Shakespeare and Interpretation, or What You Will

Polka Brayton Polka

Description

Brayton Polka takes both a textual and theoretical approach to seven plays of Shakespeare: Macbeth, Othello, Twelfth Night, All's Well That Ends Well, Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, and Hamlet. He calls upon the Bible and the ideas of major European thinkers, above all, Kierkegaard and Spinoza, to argue that the concept of interpretation that underlies both Shakespeare's plays and our own lives as moderns is the golden rule of the Bible: the command to love your neighbor as yourself. What you will (the alternative title of Twelfth Night ) thus captures the idea that interpretation is the very act by which we constitute our lives. For it is only in willing what others will-in loving relationships-that we enact a concept of interpretation that is adequate to our lives.Polka argues that it is the aim of Shakespeare, when representing the ancient world in plays like Julius Caesar and Troilus and Cressida, and also in his long narrative poem "The Rape of Lucrece," to dramatize the fundamental differences between ancient (pagan) values and modern (biblical) values or between what he articulates as contradiction and paradox. The ancients are fatally destroyed by the contradictions of their lives of which they remain ignorant. In contrast, we moderns in the biblical tradition, like those who figure in Shakespeare's other works, are responsible for addressing and overcoming the contradictions of our lives through living the interpretive paradox of "what you will," of treating all human beings as our neighbor. Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies, notwithstanding their dramatically different form, share this interpretive framework of paradox. As the author shows in his book, texts without interpretation are blind and interpretation without texts is empty.Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. 

Informations

• Publié par: University of Delaware Press
• Date de parution: 24 juin 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781644531198
• Langue: English

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Shakespeare and Interpretation, or What You Will



Shakespeare and Interpretation, or What You Will
Brayton Polka
UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS
Newark



Published by University of Delaware Press
Co-published with The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
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Copyright © 2011 by Brayton Polka
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Polka, Brayton.
Shakespeare and interpretation, or what you will / Brayton Polka.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61149-042-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61149-043-5 (electronic)
1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
PR2976.P57 2011
822.3'3—dc22 2011007986
™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America



