemporary critical approaches to Shakespeare, materialist critics, such as Alan Sinfield, uncover other ideological discourses present in the play and traditionally hidden by the critics. Tillyard considers that the political issue is fundamental in the scene in England in 4.3. He believes this scene to be the emblem of order and balance. This order is highlighted because it follows the scene of utter confusion in the play, that is, the murder of Macduff’s family, which the critic calls “Macbeth’s culminating crime and supreme act of disorder” (321), and which is reported in the English scene. Tillyard considers that the English court is portrayed as reflection of a political stability which corresponds to heavenly equilibrium in the image of Edward the Confessor and its divine power to heal people. Malcolm and Macduff, symbols of order, function as the “instruments” (4.3.242) of the “powers above” (241), that is, of “God’s all-inclusive order” (1991: 321), according to Tillyard. To the critic, Shakespeare finds the image of the perfect good ruler in Malcolm: He is in fact the ideal ruler who has subordinated all personal pleasures, and with them all personal charm, to his political obligations. He is an entirely admirable and necessary type and he is what Shakespeare found that the truly virtuous king, on whom he had meditated so long, in the end turned into. (321)23

4.2.2. Contemporary Critical Approaches to Macbeth: Janet Adelman and Alan Sinfield Janet Adelman: Macbeth, Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies Janet Adelman, in his article “’Born of Woman’: Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth” (1985)24, finds in the play a tension between two different fantasies. The first one evokes the presence of an all-pervading and maleficent maternal power. The second one calls forth the escape from such power. The mother figure is replaced in this play by the figures 23 Compare Tillyard’s view of Malcolm’s traits as a ruler deduced from 4.3. with Alan Sinfield’s conclusions after analysing the politicial implications of the scene. 24 This essay is printed in Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance (1987: 90-121). It is also included in Adelman’s Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origins in Shakespeare, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest” (1991). You can also find it in Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender (1996: 105-34). Our pagination corresponds to the last reference.

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of the Witches and Lady Macbeth. Adelman perceives in Macbeth the presence of the male fear of a female presence that takes control of male identity, mind, self and autonomy.25 Adelman finds in Duncan a congenial relation of the genders since she portrays him as “the ideally androgynous parent” (1996: 108). As the center of power and authority, Duncan is viewed as the paternal figure. As a benign monarch that takes care of his children he is described as a maternal symbol. As Adelman remarks, when he is murdered, nurturance is gone: “The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees / Is left this vault to brag of” (2.3.88-89).26 Duncan’s death brings about the separation between male and female and his absence, the absence of the father, unleashes the power, control and authority of the destructive mother, of chaos. Adelman reminds us of the fact that Macbeth’s murder of Duncan has been analysed, following an oedipal reading, as parricide. Freud was the first one to give such an interpretation in “Some Character-Types Met With in PsychoAnalytic Work” (1915). The mother, Lady Macbeth, is the one that incites the son, Macbeth in this case, to kill the father, symbolized in Duncan. Adelman’s reading does not offer such an interpretation. She argues that in Macbeth the maternal image is endowed with power because Duncan’s paternal function, his role of protector, is not effective, since it is absent even before his murder. According to Adelman, Duncan is killed for his female vulnerability and softness. It is very interesting the analysis she makes of the following lines in which Macbeth compares himself to the rapist Tarquin when he is about to murder Duncan: Macbeth withered murder, Alarumed by his sentinel, the wolf, Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace, With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design Moves like a ghost. (2.1.52-56)

Murder is then depicted as male sexual aggression. If Macbeth is a rapist-murderer, Duncan is then compared to Lucrece, a violated woman.27 25

In order to perceive the whole scope of Adelman’s approach you are recommended to go back to section 2.4.1.3. on Feminism and Psychoanalysis and read the elements that constitute the pre-oedipal stage and their impact on the relationship between infant and mother. 26 See also 2.3.91-92. 27 According to legend, Lucretia was raped by the Etruscan prince Sextus Tarquinius. When Lucretia revealed it to her husband, L.Tarquinius Collatinus, she committed suicide. This incident led to the rebellion (509 BC) commanded by Junus Brutus and to the expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome, the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of the Roman republic. The story is told by the historian Livy and is the subject of Shakespeare’s poem The Rape of Lucrece (1594).

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Femaleness is then identified with weakness and vulnerability, and maleness with violence. But femaleness also acquires grim connotations. Adelman finds another identification between Duncan and femaleness stated by Macduff when he compares the king’s corpse with a new Gorgon as he tells Macbeth and Malcolm: “Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight / With a new Gorgon” (2.3.65-66). In Greek myth, the Gorgons were three female monsters, Sthenno or “mighty”, Euryale or “wide-wanderer” and Medusa or “queen”, who lived in the far West. They inspired terror and had monstrous features such as serpents in her hair and glaring eyes. Only Medusa was mortal and her head was so fearful that could turn whoever looked upon her to stone. Adelman argues that the image of Duncan’s corpse as a Gorgon symbolises the force of a castrating femaleness that strongly emerges after the king’s death. Macbeth is viewed by Adelman as the Witches’ and as Lady Macbeth’s dependent infant. Macbeth, in fact, is described as the Witches’ “way-ward son” (3.5.11) by Hecate. However, the most powerful and most terrifying image of the maternal maliciousness is presented in the following lines by Lady Macbeth: Lady Macbeth I have given suck, and know How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me: I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums, And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn As you have done to this. (1.7.54-59)

Adelman describes these lines as an “image of murderously disrupted nurturance” (111). Following the stages of the pre-oedipal phase, she sees reflected in these lines the moments in which the infant feels disturbed when rejected by the mother. As Adelman states in one of her notes, “several critics see in Macbeth’s susceptibility to female influence evidence of his failure to differentiate from a maternal figure, a failure psychologically the consequence of the abrupt and bloody weaning image by Lady Macbeth” (126). In the play Lady Macbeth is the image of the failure of maternal protection clearly reinforced in the lines in which she desires to unsex herself and rejects her maternal functions: Lady Macbeth Come, you Spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood,

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Stop up th’access and passage to remorse;28 That no compunctious visitings of Nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between Th’effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts, And take my milk for gall, you mur’dring ministers. (1.5.38-46)

It is very interesting to point out Adelman’s reference to the current meanings of the terms “passage” and “visitings of nature” in order to understand the sexual connotations of these lines. “Passage” was a term for the neck of the womb and “visitings of nature” was a way to define menstruation.29 These terms and the identification of her breast-milk with gall represent, as Adelman states, “an attack on the reproductive passages of her own body, on what makes her specifically female” (111). Adelman also observes in these lines how the calling of the spirits, one of the functions of the Witches, establishes a clear bond between their malevolent character and Lady Macbeth’s. This bond is reinforced by the fact that, as Scot remarked in Discovery of Witchcraft, amenorrhea, or the absence of menstruation, was a witch’s trait.30 The link is also highlighted by the image that presents Lady Macbeth nurturing the evil spirits and by the fact that the colostrum was identified with the witch’s milk. During Shakespeare’s times the nursing of evil spirits was considered a witch’s function. The presence of an extra teat or nipple was esteemed as a sign that one was a witch. From it, the witch permitted a familiar, that is, a spirit or demonic attendant to a sorcerer, witch or magician, to suckle human blood.31 Finally, says Adelman, these lines can also point to the current fear of maternal milk. It was thought that, not only were several diseases transmitted through nursing, but also morals and ways of conduct.32 All these topics were of interest to King James who commented on most of them in his Daemonologie. Adelman’s fascinating analysis of these lines shows us the clear relationship between Shakespeare’s art and the concerns of his time. Nowadays it is difficult to understand the multiple 28 The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Macbeth inserts an explanation to these two verses that sheds light on to the meaning of Lady Macbeth’s words: “Classical and early modern medical theory held that health and illness, emotions and other psychological states, were the consequence of ‘humours’ or ‘spirits’ that passed through the blood to various organs and bodily structures. If the ‘thin and wholesome blood’ (Ham.1.5.70) became ‘thick’ or the ‘passage’ was stopped, no emotional or psychological changes could take place” (2001: 125). 29 See The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Macbeth (2001: 33). 30 See The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Macbeth (2001: 34). 31 The witches’ familiars could take the shape of animals such as cats, toads, dogs, rats and insects. In the first scene of Macbeth we know of the existence of two familiars, a cat called Graymalkin and a toad called Paddock. 32 Reflect upon the use of the term “milk” also in 1.5.15 and 4.3.98.

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meanings of texts like this one if we do not know the connotations of certain terms that the Elizabethan spectator would have been able to decipher much more easily than us. Adelman describes Lady Macbeth as the most terrifying figure in the play. In order to prove her statement, she observes that Lady Macbeth is not just linked to the Witches of the play, which would be considered as English witches, but also to the more horrifying Continental witches.33 They were known to practise ritual murder, eating of infants or attacks on male genitals. Adelman considers that Continental witchcraft is mirrored, in psychological terms, in Lady Macbeth’s relation with Macbeth. The critic considers that, as we have seen in 1.5.38-46 and in 1.7.54-59, “she becomes the inheritor of the realm of infantile vulnerability to maternal power, of dismemberment and its developmentally later equivalent, castration. Lady Macbeth brings the witches’ power home” (114). To Adelman, Lady Macbeth acquires authority over Macbeth by attacking his virility and by imagining him as her vulnerable infant. First, when she tries to persuade Macbeth to murder Duncan, she identifies virility with the ability to kill: “When you durst do it, then you were a man” (1.7.49). Adelman states that if he is not able to do it, he is merely “reduced to the helplessness of an infant subject to her rage” (114). In the terms that Lady Macbeth uses to describe Macbeth’s hope, that is, “green and pale” (1.7.37), Adelman observes how, for Lady Macbeth, Macbeth’s doubts make him effeminate and, metaphorically castrated. With these two terms, Shakespeare could refer to the symptoms of a disease that was considered to affect young virgin women and called “greensickness.”34 Its symptoms were lack of menstruation, dietary disturbation, altered skin colour and general weakness. Macbeth is then considered as deprived of virility and procreative power through the use of these terms. Second, to Adelman, the lines “I would, while it was smiling in my face, / Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums, / And dash’d the brains out” (1.7.56-58) reflect a fantasy of Macbeth’s vulnerablity to her. She tries to erase any trace of femaleness within her since, for her, being less than a man is now being a child or a woman. As textual examples that reinforce such an idea, Adelman mentions the moment when Lady Macbeth states that “’tis the eye of childhood / That fears a painted devil” (2.2.57-58) and when she tells Macbeth: “Are you a man? … these flaws and starts … would well become / A woman’s story” (3.4.58-65). See also the moment in which Macbeth remarks that if he were afraid of Banquo alive he could be called “the baby of a girl” (106). 33 34

See The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Macbeth (2001: 30). See Hamlet 1.3.101.

