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Shakespeare
This is the first collection of criticism on Shakespeare's romances to register the impact of modern literary theory on interpretations of these plays. Kiernan Ryan brings together the most important recent essays on Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest , the greatest of the `last plays', staging a dynamic debate between feminist, poststructuralist, psychoanalytic and new historicist views of the masterpieces Shakespeare wrote at the close of his career.
The book aims not only to anthologise accounts of the last plays by leading Shakespearean critics, including Stephen Greenblatt, Janet Adelman, Leah Marcus, Howard Felperin and Steven Mullaney, but also to dramatise what is at stake in the choice of a particular critical approach. It allows the student to compare the strengths and limitations of a deconstructive and a feminist reading of the same romance, or to test the plausibility of one psychoanalytic angle on the last plays against another. The headnotes that preface the essays highlight their distinctive slants on Shakespearean romance, unpack the theoretical assumptions that steer their interpretations, and throw into relief the key points at which their authors collide or converge.
The editor's introduction places the essays in the context of twentieth-century criticism of the last plays and makes a powerful case for a fundamental reappraisal of Shakespearean romance. The comprehensive, fully annotated bibliography provides an unrivalled guide to further reading on all four plays.
The book aims not only to anthologise accounts of the last plays by leading Shakespearean critics, including Stephen Greenblatt, Janet Adelman, Leah Marcus, Howard Felperin and Steven Mullaney, but also to dramatise what is at stake in the choice of a particular critical approach. It allows the student to compare the strengths and limitations of a deconstructive and a feminist reading of the same romance, or to test the plausibility of one psychoanalytic angle on the last plays against another. The headnotes that preface the essays highlight their distinctive slants on Shakespearean romance, unpack the theoretical assumptions that steer their interpretations, and throw into relief the key points at which their authors collide or converge.
The editor's introduction places the essays in the context of twentieth-century criticism of the last plays and makes a powerful case for a fundamental reappraisal of Shakespearean romance. The comprehensive, fully annotated bibliography provides an unrivalled guide to further reading on all four plays.
- GenresShakespeare
312 pages, Paperback
First published December 22, 1998
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 25, 2020
Let down by two or three obfusc essays, this collection is a must read if you love the Romances.
Kiernan Ryan's introduction asks us to think about the historical romantic-humanist approach to interpreting Shakespeare's romances as a baseline for the new critical approaches purveyed in this collection of essays. Old contextualisations of metaphors for court and king and symbolism for Shakespeare's own assumed transformation into tragicomedy are still valid if now clichéd or over-worked. What is needed are fresh approaches, while at the same time not transforming the sense of wonder the last plays require of us in order for them not only to work, but for us to be immersed in their spirit of optimism and the profound sense of futurity in their messages of hope.
Funnily enough, this is the sense that most affects us, this magical quality of the romances, that we are constantly aware of the flux of time, looking back while looking forward at once, like Janus. Time, its contractions, compressions, truncations and reversals, its personifications and its plasticity, is an essential part of the experience, structure and medium of meaning in these plays. Time becomes less a chronological measure (The Tempest) as a liquid dimension through which we travel, a voice, a means of making us look to the future, and yet, after four hundred years, have still not arrived there. This perception of the plays - particularly The Winter's Tale - is what stays with you after first reading/seeing it, but then you do not quite know why; yet, liminally, feel.
There is life and much clarity to Ryan's introduction, it makes you want to read the book, and it also makes you want to read more of his. To resonate with a writer of what are - to much of the reading public - a set of eclectic plays in difficult language analysed through a sometimes obscure or unknown set of literary perspectives, is a wonderfully gratifying thing. I suspect it's out of a common love for these wonderful plays....
This is a sound start to what becomes a series of new perspectives (new historicism, feminism, deconstruction) on old works that are yet still fresh, still quick, still affecting. There is - after a grand tragic and comic past - something very appealing and affecting about the romances, not merely because they seem to represent a tenor of life that is not neatly resolved, not fully redeemed, yet of hopeful outcomes centred around family (albeit ruling class families).