Preface

Of the nine chapters that constitute my study the first is introductory. I devote it to showing that the concept of interpretation that we bring to the study of Shakespeare’s works is precisely that which they bring to us. The principle here is that we can interpret solely those texts—in whatever medium, of whatever discourse—which themselves contain the concept of interpretation. Interpretation is not something that we do to a text, external to its textuality, to its content, to its story, to its values. Rather, interpretation constitutes the very values by which we test, examine, and interrogate the text and the very same values by which the text tests, examines, and interrogates us. It then emerges that there are “texts” that cannot be interpreted. There are texts that do not contain, or bear witness to, the values that constitute interpretation. I refer here, as relevant to my study, to the (pagan) works of Roman and Greek antiquity, above all, the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Of the many issues that consequently arise here, two are paramount. The first is to distinguish between Greek tragedy and Shakespearean tragedy, between the values that are central to each. As we learn from Juliet and Rushdie, we must not confuse the accident of a family name—here “tragedy”—with necessary existence. While the name “tragedy” is common to both the ancients and Shakespeare, ancient (pagan) tragedy contains no concept of the necessary existence of interpretation as love of neighbor.
We have now arrived at our second issue. How, then, are we to understand Shakespeare’s Roman and Greek plays? I refer to those plays whose content is constituted by Roman and Greek story: Titus Andronicus , Julius Caesar , Antony and Cleopatra , Coriolanus , Timon of Athens , and Troilus and Cressida , together with The Rape of Lucrece . These works present us with an exquisite paradox. As modern (biblical)—post-classical, if you will—they cannot not contain, and so they do contain, the principle of interpretation that constitutes all of Shakespeare’s plays. Yet, as classical in content, they cannot and do not contain the principle of interpretation. Why Shakespeare wrote these works, that is, how we are to understand them or what it is that we are to get out of them makes them among the most challenging of his works to comprehend. It is little wonder that they have largely defied critical understanding, whether on the part of critics or in stage production. They provide an especially acute test for my concept of interpretation.
The seven chapters that follow the Introduction constitute the heart of my book. I read seven individual plays. This study is not a Shakespeare survey. I find that it is only when we exactingly ask why and how it is that characters bespeak themselves in the plays that we can truly appreciate the extraordinary self-consciousness with which Shakespeare endows them. The text of plays is uniquely constituted, except for brief stage directions, by the speeches that their various characters make (including, for example, the Chorus in Romeo and Juliet and Henry V , Time as the chorus in The Winter’s Tale , and Gower as the chorus in Pericles ). There is no independent narrative. The playwright is nowhere present in his plays, yet he is omnipresent. Of the seven plays I study here I could have chosen others, with the exception, doubtlessly, of Hamlet . To gain an adequate conception of the prince of Denmark must always be, I think, the ultimate test of one’s interpretive principles. Given the centrality of Hamlet to my study, I thought it important to read other major tragedies of Shakespeare, in this case, Macbeth and Othello .
Because Shakespeare’s Roman and Greek plays are central to my study, as I indicated above, I read two of them. I chose Julius Caesar over the other Roman plays because it is particularly instructive to discern the fundamental differences between Brutus and Hamlet. I include Troilus and Cressida , both because it is surely the most famously misunderstood of all of Shakespeare’s plays and because, as “Hamlet’s play,” 1 it is central to seeing why Hamlet has the player speak Virgil’s description of the scene in ancient Troy in which the “clamor” of Queen Hecuba, “When she saw [the Greek warrior] Pyrrhus make malicious sport / In mincing with his sword” the limbs of her husband, King Priam, would have made moist the fiery eyes of heaven. I also discuss The Rape of Lucrece as part of my examination of how Shakespeare, while imbuing the ancient scenes that he depicts with his own modern (biblical) consciousness, at the same time shows us that the consciousness of ancient figures is utterly different from our own.
An example of what we may call Shakespeare’s double(d)-consciousness (which is not to be confused with double-mindedness) is given in the passage from Julius Caesar that stands at the head of my study. After Cassius, Brutus, and the other defenders of republican (senatorial) values have killed Caesar and bathed their hands in his blood, Cassius indicates that their “lofty scene” will “be acted over, / In states unborn and accents yet unknown!” While Cassius effectively expresses a sense of the magnitude that their act of assassinating Caesar involves, at the same time two opposed perspectives on, or concepts of, history emerge in his speech. One perspective comes from within the Roman story and is consistent with it. Mark Antony and Octavius Caesar will view the assassins of Julius Caesar as conspirators; and it will then be Octavius who, after destroying, first, Cassius and Brutus, with Antony’s aid, and, second, Antony, will reenact this lofty scene in which the republican state of Rome is reborn as the empire, with the emperor himself being reborn as the res publica , the republic or public thing. The other perspective, that of Shakespeare, is not Roman. His conception of ancient Rome is not “republican” in the sense either of Brutus or of Caesar (whether Julius or Augustus). Rather, Shakespeare reenacts the lofty scene of Caesar’s assassination within the historical perspective of modernity, the state of whose biblical consciousness was born outside of Rome and the accent of whose interpretive commitment to love of neighbor was unknown to the Romans.
To round out my study of Shakespeare I also include two of his wondrous comedies, Twelfth Night (earlier) and All’s Well That Ends Well (later). I regret not being able to treat in detail King Lear , Measure for Measure , the four late romances, the four major history plays ( Richard II , Henry IV 1 and 2 , and Henry V ), and so many other plays, not to mention the sonnets. I do, however, from time to time, call upon, as appropriate, key passages from plays other than the seven on which I concentrate in my study.
I conclude my study by drawing together in the final chapter the principal lines of my inquiry in order to assess, finally, the interpretive self-consciousness—the self-consciousness of interpretation—that embodies the “necessary existence” of the values that are found at once in Shakespeare’s plays and in us, the readers—and the audience, critics, actors, and so on—of the plays. How we read the plays is how they read us. The structure of interpretive self-consciousness that we bring to the plays is that which we find in the plays, that which the plays elicit, call forth, from us. “Like for like” is what Kierkegaard, whose critical ideas I make central to Chapter 1, calls the structure of upbuilding love. “Wherever upbuilding is,” he writes in Works of Love , “there is love, and wherever love is, there is upbuilding. . . . Love is the ground, love is the building, love builds up. To build up is to build up love, and it is love that builds up” (214, 216). Deconstruction, critique, interpretation, reading . . . all presuppose the necessary existence, the privileged stage of love, of building up and of being built up by love. I call this the interpretive imperative of love.
Let me add that the seven chapters that I devote to individual plays could conceivably be read separately or in any order. There is no larger scheme to the ordering of these chapters, except, again, in the sense that Hamlet is the lodestar of my study. But I do believe that my argument is accumulative. While I hope that I do not too eagerly anticipate what lies ahead, I do presuppose in later chapters the argument of earli