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However, when Macbeth is convinced to carry out the murder, his childlike vulnerability is transferred to Duncan. The king becomes the most potent image of an infant vulnerable to Lady Macbeth’s power. Regicide could be then interpreted not only as parricide, but as infanticide. Duncan murdered body functions then as the materialization of Lady Macbeth’s murdered child in 1.7.54-59. Adelman strengthens this position by alluding to Macbeth’s initial comparison of Duncan’s power after his death with the power of a “naked new-born babe, / Striding the blast” (1.7.21-22). Once Macbeth decides to actively participate, as a man, in Lady Macbeth’s plans, Adelman states that the second fantasy of escape from woman in the play begins to take shape. Macbeth begins to escape from the malevolent maternal image that Lady Macbeth represents. He describes her as the mother of just hard male children and imagines himself as one of those invulnerable children, free from the dominion of women. Adelman reinforces this idea by analysing the following lines by Macbeth: Macbeth Bring forth men-children only! For thy undaunted mettle should compose Nothing by males. (1.7.72-74)

Adelman observes a double pun in “mettle/metal” and “male/mail” that shows how “Lady Macbeth herself becomes virtually male, composed of the hard metal of which the armored male is made”(115). Macbeth deprives her of her femaleness and also defines her as the mother of men nurtured by her fortitude, her mettle. Her children will never be innocent or vulnerable since from the very beginning they are “men-children.” They are, like Macbeth is now, male infants ready to commit murder, invulnerable to everything, even to female malevolence. According to Adelman, Macbeth’s desire to escape from the maternal authority is a reflection of the whole play’s insistence on a separation from femaleness. The more radical example of such a fantasy of escape would be imprinted in these lines in which the Second Apparition encourages Macbeth to become one of those imagined Lady Macbeth’s invulnerable and murderous men-children: Second Apparition Be bloody, bold, and resolute: laugh to scorn The power of man, for none of woman born Shall harm Macbeth. (4.1.78-80)

A birth without a woman is the most extreme way of rejecting the female image. At this point, it is interesting to allude to Adelman’s curious reference to James Weimis of Bogy’s report about the Earl of Gowrie,

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known for having failed to kill James I in 1600. Weimis of Bogy states that Gowrie’s necromantic ideas made him think that the matrix of woman was not essential for the development of male or female embryos. As Adelman remarks, “whether or not Shakespeare deliberately recalled Gowrie, the connection is haunting …, for Gowrie at least, recourse to necromancy seemed to promise at once invulnerability and escape from the maternal matrix” (106).35 Being the product of a woman is synonymous with weakness and vulnerability according to the Witches’ prophecy. Since, apparently, this prophecy makes Macbeth invulnerable, it also makes him as separate from femaleness as if he were not born of woman. However, the moment we finally discover the doubleness of the prophecy, after knowing Macduff’s story, Macbeth’s fantasy of his own invulnerability and his own escape from woman, from the maternal matrix, is disrupted. However, Adelman shows how this fantasy of escape from maternal power is all-pervading in the play from the very first scene till the last one. She analyses the description of the battle between Macdonald and Macbeth in 1.2.7-23. She finds out that, first, there is a clear separation between maleness and femaleness in these lines. Second, she considers that Macbeth’s triumph implies the destruction of the female: Captain. The merciless Macdonald (Worthy to be a rebel, for to that The multiplying villainies of nature Do swarm upon him) from the western isles Of kernes and gallowglasses is supplied; And Fortune, on his damnèd quarrel smiling, Showed like a rebel’s whore: but all’s too weak; For brave Macbeth (well he deserves that name), Disdaining Fortune, with his brandished steel, Which smoked with bloody execution, Like Valour’s minion carved out his passage, Till he faced the slave; Which ne’er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him, Till he unseamed him from the nave to th’chaps, And fixed his head upon our battlements. (1.2.9-23)

35 Adelman also points out Shakespeare’s continuous references to such an issue in other plays: “A few years after Macbeth, Posthumus will make the fantasy explicit: attributing all ills in man to the ‘woman’s part’, he will ask, ‘Is there no way for men to be, but women / Must be half-workers?’ (Cymbeline 2.5.1-2). The strikingly motherless world of The Tempest and its potent image of absolute male control answer Posthumus’s questions affirmatively: there, at least, on that bare island, mothers and witches are banished and creation belongs to the male alone” (106).

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As we can observe, Macdonald is given in these lines a female nature. He is related to the unreliable, inconstant and “disdaining” female figure of Fortune36, against whom Macbeth fights. Macbeth, on the contrary, is given masculine traits; he is compared to “Valour’s minion.” Adelman observes that there is an anticipation in these lines of Macbeth’s fantasy of being born of no woman when he carves out his passage through a female body, the Fortune’s body, in order to reach Macdonald. According to Adelman, these lines could represent Macbeth’s triumph as symbol of Macbeth’s own escape from woman, of Macbeth’s own Caesarean section and self-birth. Also, since Macdonald is considered as female in these lines, Adelman views Macbeth’s act of unseaming him from the nave to the chops as again the image of a Caesarean section. That is, these lines metaphorically and aggressively anticipate the Witches’ prophecy and the extraordinary circumstances of Macduff’s birth. A few lines later, Macbeth, is described by Ross as “lapped in proof” (1.2.54). Adelman sees in this allusion a reference to Macbeth as one of Lady Macbeth’s armoured and invulnerable men-children. However, Adelman observes that the final battle will prove a gender inversion since Macduff is the one that stands for the male figure and not Macbeth. Adelman remarks that, though the fact that Macduff has a mother does in a way deny the fantasy of male self-birth and escape from women, however, the fact that he has been violently separated from his mother leads him to success. As Adelman finally concludes, “Macduff has now taken the place of Macbeth: he carries with him the male power given him by the Caesarean solution, and Macbeth is retrospectively revealed as Macdonwald, the woman’s man” (121). Adelman detects another moment in which femaleness is excluded from the play. She compares the trees and branches of Birnam Wood as “the emblems of a patriarchal family tree” (121). In fact, certain critics, such as Henry N. Paul in The Royal Play of Macbeth (1950), argue that Shakespeare knew John Leslie’s De Origine Scotorum (1578) where he gave a family tree called “Genealogy of the Royal Family of the Stuarts, who obtain the Scottish Sceptre in a direct line and Succession of eight Monarchs.” You can see this tree in The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Macbeth (2001: 3). Banquo is at the base and James at the top of the tree. Paul considers that the scene of the show of the eight kings and certain references such as the moment when 36 Remember the traditional female connotations of Fortune, the Italian goddess of chance or luck. She is described in Shakespeare’s plays according to a set of values such as volability or unconstancy intimately linked to sexual promiscuity. Remember, for example, when Hamlet tells Guildenstern: “In the secret parts of Fortune? Oh most true, she is a strumpet” (2.2.226-27). There are numerous examples of this kind in many of Shakespeare’s plays.

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Banquo sees himself as “the root and father of many kings” (3.1.5) are influenced by Leslie’s picture. However, Adelman considers that all these images of the family tree, like the image of a child crowned with a tree in his hand, were familiar at the time and did not have to be influenced by Leslie’s tree. As in the family trees, in which daughters and mothers are not central, the march of Birnam Wood is also male; it is the fantasy, according to Adelman, of an all-male lineage. The concluding image of nature in Macbeth, a play were in the final scenes the Witches, Lady Macbeth and Lady Macduff have already vanished, is an image of a nature without women. It is also interesting to know that, at the time, witches were considered to move trees. Consequently, the image of men carrying branches, that is, moving trees, is a symbol that denotes the male usurpation of female power. Adelman considers that James I might have been interested in issues such as the desire of being born of no woman and of creating an all-male lineage. The bad image of his mother Mary Queen of Scots in England was one of his main concerns when he became king of England. We must remember that Mary was thought to have murdered her husband Lord Darnley. She was imprisoned, first in Scotland, and later on in England for nineteen years. She plotted against her cousin Elizabeth I to get her freedom and was condemned to death in 1587. Bullough refers to certain critics who have seen in the murder of Duncan parallels with the murder of Lord Darnley by Bothwell, with whom Mary married three months later. The triangle Mary-Bothwell-Darnley has been then compared with the one composed by Lady MacbethMacbeth-Duncan. As Bullough remarks, any association between Lady Macbeth and Mary would not have pleased the king, but such a possibility is not discarded. According to Adelman, another reflection of the fantasy of escape from women is found in the play’s geography. Scotland symbolises the land of Lady Macbeth and the Witches, the mother’s land. England is the land of Edward the Confessor, as Adelman calls him, the “good father-king” (122) and his surrogate son, Malcolm, who is said to be “unknown to woman” (4.3.126). England is then the land of the father. When Malcolm comes back to Scotland he plants there the paternal rule and completely deposes maternal power. As we can see, in Adelman’s opinion the conclusion of the play shows the triumph of masculinity and the absence and disempowerment of the female and the maternal image.

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Alan Sinfield: Macbeth and Cultural Materialism In “Macbeth: History, Ideology and Intellectuals” (1986)37 Alan Sinfield establishes a clear distinction between two different types of violence. The first one is considered as valid and legitimate since it is at the service of the state, of power. The violence which is not accepted is the one that disrupts authority. The first kind of violence would be represented by Macbeth’s battle triumph over Macdonald. The second by Macbeth’s murder of Duncan. Sinfield translates this situation to the modern state and shows us how the citizens are taught to differentiate between these two types of violence clearly represented by the force of the police or the army and the violence exerted by protesters, criminals or terrorists. Sinfield points out that in European countries, during the sixteenth century the power of the Absolutist States was wielded by the monarch. The state needed violence in order not to be destabilised and in order to resist its dissidents. To this end, State violence had to be legitimised and generally accepted by the population. The propagation of the ideology of Absolutism was therefore essential. The citizen was inserted into that system by different social and political forces at the service of the monarch. The citizen was then taught that he or she had to obey a monarch that was divinely sanctioned. This was then taught to be the natural system, a hierarchical system that had to be defended against disruption. As a clear and ironic reference to Tillyard’s description of the so-called Elizabethan world picture, Sinfield states that this dominant ideology was “what some Shakespeareans have celebrated as a just and harmonious world picture” (1994: 169). According to Sinfield, Macbeth presents a debate about the political question of the Absolutist State violence and its legitimacy. First, the play presents the consequences of the fissure between authority and legitimacy. That is, sometimes the monarch is not the most powerful person in the state. Sinfield gives us the example of the relationship between Essex and Queen Elizabeth I. Although she was the legitimate Queen until her death, Essex’s charismatic character showed he could also rule. The Essex rebellion in 1601 is the best example that illustrates that powerful and dangerous dissidents had to be dispelled.38 In Macbeth, Duncan holds the legitimacy to rule but the state depends on the strength of his best general, 37 This article can be found in Critical Quarterly, 28, nos.1,2 (1986), 63-77. It is also printed in Macbeth. Contemporary Critical Essays, edited by Alan Sinfield in 1992 and in New Historicism & Renaissance Drama, edited by Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton in 1992. Our pagination corresponds to the last reference. 38 See note 5 in Unit 3.