Anne Barton's 'Leontes and the Spider: Language and Speaker in Shakespeare's Last Plays' is an essay frequently referred to in modern discussions of the Romances. Its principal arguments are that 1) Shakespeare tends to prefer dramatic action over characterisation in them; that 2) his language convolutes hitherto clear antitheses (such as true-false) in its obliqueness to clear-cut morality; and that 3) these effects create a metatheatrical awareness of their fictions 'while making us understand why and how much we should like those fictions to be real' (p.41). All arguments are prompts to encourage us to awake our faith, despite their incredible turns and outcomes. Through close reading, Barton cleverly but clearly articulates the residual surprise of these Romances and why they stay with us, these humanist 'parables of expiation' (Ryan, p.5). The essay shows a mind clearly in conjunction with the oddities of their construction and characterisation, and the way that readings of them are not only difficult, but often obliquely contradictory, that people sometimes speak out of character for dramatic effect than for the verisimilitude of reality, and the big ask of our belief nonetheless.
Tennehouse's argument that the Romances ultimately assert the continuity and 'perpetuity' of royal genealogy and patriarchy, despite failing fathers, reprieved, is so creatively constructed in 'Family Rites: Patriarchal Strategies in Shakespearean Romance', it is a pleasure. While this New Historicist approach - developed into the full book by Bergeron, for example - and the topicality of Shakespearean royalist affirmation of James I might not seem cutting edge or sexy, it is nonetheless superbly executed, and I found myself convinced before the end, after initial yawns. I may baulk at Bergeron's full treatise, but I will go into more aware and open to the possibilities now.
Ruth Nevo's 'The Perils of Pericles' is a psychoanalytical reading deploying Freud, Lacan and Green to delineate a hidden 'other' text of Pericles' cycle of flights and recoveries from an essential Oedipal guilt based on an inbuilt incest desire he recognises in Antionchus' riddle. It uncovers not only the 'other scene' but provides answers to vexing questions largely glossed over or glossed as the inevitable demands of the romantic plot, and discovers a 'comic' dénouement wholly different from those comic resolutions of the earlier romantic comedies which portray a clever construction of Shakespeare which remains largely hidden, despite its shocking beginning. Poor Pericles, to suffer all this unconscious angst as well as all those tearing tempests and loss of his girls! An excellent essay and a remarkable insight I never would have got my head inside otherwise - despite all my own Oedipal guilt, too.
Steven Mullaney's new historicist look at the positioning of Pericles in the social and cultural context of Jacobean theatre was interesting yet far from clear. Too many generalisations like 'its literary fortunes consequently testify to the limits of any work that seeks to obscure or escape its historical conditions of possibility' (p.104) didn't mean anything to me except that it seemed self-reflective, and I felt such phrases were a very clever-sounding way of not really saying anything much, certainly nothing specific or comprehensible. The gist, as I took it (and I underlined little), was that Shakespeare deliberately posited certain critically confusing scenes, such as Marina at the brothel, not as metatheatrical, but as moral illustration. The result is that Shakespeare turns a theatrical trick bound up in trade and merchandise, to a morality tale (one of the romance's traditions). The point is fine, and none too clearly articulated.
Janet Adelman's Masculine Authority and the Maternal Body makes some good points about the confused sexuality and the depreciation of women in Cymbeline, but does so with much heavy repetition and frequent lack of clarity. Such complexities of close reading require very pristine articulation, and there were so many times I had to re-read sections, it was evident that this was not there all too often. The reclamation of masculinity by Cymbeline and Posthumus by the diminution of Innogen and the death of the Queen - the two chiasmic plots of the play - would have been much aided in transmission by a single diagram, shaped much like the union flag.
I found Leah Marcus's 1988 'Cymbeline and the Unease of Topicality' rather hard-going. It presents a reading of the play with James I's Union project, pulling in characters, themes, readings to exemplify this point, but also concludes that 'reading texts' in the play is a somewhat indeterminate process, as the Soothsayer's modification of his interpretation of the prophecy shows, for example. But Marcus goes further than I can grasp in her concluding discussion of 'cryptonymy', briefly alluding to its meaning in a footnote, where that meaning is a significant if not whole other discussion. I found myself wandering too often, instead of wondering.
Carol Thomas Neely's focus in 'The Winter's Tale': Women and Issue is a feminist appraisal of the positive role of the three strong women, Hermione, Paulina and Perdita, the antidotes to the toxic misogyny of Leontes and Polixenes, and the misinterpretation of Antigonus. It rightly lauds that it is the women in the Romances who bring about the happy transformations. The approach here is simplicity, rather than the obscurity of the two previous offerings, and a welcome respite from convoluted argument. And I wholeheartedly agree: Shakespeare never better represented the key women in his plays (not even in Much Ado or All's Well).