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Macbeth. Legitimacy and power are presented as split in the play. Second, Macbeth could also be analysed as a debate about whether Absolutism and tyranny are or are not different concepts. Sinfield gives examples of State violence events such as the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s in France in 1572,39 the torture and executions suffered by more than a hundred witches in Scotland in 1590-91 or the attacks on the Irish people. The most evident dissident violence against State power referred to in Macbeth, as we have already noted in the first section of this unit, is the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Sinfield justifies this outrage as a consequence of “many years of State violence against Roman Catholics: the Absolutist State sought to draw religious institutions entirely within its control, and Catholics who actively refused were subjected to fines, imprisonment, torture and execution” (170). As we can see there is a fine line drawn between legitimate State violence and tyranny. In Basilikon Doron (1599)40 James I established a clear difference between a lawful good king and a usurping tyrant and rejected the possibility that a legitimate monarch would be tyrannical. The violence committed by the legitimate king was a sanctioned violence. The motivation behind the violence was what differentiated the good king from the tyrant. James I justified State violence when it was destined to maintain the status quo since the disruption of the power structure was considered a crime against God and the people. However, such assumptions are contradictory since, as Sinfield argues “the distinction between lawful and tyrannical rule eventually breaks down even in James’s analysis, as his commitment to the state leads him to justify even tyrannical behaviour in established monarchs” (171). Traditional criticism of Macbeth, which Sinfield considers as participant of what he calls the Jamesian reading, was inclined to view the play as a reaffirmation of James’s Absolutist State ideology. The most remarkable interpretation of this kind is N. H. Paul’s The Royal Play of Macbeth (1950), which sustained that the play was written especially for the king. This theory was much later refuted in the well-known article by Michael Hawkins “History, Politics and Macbeth” (1982). Sinfield observes how the Jamesian reading reinforces the idea of a clear dichotomy in the play between Macbeth as a usurping tyrant and the figure of Edward the Confessor as a legitimate good king; between the state as good and 39 See Literatura inglesa hasta el siglo XVII (2002: 223). See also section on Textual Analysis and its commentaries on the images of the sound of bells and their possible relationship with the massacre of St. Bartholomew. 40 In Basilikon Doron, which means kingly gift, James I instructed his young son, Prince Henry, in manners, morals and the ways of kingship.

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Macbeth as a disruption of order. However, according to Sinfield, we have to pay attention to certain facts that show that this dichotomy could be deconstructed. The state is represented by a king who is supposedly endowed with supernatural powers to cure his people of the King Evil. But we know that James I refused to practise such rituals since he considered them as mere superstitions. However, he was encouraged to do so since the false image of a king with miraculous powers made the people accept their subordination to his authority. As we see, the ideological apparatus that sustained the idea of the legitimate good king was based on lies and manipulation. There are also other contradictions inherent within a Jamesian reading of the play. That is, Absolutist ideology defended that even tyrannical kings must not be confronted. However, Macbeth is finally resisted and defeated. When Macduff kills Macbeth, he is killing a rebel but also a king and this would upset a pure Jamesian reading that would clearly distinguish between the tyrant and the king. Sinfield opposes the thesis of a certain type of criticism that considers the Jamesian reading of the play as the correct one since it assumes that other views of State Ideology were not accessible during that age. He offers the Gunpowder Plot as a clear evidence that there were factions that clearly resisted the king’s view of the Absolutist State. But above all, what Sinfield tries to prove is the textual traces in the play of the ideas developed by the Scotsman George Buchanam in his writings De jure regni (1579) and History of Scotland (1582) that James tried to censor in 1584. According to Buchanan, who had been tutor to both Mary Queen of Scots, and her son James I, the monarch’s power comes from and remains with the people and it is not divinely sanctioned. Buchanan then shows the relevant role of religion in the establishment of the State ideology. He also considers that the king who acts against his people’s desires is a tyrant and must be dethroned. Consequently, he esteems that State violence is not always legitimate. In his History of Scotland, Buchanan approves of the deposition of Mary Queen of Scots in 1567. In Mary the binary opposition between the legitimate good king and the usurping tyrant collapses. She is at the same time a legitimate ruler and a tyrant, consequently, for Buchanan her deposers are usurpers but, at the same time, they are lawful. Once again another dichotomy is deconstructed.41 The view of Mary as lawful monarch 41 As Adelman, Sinfield also refers to James’s preoccupation with her mother’s reputation. This reputation may be the reason why there are just eight kings in the show of monarchs in Macbeth and not nine. James was the ninth Stuart monarch, his predecessor was his mother Mary, the eighth Stuart monarch. There has been a wide critical debate about the reasons why there are only eight Stuart monarchs in the scene of the show of kings in Macbeth. For example, in the introduction to The Oxford Shakespeare edition of Macbeth,

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but at the same time a tyrant disrupts the Absolutist ideology and the Jamesian reading of Macbeth which, according to Sinfield, “begins to leak at every joint” (173).42 For example, Duncan’s efficiency as a ruler is called into question even before Macbeth’s plans, and Malcolm’s title is not clear since succession was not necessarily hereditary during Macbeth’s times.43 Also, Banquo’s behaviour is also doubted. In the chronicles, as we know, he helped Macbeth. To show his collaboration in the murder in Macbeth would have been an insult to the king’s lineal ascendancy. However, Sinfield argues, he never communicates his knowledge of the prophecies and does not take a clear line. But the most important proof of the inconstancies of the Absolutist State ideology presented in the play is implicit in the conversation between Malcolm and Macduff in 4.3. This conversation shows how the legitimate monarch’s traits share elements with the tyrant’s. Despite the fact that Malcolm is accusing himself of “boundless intemperance” (4.3.67) and of “a stanchless avarice” (78), and despite the fact that Macduff admits that such vices have provoked the fall of many other monarchs, Macduff still thinks him apt to become king. He argues that everything will be fine since people will be beguiled and will perceive him as a good king. Obviously, Malcolm is not as he makes Macduff believe he is. But Sinfield considers that the fact that he has lied to Macduff indicates that falsity taints the image of Malcolm as a “truly virtuous king” that critics such as Tillyard draw. Therefore, there is not such a clear demarcation between the tyrant and the true king but an obvious overlapping of qualities. As Sinfield remarks, this scene proves how “the virtues James tries to identify with the Absolutist monarch are an ideological strategy, and that the illusion of them will probably be sufficient to keep the system going” (175). Sinfield highlights the fact that among the play’s audiences there would have been spectators who would have interpreted the play following Buchanan’s perspectives. Many would have seen the play as positioned Nicholas Brooke states that “‘king’ was occasionally used of a queen regnant, but the sense is rare, and they are traditionally presented on stage as all male. Mary was a controversial figure, but James would not have been flattered by her omission. If ‘eight’ was not a mere slip, it might be that omitting the ninth was to avoid even symbolically representing the reigning monarch; but if all were male on stage before the Restoration there would still be inconsistency” (1994: 74). 42 Sinfield states that there have even been established similarities between Mary and Macbeth: “She is said to hate integrity in others, to appeal to the predictions of witches, to use foreign mercenaries, to place spies in the households of opponents and to threaten the lives of the nobility; after her surrender she is humiliated in the streets of Edingburgh as Macbeth fears to be” (173). See 5.8.23-35. 43 On this issue see also the section on Textual Analysis.

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against James’s ideas about royal power. The critic considers that the multiple signs of resistance to State authority that eventually led to the Civil War were proof of the existence of numerous citizens who opposed the monarch’s authority. Macbeth could have been interpreted not as a reinforcement of power but as a challenging piece of work that uncovered the instabilities and incongruent aspects of the Absolutist State ideology. Sinfield finally points to the fact that the discrepancies among the different political stances of literary criticism on Macbeth throughout the ages have a great significance since, as he states, “like other kinds of cultural production, literary criticism helps to influence the way people think in the world” (178). The Jamesian reading of Macbeth has traditionally aimed to legitimise State violence. On the contrary, his own reading disturbs this position in order to emphasise the idea that authorised violence is sometimes tyrannical and unjust. As we already saw when analysing the characteristics of cultural materialism, critics such as Sinfield usually establish a link between the ideological values of the text and contemporary events. In this case, Sinfield compares the Gunpowder Plot with the bombing in 1984 by the Irish Republican Army of the Brighton Hotel where the then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet were meeting and with the debate about the state and violence that events such as this can provoke.

4.3. TEXTUAL ANALYSIS This section will be devoted to the analysis of the central themes and images that give form to the whole dramatic atmosphere of Macbeth. An adequate assimilation of the information given in this section depends on a careful and close reading of the play in order to observe the way Shakespeare interrelated language and ideas when composing his works. As a very convenient starting point for our examination, I will begin by presenting Cleanth Brooks’s findings in his analysis of the play’s imagery in “The Naked Babe and the Cloak of Manliness” (1947) referred to in section 1.6. This article has been central to the understanding of the meaning of two essential sets of images in Macbeth: the clothes imagery and the images related to babies. Brooks’s main concern is to give an explanation to two passages in the play in order to show that every reference in Macbeth, every detail, must be examined since everything is part of a unified and connected whole. The first passage is inserted in the scene in which Macbeth ponders on the consequences of killing Duncan (1.7.1-28). One of those effects would be that

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Macbeth pity, like a naked newborn babe Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin horsed Upon the sightless courier of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, That tears shall drown the wind. (1.7.21-25)

The second passage that Brooks analyses is the one in which Macbeth, after hypocritically confessing he has killed Duncan’s guardians out of love for the king and rage for his death, describes Duncan’s corpse: Macbeth Here lay Duncan, His silver skin laced with his golden blood, And his gashed stabs looked like a breach in nature, For ruin’s wasteful entrance. There the murderers, Steeped in the colours of their trade; their daggers Unmannerly breeched with gore. (2.3.104-109)

As Brooks states, these two passages could be “omitted in the acting of the play without seriously damaging the total effect of the tragedy” (1980: 186). However, the close analysis of the images used in order to express the idea of pity denouncing Duncan’s death and the description of Duncan’s corpse reveal how these two passages contain central symbols of the play whose understanding is essential for the comprehension of the whole structure of Macbeth. If we examine the second passage we observe two terms that allude to clothing. The first one would be “laced”, the king’s body garment is his own blood. The second one would apply to the daggers “unmannerly breeched with gore.” The daggers are also covered with blood, that is, they are metaphorically indecently wearing bloody breeches – that is, trousersmade of Duncan’s blood.44 As Brooks acknowledges, Caroline Spurgeon, in her work Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (1935), already discovered the existence of a series of images in Macbeth that alluded to garments. She calls the section in which she analyses such images “Macbeth’s Ill-Fitting Garments” (1999: 324-26). From the beginning of the play we find expressions that directly allude to the act of wearing clothes that do not fit Macbeth properly. For example, when he is nominated Thane of Cawdor Macbeth states: “The Thane of Cawdor lives. 44 Note how they are wearing trousers because it would be the lower part of the daggers, the blades, which would be stained with blood. The daggers are compared to men “unmannerly”, that is, incorrectly, dressed, wearing only red trousers. “Unmannerly” could also be a pun that would refer to “unmanly”, that is, cruelly done. As we have already noted when analysing Adelman’s article the play constantly makes use of the term “man” in order to allude to courage but also to cruelty as in this case.