Surprisingly, Felperin's The Deconstruction of Presence in 'The Winter's Tale', from his The Uses of the Canon: Elizabethan Literature and Contemporary Theory (1990) is delivered in language as obscurantist of meaning as his argument of Shakespeare's 'linguistic indeterminism' in the more obscure passages of The Winter’s Tale. That is, those speeches where Leontes is imagining something out of nothing, or nothing from something(?), in his flight of wild imagination of Hermione's apparent infidelity. Taking his cue from Derrida - whose 'différence' was never easy to comprehend - doesn't help either. If Shakespeare's language is duplicitous and incomprehensible, then surely if your premise is to help decide what it might mean, you should do so in the clearest language possible about a difficult one - some say the most difficult of all passages in all his plays (I'd say that was Macbeth, from beginning to end). Felperin doesn't do this; instead he goes off on an analogy of Sydney's Apology, talking about the way poesis either betters or makes new mimetic reality, but losing us in the referencing analogy that is the crux of Leontes' 'imaginings'. I got so lost I disappeared up my own arse, let alone his.
Now I have quite a bit of respect for Felperin's Shakespearean Romance (1972) - once you get past his pompous Shakespearean preface. He here revises his opinion of The Winter’s Tale, certainly in terms of its difficult language, eventually shrugging his shoulders and saying to the effect of 'maybe we're not meant to understand'. But this essay doesn't help you decide that because you cannot understand his argumentative progression (his dialectic) because of his own obscure use of language. This felt like a small group of Deconstructionist elitists sitting in a club scratching each other's parts - just as that preface felt. I'll stick to the 1972 work, myself.
Greenblatt's New Historicist view of The Tempest, in 'The Tempest': Marital Law in the Land of Cockaigne, argues from the point of view that institutions of power and authority (the Church, James I, the Virginia Company) operate on the principal of maintaining a state of anxiety in their subjects, carefully managed by disciplines (perdition and damnation, executions and torture, courts-martial and execution) and the contract of loyalty to a higher power, whereas the function of art, the theatre, and The Tempest, are to use such devices towards the final objective of resolving anxieties into happiness through their comic endings (or, in the case of tragedy, the final atonement of death). It is a long but almost entirely well-articulated essay (only one sentence which was not readable), and despite the gruesome and at times remote examples given, an enjoyable read. Certainly his point is very clearly applied to The Tempest, and adds something to its understanding, points where we frown but continue, such as Prospero's own occasional intrusions of anxiety. While I take this away, I am still in admiration that someone can write so much which merely adds but an increment of my appreciation of what is a superb play, and perhaps Shakespeare's most enjoyable, if not his best.
Norbrook's Language and Utopia in 'The Tempest' begins with so many eclectic references to the different perspectives of literary criticism that I didn't understand much of it for 8 pages; you had to have read all the references to comprehend his points. When he started talking about the play, though, it became very interesting. I was unaware of how the language of the play in certain passages evoked the (typical historicist) topicality of 'celebrating the restoration of monarchical legitimacy as a return to a transcendent natural order' (pp.247-8), as opposed to the utopian implications of, say, Gonzalo's speech. Nor was I aware of Caliban's rebellion by his alternations from 'thou' to 'thee' to 'you'. Norbrook demonstrated in a few areas where language was both seeming to promote a political cause, while withdrawing from or collapsing it, and this cast an interesting light on a much-discussed and loved play. Unfortunately, he reverted to his obscure references in his conclusion, but overall, what I could understand I was thankful for knowing.
Kiernan Ryan's introduction asks us to think about the historical romantic-humanist approach to interpreting Shakespeare's romances as a baseline for the new critical approaches purveyed in this collection of essays. Old contextualisations of metaphors for court and king and symbolism for Shakespeare's own assumed transformation into tragicomedy are still valid if now clichéd or over-worked. What is needed are fresh approaches, while at the same time not transforming the sense of wonder the last plays require of us in order for them not only to work, but for us to be immersed in their spirit of optimism and the profound sense of futurity in their messages of hope.
Funnily enough, this is the sense that most affects us, this magical quality of the romances, that we are constantly aware of the flux of time, looking back while looking forward at once, like Janus. Time, its contractions, compressions, truncations and reversals, its personifications and its plasticity, is an essential part of the experience, structure and medium of meaning in these plays. Time becomes less a chronological measure (The Tempest) as a liquid dimension through which we travel, a voice, a means of making us look to the future, and yet, after four hundred years, have still not arrived there. This perception of the plays - particularly The Winter's Tale - is what stays with you after first reading/seeing it, but then you do not quite know why; yet, liminally, feel.
There is life and much clarity to Ryan's introduction, it makes you want to read the book, and it also makes you want to read more of his. To resonate with a writer of what are - to much of the reading public - a set of eclectic plays in difficult language analysed through a sometimes obscure or unknown set of literary perspectives, is a wonderfully gratifying thing. I suspect it's out of a common love for these wonderful plays....
This is a sound start to what becomes a series of new perspectives (new historicism, feminism, deconstruction) on old works that are yet still fresh, still quick, still affecting. There is - after a grand tragic and comic past - something very appealing and affecting about the romances, not merely because they seem to represent a tenor of life that is not neatly resolved, not fully redeemed, yet of hopeful outcomes centred around family (albeit ruling class families).
Anne Barton's 'Leontes and the Spider: Language and Speaker in Shakespeare's Last Plays' is an essay frequently referred to in modern discussions of the Romances. Its principal arguments are that 1) Shakespeare tends to prefer dramatic action over characterisation in them; that 2) his language convolutes hitherto clear antitheses (such as true-false) in its obliqueness to clear-cut morality; and that 3) these effects create a metatheatrical awareness of their fictions 'while making us understand why and how much we should like those fictions to be real' (p.41). All arguments are prompts to encourage us to awake our faith, despite their incredible turns and outcomes. Through close reading, Barton cleverly but clearly articulates the residual surprise of these Romances and why they stay with us, these humanist 'parables of expiation' (Ryan, p.5). The essay shows a mind clearly in conjunction with the oddities of their construction and characterisation, and the way that readings of them are not only difficult, but often obliquely contradictory, that people sometimes speak out of character for dramatic effect than for the verisimilitude of reality, and the big ask of our belief nonetheless.
Tennehouse's argument that the Romances ultimately assert the continuity and 'perpetuity' of royal genealogy and patriarchy, despite failing fathers, reprieved, is so creatively constructed in 'Family Rites: Patriarchal Strategies in Shakespearean Romance', it is a pleasure. While this New Historicist approach - developed into the full book by Bergeron, for example - and the topicality of Shakespearean royalist affirmation of James I might not seem cutting edge or sexy, it is nonetheless superbly executed, and I found myself convinced before the end, after initial yawns. I may baulk at Bergeron's full treatise, but I will go into more aware and open to the possibilities now.
Ruth Nevo's 'The Perils of Pericles' is a psychoanalytical reading deploying Freud, Lacan and Green to delineate a hidden 'other' text of Pericles' cycle of flights and recoveries from an essential Oedipal guilt based on an inbuilt incest desire he recognises in Antionchus' riddle. It uncovers not only the 'other scene' but provides answers to vexing questions largely glossed over or glossed as the inevitable demands of the romantic plot, and discovers a 'comic' dénouement wholly different from those comic resolutions of the earlier romantic comedies which portray a clever construction of Shakespeare which remains largely hidden, despite its shocking beginning. Poor Pericles, to suffer all this unconscious angst as well as all those tearing tempests and loss of his girls! An excellent essay and a remarkable insight I never would have got my head inside otherwise - despite all my own Oedipal guilt, too.
Steven Mullaney's new historicist look at the positioning of Pericles in the social and cultural context of Jacobean theatre was interesting yet far from clear. Too many generalisations like 'its literary fortunes consequently testify to the limits of any work that seeks to obscure or escape its historical conditions of possibility' (p.104) didn't mean anything to me except that it seemed self-reflective, and I felt such phrases were a very clever-sounding way of not really saying anything much, certainly nothing specific or comprehensible. The gist, as I took it (and I underlined little), was that Shakespeare deliberately posited certain critically confusing scenes, such as Marina at the brothel, not as metatheatrical, but as moral illustration. The result is that Shakespeare turns a theatrical trick bound up in trade and merchandise, to a morality tale (one of the romance's traditions). The point is fine, and none too clearly articulated.
Janet Adelman's Masculine Authority and the Maternal Body makes some good points about the confused sexuality and the depreciation of women in Cymbeline, but does so with much heavy repetition and frequent lack of clarity. Such complexities of close reading require very pristine articulation, and there were so many times I had to re-read sections, it was evident that this was not there all too often. The reclamation of masculinity by Cymbeline and Posthumus by the diminution of Innogen and the death of the Queen - the two chiasmic plots of the play - would have been much aided in transmission by a single diagram, shaped much like the union flag.