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Why do you dress me / In borrowed robes?” (1.3.106-107). In order to express Banquo’s reaction to Macbeth’s new position Shakespeare uses again a metaphor of clothes in the same way: Banquo New honours come upon him Like our strange garments, cleave not to their mould, But with the aid of use. (1.3.143-45)

At the end of the play, when Macbeth is presented as a weakened tyrant who is going to be defeated by the Scottish army, Caithness describes him as someone who is wearing a large garment that does not fit him: “He cannot buckle his distempered cause / Within the belt of rule” (5.2.15-16). Again, Angus, in the same scene, gives us an image of Macbeth as a dictator that Angus Now does he feel his title Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe Upon a dwarfish thief. (5.2.20-22)

Spurgeon points out that through the use of these images Shakespeare draws an image of Macbeth as a “small, ignoble man encumbered and degraded by garments unsuited to him … there is an aspect in which he is but a poor, vain, cruel, treacherous creature, snatching ruthlessly over the dead bodies of kinsman and friend at a place and power he is utterly unfitted to possess” (327). Though Brooks recognises the value of Spurgeon’s analysis, however, he considers that there is much more behind these images, especially behind the last two. For Brooks, the main point that Shakespeare is making by using these metaphors of clothes is that these garments do not fit Macbeth because they are not his garments. They are Duncan’s. The clothes imagery recurrently points to the central theme of Macbeth’s bloody usurpation of power. Macbeth vacillates and momentarily refuses to kill Duncan in order to, first, enjoy his new honours, his new position as Thane of Cawdor and, second, maintain his reputation “which would be worn now in their newest gloss, / Not cast aside so soon” (1.7.34-35). However, Lady Macbeth, uncovers the fact that the desire to dethrone the king, that is, to wear Duncan’s garments, had already been in Macbeth’s mind before. As she states: Lady Macbeth Was the hope drunk Wherein you dressed yourself? Hath it slept since? And wakes it now to look so green and pale At what it did so freely? (1.7.35-37)

Macbeth is now ridiculously described as wearing a drunken hope. That is, Macbeth’s doubts turn now the hope that once situated himself

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in Duncan’s place into a mere fantasy that will eventually become a reality after Lady Macbeth’s witty instigations.45 Apart from linking the clothing imagery with the theme of political usurpation, these metaphors are also intimately connected to another essential theme in the play: the opposition between reality and appearances. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth strive, during the whole play, to disguise their real personality. As Brooks states, they are the most faithful images of the fact that “the oldest symbol for the hypocrite is that of the man who cloaks his true nature under a disguise” (1980: 188). In a very ironical intervention that alludes to the traitorous nature of the Thane of Cawdor, clearly anticipating what will happen later between Macbeth and the king, Duncan states that Duncan There’s no art To find the mind’s construction in the face. He was a gentleman on whom I built An absolute trust. (1.4.11-14)46

Deceitfulness is a principal theme in the play. Before Duncan arrives to Macbeth’s castle, Lady Macbeth counsels her husband Lady Macbeth To beguile the time, Look like the time, bear welcome in your eye, Your hand, your tongue; look like th’ innocent flower, But be the serpent under’t. (1.5.61-64)

Before the murder, Macbeth tells her wife to “mock the time with fairest show, / False face must hide what the false heart doth know” (1.7.81-82).47 After his father’s death, Malcolm suspects there is a traitor amongst them and states how “to show an unfelt sorrow is an office / Which the false man does easy” (2.3.129-30). His brother, Donaldbain, reinforces such an idea by stating that “there’s daggers in men’s smiles” (133). Macbeth asks Banquo’s murderers to mask “the business from the common eye / For sundry weighty reasons” (3.1.124-25)48 and before the banquet-scene, 45

See 1.5.24-28. Note that the irony is here increased by the fact that Macbeth immediately enters after these lines and also by the fact that Macbeth has been already nominated Thane of Cawdor. He does not only acquire the Thane of Cawdor’s position but also his same disloyal nature. 47 Notice the rhyme. 48 The reference to these “weighty reasons” could sound ironical to the spectator since the motives Macbeth has to cover the murder are completely different from the ones he tells the murderers. The spectator is the one who knows exactly that the Witches’ prophecies that see Banquo’s sons as kings make these reasons “weighty.” 46

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Macbeth is decided to “make our faces vizards to our hearts, / Disguising what they are” (3.2.34-35). Deceit in the play is closely directly to moral disguise but also to images of clothing directly related to metaphors of masking or cloaking. Brooks focuses his attention on the following lines by Lady Macbeth Lady Macbeth Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, To cry, ‘Hold, hold.’ (1.5.48-52)

First of all we have to bear in mind the dreadful meaning of the verb “to pall” and the noun “blanket.” “To pall” means to cover as with a cloak and it evokes the noun “pall” which can refer to a shroud, that is, the cloth that covers a corpse, the clothing of death. “Blanket” could also be considered as a garment metaphor, since it could be regarded as the clothing of sleep. Brooks imagines Lady Macbeth holding the knife while asking the night to dress itself with infernal smoke, that is, to become completely black so as her knife cannot see the wound it makes and so as to hide Duncan’s murder from God. But also, Brooks gives an original interpretation of this passage by identifying “keen knife” with Macbeth. His doubts and vacillations make her ask the night to conceal the murder even from the hesitant murderer. This interpretation would be reinforced by Macbeth’s lines after knowing that Duncan has appointed his son Malcolm, Prince of Cumberland, as his heir. Macbeth’s ambition and also his fear make him desire murdering Duncan without seeing the deed being done: Macbeth [Aside] The Prince of Cumberland: that is a step On which I must fall down, or else o’erlap, For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires, Let not light see my black and deep desires, The eye wink at the hand. Yet let that be, Which the eye fears when it is done to see. (1.4.48-53)

Before Banquo’s murder, Macbeth invokes the night in a few lines that work as parallel to Lady Macbeth’s lines in 1.5.48-52. Again, Macbeth desires to conceal, to make invisible, Banquo and Fleance’s deaths, that is, to cover the destruction of the “great bond” not just between father and son, but also, according to the Witches’ prophecies, between kings. Observe how, once again, an image of clothing, the verb “scarf up”, is used to allude to falsity:

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Macbeth Come, seeling night, Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day And with thy bloody and invisible hand Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond Which keeps me pale. (3.2.46-50)

As we can see, the clothes imagery is all-pervading in Macbeth. The description of the daggers “unmannerly breech’d with gore” is then part of one of the main symbolic chains in the play. The daggers are described as wearing a bloody garment, Duncan’s blood. But on a deeper level, Brooks points out the fact that this metaphor primarily shows how “as Macbeth and Lennox burst into the room, they find the daggers wearing, as Macbeth knows all too well, a horrible masquerade” (192). Likewise, Lady Macbeth paints the guardians’ faces to disguise them as the murderers: “I’ll guild the faces of the grooms withal, / For it must seem their guilt” (2.2.59-60). The daggers have also been disguised with breeches made of royal blood. The function of such masks is to conceal the identity of the real murderer. The disguise the daggers are wearing allows Macbeth to wear Duncan’s royal garments. As Brooks states: They are not honest daggers, honourably naked in readiness to guard the king, or ‘mannerly’ clothed in their own sheaths. Yet the disguise which they wear will enable Macbeth to assume the robes of Duncan – robes to which he is not more entitled than are the daggers to the royal garments which they now wear, grotesquely. (192)

As we anticipated above, Brooks also examines the metaphor of the “naked new-born babe” in the following lines: Macbeth pity, like a naked newborn babe Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin horsed Upon the sightless courier of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, That tears shall drown the wind. (1.7.21-25)

Once we read the play we notice there is another recurrent metaphor in Macbeth that constantly makes present the image of the baby. We have already mentioned Lady Macbeth’s lines in which she rejects her maternal functions and shows her aggressiveness against the babe she suckles. But above all, we must remember the shape of two of the three apparitions, the crowned baby and the bloody baby, and the last of the three prophecies: Macbeth will be defeated by “none of woman born” (4.1.79). The explanation to such a reiterative image can be found in Macbeth’s obsession to destroy Banquo’s children, that is, in his preoccupation with the future line of kings.

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The play’s insistence on the question of succession is obvious in Macbeth’s reasonings about the need to kill Banquo: Macbeth There is none but he, Whose being I do fear; and under him My genius is rebuked, as it is said Mark Antony’s was by Caesar. He chid the sisters When first they put the name of king upon me And bade them speak to him. Then prophet-like, They hailed him father to a line of kings. Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown And put a barren sceptre in my gripe, Thence to be wrenched with an unlineal hand, No son of mine succeeding. If’t be so, For Banquo’s issue have I filed my mind; For them, the gracious Duncan have I murdered, Put rancours in the vessel of my peace Only for them, and mine eternal jewel Given to the common enemy of man, To make them kings, the seed of Banquo kings. Rather than so, come Fate into the list, And champion me to th’utterance. (3.1.55-73)

Observe how the terms that make reference to sterility obsess Macbeth’s mind in these lines: “fruitless”, “barren”, “unlineal.” As Macduff states when he knows about his child’s death: “He has no children” (4.3.218). But it is precisely his resistance to admit the Witches’ prophecy that Banquo will be the “root and father / Of many kings” (3.1.5-6) what leads him to murder Banquo. Macbeth wishes instead to pass his power on to members of his own family. However, though Banquo dies, his offspring, Fleance escapes and Macbeth is then unable to change the Witches’ predictions. The image of the babe in the play signifies, as Brooks remarks, a future that Macbeth cannot control. Macbeth attacks children literally in the play, that is, he attacks the image of the future, a future that presents itself without any trace of Macbeth’s descendancy. We must examine the words by which Macbeth gives the order to murder all members of Macduff’s household and notice Macbeth’s recurrent obsession with annihilating his enemy’s successive lines: Macbeth From this moment, The very firstlings of my heart shall be The firstlings of my hand. And even now To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done. The castle of Macduff I will surprise;

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Seize upon Fife; give to th’edge o’th’sword His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls That trace him in his line. (4.1.145-52)