I found Leah Marcus's 1988 'Cymbeline and the Unease of Topicality' rather hard-going. It presents a reading of the play with James I's Union project, pulling in characters, themes, readings to exemplify this point, but also concludes that 'reading texts' in the play is a somewhat indeterminate process, as the Soothsayer's modification of his interpretation of the prophecy shows, for example. But Marcus goes further than I can grasp in her concluding discussion of 'cryptonymy', briefly alluding to its meaning in a footnote, where that meaning is a significant if not whole other discussion. I found myself wandering too often, instead of wondering.
Carol Thomas Neely's focus in 'The Winter's Tale': Women and Issue is a feminist appraisal of the positive role of the three strong women, Hermione, Paulina and Perdita, the antidotes to the toxic misogyny of Leontes and Polixenes, and the misinterpretation of Antigonus. It rightly lauds that it is the women in the Romances who bring about the happy transformations. The approach here is simplicity, rather than the obscurity of the two previous offerings, and a welcome respite from convoluted argument. And I wholeheartedly agree: Shakespeare never better represented the key women in his plays (not even in Much Ado or All's Well).
Surprisingly, Felperin's The Deconstruction of Presence in 'The Winter's Tale', from his The Uses of the Canon: Elizabethan Literature and Contemporary Theory (1990) is delivered in language as obscurantist of meaning as his argument of Shakespeare's 'linguistic indeterminism' in the more obscure passages of The Winter’s Tale. That is, those speeches where Leontes is imagining something out of nothing, or nothing from something(?), in his flight of wild imagination of Hermione's apparent infidelity. Taking his cue from Derrida - whose 'différence' was never easy to comprehend - doesn't help either. If Shakespeare's language is duplicitous and incomprehensible, then surely if your premise is to help decide what it might mean, you should do so in the clearest language possible about a difficult one - some say the most difficult of all passages in all his plays (I'd say that was Macbeth, from beginning to end). Felperin doesn't do this; instead he goes off on an analogy of Sydney's Apology, talking about the way poesis either betters or makes new mimetic reality, but losing us in the referencing analogy that is the crux of Leontes' 'imaginings'. I got so lost I disappeared up my own arse, let alone his.
Now I have quite a bit of respect for Felperin's Shakespearean Romance (1972) - once you get past his pompous Shakespearean preface. He here revises his opinion of The Winter’s Tale, certainly in terms of its difficult language, eventually shrugging his shoulders and saying to the effect of 'maybe we're not meant to understand'. But this essay doesn't help you decide that because you cannot understand his argumentative progression (his dialectic) because of his own obscure use of language. This felt like a small group of Deconstructionist elitists sitting in a club scratching each other's parts - just as that preface felt. I'll stick to the 1972 work, myself.
Greenblatt's New Historicist view of The Tempest, in 'The Tempest': Marital Law in the Land of Cockaigne, argues from the point of view that institutions of power and authority (the Church, James I, the Virginia Company) operate on the principal of maintaining a state of anxiety in their subjects, carefully managed by disciplines (perdition and damnation, executions and torture, courts-martial and execution) and the contract of loyalty to a higher power, whereas the function of art, the theatre, and The Tempest, are to use such devices towards the final objective of resolving anxieties into happiness through their comic endings (or, in the case of tragedy, the final atonement of death). It is a long but almost entirely well-articulated essay (only one sentence which was not readable), and despite the gruesome and at times remote examples given, an enjoyable read. Certainly his point is very clearly applied to The Tempest, and adds something to its understanding, points where we frown but continue, such as Prospero's own occasional intrusions of anxiety. While I take this away, I am still in admiration that someone can write so much which merely adds but an increment of my appreciation of what is a superb play, and perhaps Shakespeare's most enjoyable, if not his best.
Norbrook's Language and Utopia in 'The Tempest' begins with so many eclectic references to the different perspectives of literary criticism that I didn't understand much of it for 8 pages; you had to have read all the references to comprehend his points. When he started talking about the play, though, it became very interesting. I was unaware of how the language of the play in certain passages evoked the (typical historicist) topicality of 'celebrating the restoration of monarchical legitimacy as a return to a transcendent natural order' (pp.247-8), as opposed to the utopian implications of, say, Gonzalo's speech. Nor was I aware of Caliban's rebellion by his alternations from 'thou' to 'thee' to 'you'. Norbrook demonstrated in a few areas where language was both seeming to promote a political cause, while withdrawing from or collapsing it, and this cast an interesting light on a much-discussed and loved play. Unfortunately, he reverted to his obscure references in his conclusion, but overall, what I could understand I was thankful for knowing.
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