As Braunmuller observes in his introduction to The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Macbeth and in the notes to this passage, we have to pay attention to the repetition of the tem “firstling” and to its double meaning as “first thing” but also as “first born.” Macbeth is now ordering as Braunmuller states, “a generational murder” (2001: 18). By using this term, Shakespeare is again pointing at the problem of succession. In order to understand Macbeth’s reaction to Malcolm’s nomination as Duncan’s successor we have to bear in mind that during Macbeth’s period the laws of royal succession were not ruled by the law of primogeniture. During the years spanning from Duncan’s to Malcolm’s reign, the system was, as Braunmuller states, moving “from its traditional system of royal succession – tanistry – to primogeniture, the system which later became common and which was by Shakespeare’s day long established” (16). In feudal Scotland, the eldest son did not necessarily inherit the throne. It could be inherited by any other member of one of the main lines of the royal house worthy to the throne. In this case, Macbeth or Banquo could have been elected by the king as his successor. However, the one elected is not the most valuable member of his royal line but Malcolm, Duncan’s eldest son. Some critics such as Elizabeth Nielsen in “Macbeth: the Nemesis of the Post-Shakespearian Actor” (1965) have considered that Macbeth’s refusal to accept Malcolm as successor is due to Duncan’s alterations of the succession rules. Others, such as Michael Hawkins in “History, Politics and Macbeth” (1982), reject Nielsen’s view and consider that Macbeth “is not shown to have a legal grievance, but a claim of power” (176). Though a debate about the problems surrounding succession would have been of interest during the reign of James I, for Hawkins Shakespeare is more interested in analysing the conduct of the kings, the consequences of their decisions, and he centres his analysis instead on the outcomes of Duncan’s errors of judgements, among which the nomination of his son Malcolm as successor is one of the central ones. Going back to the scene in which Macduff’s child is killed, we must observe how the daring attitude of Macduff’s son makes the image of the child not an equivalent to weakness but, on the contrary, a symbol of strength. As Brooks states, as a “force which threatens Macbeth and which Macbeth cannot destroy” (1980: 198). But evidently, the moment in which Macbeth is definitively destroyed by the force of a child is the one in which he is killed by Macduff, a man not born of woman but “untimely ripp’d” (5.8.16) from his mother’s womb. Though the image of the new-born baby

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also signifies in Macbeth the image of vulnerability and weakness as we saw when commenting on Adelman’s analysis of the play, the baby is also a symbol of power. The babe can symbolise, on the one hand, mercy and pity as we see in the preceding lines, but it is suddenly turned into a forceful image since we see it “striding the blast” (1.7.22) being like “heaven’s cherubin horsed / Upon the sightless courier of the air” (22-23). As Brooks concludes, the babe not only represents the future but also “an avenging angel” (200) for Macbeth that, despite his efforts to hide the deed with “the blanket of the dark”, will uncover the murder in the eyes of everyone. However, and paradoxically, though Macbeth puts on a “manly readiness” (2.3.126), that is, though he pretends to be inhuman, bloody and masculine, he recurrently becomes the image of weakness and vulnerability when he is identified with a baby by Lady Macbeth, as we have already observed in the study of Adelman’s article. If we return to the theme of lineal succession, we observe Macbeth lamenting the fact that his is a “fruitless crown” (3.1.62) and that Duncan’s murder has only served to make “the seed of Banquo kings” (3.1.71). Note that the issue of succession is closely related to the theme of growth, referred especially to the growth of plants. Banquo desires to know who will be, as he says, “the root and father of many kings” (3.1.5-6) by asking the Witches whether they “can look into the seeds of time / And say which grain will grow and which will not (1.3.56-57). Also, Duncan, in his role as father of his subjects, addressed Macbeth by saying that “I have begun to plant thee and will labour / To make thee full of growing” (1.4.28-29). When the king addresses Banquo in the same terms, the latter answers: “There if I grow, / The harvest is your own” (1.4.32-33). As we see, the images related to the growth of plants apply to political issues such as royal succession and the relationship between the sovereign, in his paternal role, and his subjects. But these images also allude to the legitimisation of power, since the lawful government is compared to a healthful and blooming nature and tyranny to a corrupted one, when Lennox remarks how Scotland needs “[t]o dew the sovereign flower and drown the weeds” (5.2.30). This imagery was already pointed out by Spurgeon, who states that in all his works Shakespeare is recurrently impressed “by the vitality and strength of seeds, especially of weeds, and their power, if unchecked, of overgrowing and killing all else, and he is continually conscious of a similar strength and power in the weeds and faults in human character” (1999: 88). In the case of Macbeth, tyranny must be destroyed, otherwise it will expand as weeds killing all living buds, flowers and plants around. Finally, before being defeated and overthrown, Macbeth is described as a fruit “ripe for shaking” (4.3.241) as he describes his own life as “fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf” (5.3.23).

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Brooks also mentions the centrality in Macbeth of this type of imagery, but, once again, he extends Spurgeon’s analysis. Brooks considers as the central image of this chain of metaphors related to plants the picture of Birnam Wood approaching Dunsinane. But what is most striking is the fact that this image is closely related to the clothes symbolism. Macbeth, who tries to deceive everyone throughout the play is now deluded by an army wearing garments made of nature itself, a nature that seems to rebel against him. But it only seems to rise against him. It is not the wood which approaches Macbeth, it is Malcolm’s army in disguise. As we already saw when analysing the date of the composition of Macbeth, the theme of “equivocation”, of ambiguity and duplicity is central in the play. In the first few lines of the play we hear the Second Witch state that they will meet again “when the hurly-burly’s done, / When the battle’s lost and won” (1.1.3-4) and the three Witches close the first scene of the play by declaring a reversal of moral values: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” (1.1.12). Apart from noting the linguistic puns and the alliterations of these lines, we must also observe that the Witches are introducing one of the main themes of the play: confusion and disorder in a world in which, as Lady Macduff laments, “to do harm / Is often laudable, to do good sometime / Accounted dangerous folly” (4.2.72-74). As we can see in the coming scenes, these first few lines by the Witches will be echoed by Duncan and Macbeth. Duncan asserts that the Thane of Cawdor will lose his title and it will be passed on to Macbeth by stating that “What he hath lost, noble Macbeth hath won” (1.2.67). Immediately after Duncan’s words the Witches reenter the stage. Right before meeting the Witches, Macbeth exclaims “So foul and fair a day I have not seen” (1.3.36). As we see, the reverberation of the Witches’ initial words and the constant allusion during the whole play to terms such as “foul”,“‘fair”, on many occasions linked to the term “fear”, are a constant reminder of the centrality in the play of a supernatural and dreadful presence that dominates Macbeth.49 The linguistic expression of the Witches’ prophecies is the most evident example of the all-pervading presence of duplicity in the play. A paradoxical language appropriated also by Macbeth when he ponders on their nature: “This supernatural soliciting / Cannot be ill, cannot be good” (1.3.129-30). We hear the First Witch say to Banquo that he will be “Lesser than Macbeth, and greater” (1.3.63). The Second Witch adds that, compared to Macbeth, he will be “Not so happy, yet much happier” (64). Finally, the Third Witch will complete the prophecy by assuring Banquo that he will “get kings, though thou be none” (65). In the same way, the final resolution 49 For more examples of equivocal language see 1.2.25-28, 2.2.1-2, 2.4.41. On the pun between the terms “fair”, “foul” and “fear” see for example 1.3.49-50 or 3.1.2-3.

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of the last two prophecies, that is, that “none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth” (4.1.79-80) and that Macbeth shall never be defeated until “Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane hill / Shall come against him” (4.1.9293) highlight the fact that the dramatic universe of Macbeth evolves around the theme of, not only ambiguity, deception and double-dealing, but also of surprise and sudden and unexpected revelation: Macbeth And be these juggling fiends no more believed That palter with us in a double sense, That keep the word of promise to our ear And break it to our hope. (5.8.19-22)

These “imperfect speakers” (1.3.68), as Macbeth already calls them in the first act, offer us a post-structuralist definition of language. That is, language is not depicted as a closed structure with a single and fixed meaning. Meaning evolves and linguistic expression works at different levels of signification. Macbeth’s problem is precisely the fact that he accepts his linguistic interpretation as valid without taking into account the polysemic nature of the Witches’ assertions.50 That is, he does not really take into account his own assertion that “nothing is, / But what is not” (1.3.140-41). Macbeth’s inability to ascertain the real meaning of the Witches’ prophecies could be a reflection of his incapacity to see things as they really are. He is, in a way, blindfolded. Apart from obviously increasing the sense of fear and the murderous nature of Macbeth’s actions, the reiterative presence in the play of images of darkness and night serves also to highlight Macbeth’s blindness; a blindness provoked by his own ambitious desires for power. In direct relation to this issue, it must be pointed out that another important chain of images is the one that refers to the sense of sight. We have already seen texts in which the term “eye” is central. For example, Macbeth does not want to see his murderous action and wishes that “the eye wink at the hand” (1.4.52) while asking the stars to “let that be / Which the eye fears when it is done to see” (52-53). Lady Macbeth invokes the “sightless substances” (1.5.47) of the evil spirits to work on her purposes. Pity is identified with a cherub riding on “sightless couriers” (1.7.23) blowing “the horrid deed in every eye” (24). Lady Macbeth advises Macbeth 50 The play presents a constant play with language and its referential object. Observe the multiple and sometimes euphemistic ways in which Duncan’s murder is referred to in the play as merely “it” (1.7.1 or 2.2.37) or the “deed.” On some other occasions it is also alluded to as “the nearest way” (1.5.16), as “that which rather thou dost fear to do” (22), as “this business” (1.7.31), “this enterprise” (1.7.48), “the bloody business” (2.1.48), “this most bloody piece of work” (2.3.121) or as “this more than bloody deed” (2.4.23). This way of referring to Duncan’s murder is also a way to avoid facing real facts. It is a consequence of fear.

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to make his feelings invisible by bearing “welcome in your eye” (1.5.62). Macbeth himself wishes to hide Banquo’s murder “from the common eye” (3.1.124). Macbeth asks the night to “scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day” (3.2.47) to carry out Duncan’s murder and solicits the help of its “invisible hand” (48). References to sight, invisibility, light and darkness are central in a play in which everything seems to be strange,51 in which it is difficult to distinguish between what is real and what is not real, what is corporeal or what is ethereal, what is material or what is just a product of a tormented mind. In the first place, the identity of the Witches is put into doubt. Hovering through a distorted nature covered with “fog and filthy air” (1.1.13), the Witches are described by Banquo as looking “not like th’inhabitants of’th’earth” (1.3.39). Banquo wonders whether they are “fantastical, or that indeed / Which outwardly ye show?” (51-52). As Macbeth reports, they suddenly vanish “into the air, and what seemed corporal, / Melted, as breath into the wind” (79-80). Banquo, once again, asks himself in astonishment: Banquo Were such things here as we do speak about? Or have we eaten on the insane root, That takes the reason prisoner? (81-83)

What are these creatures? Where they indeed there or were they just the product of their imagination? Are they supernatural beings or just strange old women? This ambiguity about the nature of the weird sisters fits perfectly with the sense of general confusion of the play. Note Banquo’s assertion when he says that they are “withered and so wild in their attire” (38) and that though they should be women “yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so” (44-45). During the Elizabethan and Jacobean period witches were believed to have beards.52 However, the term “witch” is only used once in the play in 1.3.5. Banquo, Macbeth and the Witches themselves use the terms “weird sisters.” At the time “weird” meant Destiny or Fate. In mythology, the Greek Fates were assimilated to the Latin Parcae. They were represented from Homer as three old women responsible for destiny and divination, not witchcraft. Evidently, in Macbeth the weird sisters have the power to foretell events. However, as Peter Stallybrass remarks in his article “Macbeth and Witchcraft” (1982) they have also other traits that were attributed to witches at the time such as their distortion of nature, their relation with the familiars Graymalkin and Paddock or their reversal of moral values. Additionally, they have 51 52

In your reading of the text, note the all-pervading presence of the term “strange.” See The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Macbeth (2001: 35).

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physical characteristics that were attributed to the English village witch such as their being old women with “choppy fingers” (1.3.42), “skinny lips” (43), or beards. Finally, Stallybrass states that killing swine, as does the Second Witch, and taking revenge – remember the First Witch’s vengeful attitude against the sailor and his wife in 1.3 – were typical offences in English witch prosecutions. The cauldron scene and the fact that the stage directions and the speech prefixes of the Folio text refer to them as witches make the issue even more ambiguous.53 Stallybrass gives a political explanation to such equivocacy. He first analyses the way the witches are described in Holinshed’s chronicles. The theme of witchcraft is also ambiguous in the chronicles. Macbeth meets a witch that tells him he will never be killed by a man born of woman and he also knows certain wizards. But the main prophecies are made by “three women in strange and wild apparel, resembling creatures of elder world” (in Bullough 1978: 494-95). These women are also depicted as “either the weird sisters, that is (as ye would say) the goddesses of destinie, or else some nymphs or feiries, indued with knowledge of prophesie by the necromenticall science” (in Bullough 495).54 Stallybrass considers that Shakespeare bases his description of the weird sisters on Holinshed but he turns them into forces of darkness, into infernal creatures, in order to “suggest demonic opposition to godly rule” (1992: 29) and therefore strengthen the “antithetical structure of the play” (29). The political effects of usurpation were already suggested by Holinshed when he states that after Banquo’s death “everie man began to doubt his own life” (in Bullough 499). However, in order to emphasise the political consequences of usurpation, Shakespeare complements Holinshed’s account of Macbeth with his account of the murder of King Duff. In this narration, the consequences of regicide are much more dramatic than in Holinshed’s account of Macbeth’s story: For the space of six moneths togither, after this heinous murther thus committed, there appeered no sunne by day, nor moone by night in anie part of the realme, but still was the skie covered with continuall clouds, and sometimes suche outragious windes arose, with lightenings and tempests, that the people were in great feare of present destruction. Monstrous sights also that were seene within the Scottish kingdome that yeere were these, horsses in Louthian, being of singular beautie and swiftnesse, did eate their owne flesh, and would in no wise taste anie other meate. (in Bullough 484) 53

See Bradley’s opinion about the Witches’ dramatic function in the play in section 3.2.1. You can find the main texts by Holinshed that influenced Shakespeare’s composition of Macbeth in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare by Geoffrey Bullough, Vol. VII (1978: 476-508). 54

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We must also bear in mind that Donwald kills King Duff after the king’s execution of Donwald’s friends for plotting with witches against him. During the Jacobean period, witchcraft was synonymous with treason and rebellion. According to the Bible: “Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft” (I Samuel XV.23).55 The alliance between Macbeth and the weird sisters in the play reinforces then the disruption of the institutional order and the traitorous nature that destabilises the whole social and political organisation. Such disorder is symbolised by images of a natural disorder, an aggressive animal realm whose starting point Shakespeare found in Holinshed’s lines above: Old Man

’Tis unnatural, Even like the deed that’s done. On Tuesday last, A falcon tow’ring in her pride of place Was by a mousing owl hawked and killed.

Ross

And Duncan’s horses, a thing most strange and certain, Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race, Turned wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out Contending ’gainst obedience as they would Make war with mankind.

Old Man

’Tis said, they eat each other. (2.4.10-18)

The animal imagery is also central in Macbeth. The violence exerted by Macbeth is mirrored by a world in which animals, as human beings, attack each other, devour each other and, as Duncan’s once tame horses, now defy order and challenge authority “contending ’gainst obedience.” Rebellion and chaos conquer the animal world inhabited by predatory animals such as vultures (4.3.74) or kites (3.4.73) and dangerous beasts such as the “rugged Russian bear / The armed rhinoceros, or th’Hyrcan tiger” (3.4.100101). In the conversation between Ross and Lady Macduff, and later between the mother and her son in 4.2, bird imagery is central. This scene is significant since it presents, in a private context, the political disorder that pervades Scotland. We should note the insistence on the theme of treason, fear, cruelty, betrayal and uncertainty in a world in which, as Ross states, they “know not what they fear, / But float upon a wild and violent sea” (2021). Lady Macduff sees her husband’s disappearance, and consequent treason to his family, as a sign of fear and describes her husband as lacking Lady Macduff the natural touch, for the poor wren, The most diminutive of birds, will fight, Her young ones in her nest, against the owl. All is fear, and nothing is the love. (9-12) 55

See The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Macbeth (2001: 29).

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The consequent annihilation of family values and descendancy, the absence of love and the triumph of fear echo themes that structure the whole play. The vulnerability of certain birds is used to represent the jeopardy of a fatherless family in this scene, a family unable to defend itself against tyranny. Lady Macduff and her children function then as a microcosm that mirrors the whole social and political situation in Scotland, a country without a lawful father. The bird metaphors will continue after the destruction of Macduff’s family. The murder of Macduff’s children turns Macbeth into a “hell-kit” (4.3.219) that has devoured Macduff’s “pretty chickens and their dam” (220). A mind, “full of scorpions” (3.2.36) as Macbeth’s, pictures his obstacles to reach future hegemony as a snake that must be annihilated. Once Duncan has died, the serpent’s menace can revive in the image of Banquo and his sons. This new hindrance has to be destroyed: Macbeth We have scorched the snake, not killed it; She’ll close, and be herself, whilst our poor malice Remains in danger of her former tooth. (13-15)

However, his plans to kill Banquo and his lineage fail. Though the “grown serpent lies” (3.4.29), that is, though Banquo is now dead, Fleance’s escape presages a future danger for Macbeth’s ambitious purposes. Macbeth feels now “cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in / To saucy doubts and fears” (24-25)56 since: Macbeth the worm that’s fled Hath nature that in time will venom breed, No teeth for th’present (29-31)

Also, certain animals function, as the Witches, as foretellers. Macbeth is packed with references to birds of evil omen whose presence and chants presage death and destruction. Before Duncan arrives at Macbeth’s castle we hear Lady Macbeth announce his murder by stating that “The raven himself is hoarse / That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan under my battlements” (1.5.36-37). During the whole play the characters seem to hear owls, ravens, crickets, maggot-pies, choughs or rooks announcing murderous deeds.57 Echoing, reverberating, menacing sounds and lamenting voices and sounds permeate a play where unlawful and violent usurpation of power transforms Scotland into a “horrid hell” (4.3.56) ruled by Macbeth, who, once considered a brave, valiant, and worthy gentleman, 56 57

Notice the alliteration. See also for example 2.2.15 or 3.4.122-26.

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is turned into an “untitled tyrant, bloody-sceptred” (104) and an “abhorrèd tyrant” (5.7.11). Described by Malcolm, as bloody, luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful, sudden and malicious (4.3.57-59) and referred to as “devilish” (117), as the “fiend of Scotland” (236) or as a “hell-hound” (5.8.3), Macbeth controls a “suffering country” (3.6.49) in which every morning “new widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows / Strike heaven on the face” (4.3.5-6). Apart from the sound of pain, of “sighs, and groans, and shrieks that rend the air” (170), one of the sounds that is constantly repeated in Scotland is the sound of the bells. Before killing Duncan, Macbeth states: Macbeth The bell invites me. Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell That summons thee to heaven and to hell. (2.1.62-64)

Even the owl that ominously shrieks is compared by Lady Macbeth to “the fatal bellman / Which gives the stern’st good-night” (2.2.3-4). The knell that announces death is so common in Scotland that Ross The deadman’s knell Is there scarce asked for who, and good men’s lives Expire before the flowers in their caps, Dying or ere they sicken. (4.3.172-75)58

Bullough gives us an interesting explanation of the reason why Shakespeare could have insisted on the presence of the bells in the play. Bullough considers that it could have been a reference to certain events related to the king’s mother’s relatives. We refer, for example, to the massacre of Protestants, known as the Massacre of St Bartholomew in Paris in 1572 ordered by Charles IX but instigated by Catherine de Medici (1519-89), Queen Mother of France, who, according to Bullough “had become as evil in English Protestant eyes as Lady Macbeth could be” (1978: 444). She was the mother of Francis II, Queen Mary of Scotland’s first husband. The signal for the massacre was the tolling of the bell of the palace clock. As Bullough also remarks, the sound of that bell was in the Protestants’ minds for a long time. Therefore the reiterative presence of the bell in Macbeth could hint at such an issue. Bullough also points out the fact that, as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, Charles IX “suffered great remorse, sleeplessness and hallucinations after the slaughter” (446). We can not be certain whether Shakespeare was consciously alluding to the Massacre of St Bartholomew. It could have offended the king to make 58

See also 2.3.68-69, 3.2.43 or 5.9.17.

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such an issue explicit but maybe it was a subtle reference to the cruelty of one of his mother’s French relatives. As Bullough states, “the possibility remains” (446). Bullough also gives us the testimony of one of Bothwell’s servants whose description of his lord’s behaviour after the crime of Darnley, James I’s father, could be identified with Macbeth’s behaviour after Duncan’s murder. We must remember that James I’s mother was accused of having taken part in her husband’s crime. The identification between Mary of Scotland and Bothwell, with whom she got married after Darnley’s death, with Lady Macbeth and Macbeth could have offended the king, but, again, the possibility remains. Returning to the theme of terrifying sounds we can focus on Lennox’s description of the night in which Duncan is murdered: Lennox The night has been unruly: where we lay, Our chimneys were blown down, and, as they say, Lamentings heard i’th’air, strange screams of death And prophesying with accents terrible Of dire combustion and confused events, New hatched to th’woeful time. The obscure bird Clamoured the livelong night. Some say, the earth Was feverous and did shake. (2.3.46-53)

Observe the sinister atmosphere that these lines draw. Darkness, ominous and disquieting sounds, confusion, strangeness, pain and disease. Macbeth is a play in which the natural, familial, social, political and personal orders are all unhealthy. The image of a shaking feverish earth is once again a metaphorical mirror that reflects the frail condition of Scotland under Macbeth’s rule. Following the image of the country as a body politic, Scotland “weeps, it bleeds, and each new day a gash / Is added to her wounds” (4.3.40-41). To dethrone Macbeth is the only remedy for the country’s poor condition, as Malcolm remarks: “Let’s make us med’cines of our great revenge / To cure this deadly grief” (216-17).59 Political corruption and ambition provoke the decay of the macrocosm but also the decline of the microcosm, of the protagonists’ mental health. Macbeth is a play whose main protagonist is “a mind diseased” (5.3.41) with a “strange infirmity” (3.4.86) that torments the mental health of Macbeth first and later on of Lady Macbeth with thoughts of remorse and fear that govern the play. The centrality of the supernatural and malicious nature of the Witches, the sense of fear, the appalling sounds, the constant allusions to ominous birds and violent beasts, the images of darkness, the 59

See also 5.2.25-29 and 5.3.51-57.

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murderous death of children, they all make Macbeth a location of evil. But this outer area of malevolence is nothing compared to the depravation provoked by the power of mental forces, the inner area that dominates the play. Macbeth is a tragedy where “sorriest fancies” (3.2.9), “horrible shadows” (3.4.106), “thick-coming fancies” (5.3.39) “perturbation in nature” (5.1.8), “slumbery agitation” (9-10) and a “rooted sorrow” in memory (5.3.42) direct the actions of the protagonists. The slumbery agitation leads us to another central image in the play: sleep. In 1.3, the Witches once again anticipate one of the most important themes in the play. They punish the sailor with insomnia: First Witch Sleep shall neither night nor day Hang upon his penthouse lid; He shall live a man forbid. Weary sennights nine times nine, Shall he dwindle, peak, and pine. (1.3.18-22)

The picture of the sailor unable to sleep for a time prepares us for the image of Macbeth’s identification of Duncan’s murder with the murder of sleep: Macbeth Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more: Macbeth does murder sleep’, the innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast. (2.2.38-43)

As most things in Macbeth, the connotations of the term “sleep” are contradictory. On the one hand, sleep is a price for the innocent, not then for Macbeth, it is caring, it is easing, relieving and nurturing.60 But, on the other hand, sleep is identified with death on numerous occasions.61 It is “the death of each day’s life” and it is also described as “death’s counterfeit” (2.3.70). The fact that everyone was sleeping helped Macbeth to kill Duncan. When Macduff discovers Duncan’s corpse he exclaims: Macduff Malcolm, awake, Shake off this downy sleep, death’s counterfeit, And look on death itself. Up, up, and see The great doom’s image. Malcolm, Banquo, As from your graves rise up and walk like sprites To countenance this horror. (2.3.69-74) 60 61

See also 3.4.140-44. See Hamlet 3.1.60.

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In these lines, that could also anticipate the image of Lady Macbeth in the sleepwalking-scene, the sleepers are identified with dead men coming out of their graves and walking like spirits. However, and paradoxically, the relationship between sleep and death can also point at a blissful estate distanced from feelings of remorse and guilt. Therefore, sleep in Macbeth works simultaneously and paradoxically as a nightmarish and a peaceful condition as we can deduce from Macbeth’s words: Macbeth But let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer, Ere we will eat our meal in fear, and sleep In the affliction of these terrible dreams That shake us nightly. Better be with the dead Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace, Than on the torture of the mind to lie In restless ecstasy. Duncan is in his grave. After life’s fitful fever, he sleeps well; Treason has done his world; nor steel nor poison, Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing Can touch him further. (3.2.16-26)

On the one hand, sleep is linked with “terrible dreams”, with “the torture of the mind”, with “restless ecstasy” and with “life’s fitful fever.” On the other hand, sleep is identified with death as a peaceful and restful situation that protects Duncan eternally from any kind of evil. Macbeth is now suffering the consequences of Duncan’s murder that he had already presaged and would have liked to “trammel up” (1.7.3) initially. He knows that Banquo’s murder will make all universal order “disjoint”, everything will be displaced and both, heaven and earth, will be destroyed. However, Macbeth’s ambitious desires encourage him to kill his future opponents to the royal succession. The Witches’ prophecies about Banquo’s descendency bring about his “terrible dreams”, Duncan’s murder has not been enough, he has to go on killing in order to reach his purpose. As Macbeth himself acknowledges “blood will have blood” (3.4.122). Ironically, life turns into a restless period whereas death gives tranquillity to the human mind. And also ironically, Macbeth tries to reach peace in life through murderous death. Macbeth suffers a psychological development that finally shapes him as a bloody tyrant that invokes universal disorder if that can help him to get what he wants (4.1.49-60). From being a man to whom the mere thought of killing Duncan “doth unfix my hair /And make my seated heart knock at my ribs / Against the use of nature” (1.3.134-36) he ends up being a man who now orders the hanging of “those that talk of fear” (5.3.37) and that has

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Macbeth almost forgot the taste of fears; The time has been, my senses would have cooled To hear a night-shriek and my fell of hair Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir As life were in’t. I have supped full with horrors; Direness familiar to my slaughterous thoughts Cannot once start me. (5.5.9-15)

That time in which Macbeth’s “slaughterous thoughts” initially had the power to disturb him is exemplified in one of the most important scenes in the play: the dagger-scene: Macbeth Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee: I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. (2.1.33-35)

Before analysing these lines we should examine the emblem by Claude Paradin published in a book of emblems called Devises Heroiques in 1557.

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In this image, royal authority is symbolised by a popular emblem at the time that represented a hand coming out of a cloud, which points at the divine origin of royal power. The hand holds a sceptre that ends with another hand holding a dagger. Macbeth’s words reflect his desire to hold this dagger, that is, to become a king. He sees the handle of the dagger approaching his hand. The moment is not yet completed since Duncan is still alive. The mental image that Macbeth portrays with his words represents monarchical authority since Duncan’s death will finally allow him to reach the dagger, that is, to reach royal power. But Macbeth distorts the emblem since, through violence, the emblem of royal authority will be turned into a bloody emblem of political usurpation. Treason and crime and not legitimate power are the new ingredients of Macbeth’s distorted emblem: Macbeth Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain? I see thee yet, in form as palpable As this which now I draw. Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going, And such an instrument I was to use. Mine eyes are made the fools o’th’other senses, Or else worth all the rest. I see thee still, And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood, Which was not so before. There’s no such thing: It is the bloody business which informs Thus to mine eyes. (2.1.36-49)

Observe in this text the centrality of the workings of the mind that sees more than eyes can see. The predominance of references to the sense of sight is obvious in this text, and, as we already mentioned, in the whole play. But, paradoxically, it is just Macbeth who can see this dagger, that is, the man who is for the most part of the play blind to the real meaning of things. Macbeth is confronted in this text with two daggers, the real one that he draws (41) and the “false creation” of his mind.62 Again, this opposition is one more reflection of the play’s insistence on the dichotomy between what is real and what is not, what is right and what is wrong, what is true and what is not. Also notice the opposition between the hand that is going to commit the crime and that will later hold the royal sceptre and the eye that sees the dagger but does not want to see the hand’s actions (1.4.52). 62

See the metaphorical meanings of the dagger in Hamlet 3.2.357 and 3.4.95.

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Lady Macbeth gives an explanation to her husband’s hallucinations: fear. When Macbeth sees Banquo’s ghost she identifies his husband’s reactions with the dagger-scene: Lady Macbeth This is the very painting of your fear; This is the air-drawn dagger which you said Led you to Duncan. O, these flaws and starts, Impostors to true fear. (3.4.61-64)

The vision of Banquo’s ghost shows Macbeth that confusion has, as Macduff lamented when Duncan was murdered, “made his masterpiece” (2.3.59). Macbeth sees now the Witches’ “hurly-burly” materialised. He observes how the dead can now come back whereas there was a time that “when the brains were out, the man would die, / And there an end” (3.4.79-80). Now, the dead “rise again” (80) and “push us from our stools” (82). In a literal sense, Banquo’s ghost is pushing him from his stool by occupying his place at the banquet table. Metaphorically, for Macbeth, this presages his dethronement and the realisation of the Witches’ prophecies regarding Banquo’s royal progeny. Determined to fight against fate, and “in blood / Stepped in so far that should I wade no more” (136-37), Macbeth decides to meet the Witches once more in order to have the information that will allow him to carry out “strange things” (139) that he has “in head that will to hand” (139). He is referring to Macduff’s destruction. The image of the hand is also central in Macbeth. Hands were at the time, as we can see in Paradin’s emblem, icons of power. In the philosophical and medical treatise by the Greek doctor Galen called On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, of great influence at the time, the symbolic function of the hand was linked to the political and personal abilities. This metaphorical value was presented in numerous social, political, pictorial and religious manifestations. In political terms, the emblematic value of the hand symbolised the royal protection of the whole body politic. However, hands in Macbeth are tainted with royal blood that must be washed in order to seem, just to seem, the right hand to take over the king’s power. Macbeth’s obsession to clean his bloody hands is a reflection of his feelings of guilt and fear of being discovered, but also it is a reflection of the permanent stain made to legitimate power: Macbeth

What hands are here? Ha: they pluck out mine eyes. Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No: this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incardine. Making the green one red.

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Enter Lady Macbeth Lady Macbeth My hands are of your colour, but I shame To wear a heart so white. Knock within I hear a knocking At the south entry. Retire we to our chamber; A little water clears us of this deed. How easy is it then! (2.2.62-71)63

However, the inverse psychological process suffered by Lady Macbeth is made evident in her final obsession to wash her hands when they are already clean in the sleepwalking scene. The whiteness of Macbeth’s heart is now to be transferred to Lady Macbeth’s. She is haunted by the red colour of blood on her hands and will abandon the blackness of murderous thoughts that she so insistently invoked by now having a “light by her continually” (5.1.19-20). Lady Macbeth’s “thick-coming fancies / That keep her from her rest” (5.3.38-39), those that she already predicted that could make them mad (2.2.37), lead her to death, to sleep and rest. Macbeth’s lines after he knows about her decease are one of the most well-known passages of all Shakespeare’s works: Macbeth Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle, Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing. (5.5.18-27)

As Harold Bloom remarks in Shakespeare. The Invention of the Human (1999), this passage could be defined as “a nihilistic death march, or rather a creeping of fools, of universal victims” (541). After her wife’s death Macbeth denounces the vulnerability of human beings to the inexorability of time and its destructive effects. Life is then described as insignificant and invisible as a “walking shadow” approaching its unavoidable end. But it is also compared to the life of a bad player whose acting will never be remembered or to a meaningless or absurd narration by an idiot. Life is 63 These lines show a clear Senecan influence. See note for lines 63-64 in The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Macbeth (2001: 146).

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then nothing, it is just a “brief candle”, which, like the sun, disappears at the end of the day. In these lines we find two other themes that should also be noticed in Macbeth: time and metatheatrical allusions. When Macbeth is reflecting on whether to kill Duncan or not in the soliloquy at the opening of 1.7, he seems to forget his own statement that “time and the hour runs through the roughest day” (1.3.146), as he desires to interrupt the course of time after the crime and so avoid the future consequences of murder: Macbeth If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well It were done quickly. If th’assassination Could trammel up the consequence and catch With his surcease, success, that but this blow Might be the be-all and the end-all – here, But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, We’d jump the life to come. (1.7.1-7)

At the banquet table, Macbeth exclaims: “Let every man be master of his time” (3.1.42). That is exactly what Macbeth intends to do. By killing Duncan and Banquo, he intends to control his own future, the future political situation of the state and the future of his victims. As Braunmuller affirms, in Macbeth usurpation could be thought as an attack on the order of time (2001: 20). Lady Macbeth rejects the “ignorant present” (1.5.55) and perceives “the future in the instant” (56) when she knows about the Witches’ prophecies. But it is not their vision which stops the natural flow of time (2001: 20), but Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s actions that, by killing the king, make time run. Scotland is portrayed as a country in which “unnatural deeds / Do breed unnatural troubles” (5.1.61-62). The most unnatural deed of all in the play is the manipulation of the natural progression of time through the murderous destruction of the rightful descendants to the crown and through the unnatural eradication of human procreation. However, Macbeth is eventually controlled by the passing of time that finally restores order by taking him to his own “dusty death” (5.5.22). Time disorder makes confusion more evident in the play since even the time of day and night overlap making darkness prevail: Ross Ha, good father, Thou seest the heavens, as troubled with man’s act, Threatens his bloody stage. By th’clock ‘tis day And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp. Is’t night’s predominance, or the day’s shame, That darkness does the face of earth entomb When living light should kiss it? (2.4.4-10)

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We observe in this text a clear opposition between the “dark night” and the “living light”, between the “night’s predominance” and the “day’s shame.” We are presented the image of the darkness of night strangling the “travelling lamp”, that is, the sun, to make blackness and mortal feelings prevail. We also notice the interrelation between the metatheatrical allusions and the disruption of the natural course of time. The heavens, that is, the gods, agitated by the human chaos, threaten the human realm. But we have to bear in mind that the canopy over the stage at the Globe theatre, where this play was being performed, was also known as the Heaven since it was adorned with sky and stars. The triple reference to heavens, act and stage is an obvious reference to the theatrical location where the play was being performed and where dramatic time through its division of acts and scenes is, as opposed to Macbeth’s time, ordered. However, there is another interpretation of these lines directly linked to one of the most important themes in the play: birth. The bloody stage could allude to the moment of birth. In the Folio we find the term “travelling” spelled as “traualing.” “Travelling” could pun then with “travailing”, that is, suffering, or labouring to become visible. Namely, the sun would be striving to get out and show its light. But also, “sun” could pun with “son” and “travailing” could then refer to the labour of giving birth, of metaphorically seeing the light. But the birth is frustrated since the “dark night” strangles the sun, or son. If we relate this image with the Witches’ allusion to the “birth-strangled babe” (4.1.30) we could see in these lines the image of a baby being killed or strangled during his or her birth. As Braunmuller states we could relate this interpretation with the fact that In Act 3, Scene 3, Macbeth’s hired murderers attack Fleance, a son who may grow up to be the ‘sun’ to darkened Scotland; so, too, ‘dark night’ strangles the moving (‘travelling’) light of the sun, which is also the ‘travailing’ source, the mother-giving-birth, and son/sun of hope for the future. (39)

Metatheatrical references seem to be linked in the play with the questions of generation as we also see in Macbeth’s following words when he realises the prophecies of the Witches begin to take shape after being nominated Thane of Cawdor: Macbeth [Aside] Two truths are told, As happy prologues to the swelling act Of the imperial theme. (1.3.126-28)

The reference to prologues, act and theme brings the spectators back to the theatrical reality they are witnessing but it also functions as one more

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prophecy in the play. The references to acting announce the relevance of duplicity, of deceitfulness that will spread throughout the play. The term “swelling” alludes to the aspect of a pregnant woman’s body and, consequently, is already pointing to Macbeth’s obsession with the fact that he holds a “barren sceptre” (3.1.63) and to his constant preoccupation about the political import of Duncan’s sons, Banquo’s descendancy and Macduff’s birth.

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RECOMMENDED BIBLIOGRAPHY ADELMAN, Janet (1996): “’Born of Woman’: Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth.” Eds. Shirley Nelson Garner and Madelon Sprengnether. Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP. 105-34. BRADLEY, A. C. 1992 (1904): “Lecture IX. Macbeth.” Shakespearean Tragedy. London: MacMillan Press Ltd. 290-321. BRAUNMULLER, A. R., ed., 2001 (1997): Macbeth. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. BROOKS, Cleanth, 1980 (1968): “‘The Naked Babe’ and the Cloak of Manliness.” Shakespeare. Macbeth. Ed. John Wain. London and Basingstoke: MacMillan Press Ltd. 183-201. BULLOUGH, Geoffrey, ed., 1978 (1973): Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Vol.VII. Routledge and Kegan Paul: London and Henley. KNIGHT, G.Wilson, 1995 (1930): “Macbeth and the Metaphysic of Evil.” The Wheel of Fire. Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy. London and New York: Routledge. 141-59. SINFIELD, Alan, 1994 (1992): “Macbeth: History, Ideology and Intellectuals.” Eds. Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton. New Historicism & Renaissance Drama. London and New York: Longman. 167-80. TILLYARD, E. M. W., 1990 (1944): “Macbeth.” Shakespeare’s History Plays. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 319-22.

RECOMMENDED WEBSITES 1. The Tragedy of Macbeth: http://the-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/macbeth/ 2. Macbeth Navigator: http://www.clicknotes.com/macbeth/welcome.html 3. Vocabulary for Macbeth. Glossary: http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~maggieoh/Macbeth/vocab2.html 4. Spark Notes: Macbeth: http://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/macbeth/ 5. Enotes: Macbeth: http://www.allshakespeare.com/macbeth.php 6. Equivocation and Free Choice in Macbeth: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/5804/macbeth.htm

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KEY TERMS These are the main themes, concepts, critical approaches, critics and images analysed in this Unit. Ask yourself whether you are able to give a brief and concise account of what they refer to and of the main ideas presented by each critic. Date Political relevance of Macbeth’s story at the time Sources: Holinshed and Boece Critical Approaches Johnson, Coleridge, De Quincey, Bradley, Wilson Knight, Tillyard Contemporary critical approaches Macbeth, Janet Adelman, gender studies and psychoanalysis: Fantasies of Maternal Power Macbeth, Alan Sinfield and cultural materialism: Jamesian reading versus Buchanan reading Textual Analysis Cleanth Brooks Clothes imagery Images of babies Appearances and Reality Political Usurpation Plants imagery Sight imagery The Witches Equivocation The dagger Animal imagery Sounds in Macbeth Disease imagery Mental images Death and sleep Lady Macbeth’s hands Light and darkness Time

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SELF-ASSESSMENT QUESTIONS Answer ONE of the following questions: 1. Give a brief account of Johnson’s, Coleridge’s, Bradley’s and Knight’s analysis of Macbeth. 2. What is the political relevance of Macbeth according to Tillyard and Alan Sinfield? How do these different analyses of the play reflect, first, the Elizabethan world picture described by Tillyard and, second, the tenets of cultural materialism in the case of Sinfield’s study? 3. After a close reading of the play, provide a description of Shakespeare’s characterisation of Macbeth, Lady Macbeth and Banquo offering as much textual evidence as possible to support your arguments.

FURTHER KNOWLEDGE EXERCISE 1. Comment on the following text by answering the questions below: Macbeth If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well It were done quickly. If th’assassination Could trammel up the consequence and catch With his surcease, success, that but this blow Might be the be-all and the end-all – here, But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, We’d jump the life to come. But in these cases, We still have judgement here that we but teach Bloody instructions, which being taught, return To plague th’inventor. This even-handed justice Commends th’ingredience of our poisoned chalice To our own lips. He’s here in double trust: First, as I am his kinsman and his subject, Strong both against the deed; then, as his host, Who should against his murderer shut the door, Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been So clear in his great office, that his virtues Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued against The deep damnation of his taking-off. 20 And pity, like a naked newborn babe Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin horsed Upon the sightless courier of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur

1

5

10

15

25

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To prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition which o’erleaps itself And falls on th’other. (1.7.1-28)

1. What is Macbeth reflecting upon in this text? What is the preceding scene about? What happens after this soliloquy? Is this important for the understanding of this soliloquy? In what way? What is “it” referring to in lines 1 and 2? Who is “he” in line 12? What would be the right condition for Macbeth to commit the crime? Is time involved in it? What is the role of time in the play? What would be the consequences of Duncan’s murder? What are the reasons that make Macbeth doubt about killing Duncan? 2. Do you find any alliterations or metaphors in the text? What are they emphasising? Comment on the relevance of images of sight and babies in the text and in the play as a whole. What is the function of the equine images in these lines? Do you find any metrical irregularities? What are they highlighting?

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KRISTEVA, Julia 1982 (1979): “Women’s Time.” Feminist Theory : A Critique of Ideology. Eds. Keohane et al. Brighton: Harvester. —— 2001 (1941): Revolution in Poetic Language. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company. 2165-79. KRONTIRIS, Tina 1992: Oppositional Voices. Women as Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance. London and New York: Routledge. LACAN, Jacques 1977: “ The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud.” Ecrits. A Selection. Ed.& Tr. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton. 146-78. —— 1977: “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalitic Experience.” Ecrits. A Selection. Ed.& Tr. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton. 1-2, 4-5. LATHAM, Agnes 2001 (1975): As You Like It. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen. LEININGER, Lorie Jerrell 1983 (1980): “The Miranda Trap: Sexism and Racism in Shakespeare’s Tempest.” The Woman’s Part. Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. Eds. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene and Carol Thomas Neely. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 285-94. LEITCH, Vincent B., ed. 2001: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company. LENNARD, Jonh and Mary Luckhurst 2002: The Drama Handbook. A Guide to Reading Plays. Oxford: Oxford UP. LENZ, Carolyn Ruth Swift, Gayle Greene and Carol Thomas Neely, eds. 1983 (1980): The Woman’s Part. Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. LEVERENZ, David 1978: “The Woman in Hamlet: An Interpersonal View.” Signs. 4: 291-308. LÉVI-STRAUSS, Claude 1963: Structural Anthropology, Vol. I. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. LEVINE, Laura 1986: “Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization from 1579 to 1642.” Criticism 28: 121-43. LOOMBA, Ania and Martin Orkin, eds. 1998: Post-Colonial Shakespeares. London and New York: Routledge. LOOMBA, Ania 1998: Colonialism / Postcolonialism. New York and London: Routledge. LOOMIS, E. A. 1956: “The Master of the Tiger.” Shakespeare Quarterly 7: 457. LUPTON, Julia Reinhard and Kenneth REINHARD 1993: After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell UP. MANNONI, O. 2001 (1990): The Psychology of Colonization. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.

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Critical Approaches to Shakespeare constituye la materia de la asignatura El Teatro de Shakespeare. El principal objetivo que persigue este volumen es ofrecer al alumno interesado en la obra de William Shakespeare una amplia visión de la recepción crítica de su obra desde el siglo XVII hasta nuestros días y adentrarlos en el mundo shakespeariano a través del análisis pormenorizado de dos de sus mejores tragedias: Hamlet y Macbeth. Marta Cerezo Moreno es actualmente profesora de Literatura Inglesa en el Departamento de Filologías Extranjeras y sus Lingüísticas de la UNED y doctora en Filología Inglesa por la Universidad de Córdoba. Su principal línea de investigación y su docencia se centran en el periodo renacentista inglés y, muy especialmente, en el teatro de William Shakespeare. Su interés también gira en torno a cuestiones de teoría y crítica literaria y estudios de género.

ISBN: 978-84-362-5074-9

46511

Editorial 9 788436 250749

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