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Making Make-Believe Real: Politics as Theater in Shakespeare's Time
A penetrating study of the images, symbols, pageants, and creative performances ambitious Elizabethans used to secure political power
Shakespeare’s plays abound with kings and leaders who crave a public stage and seize every opportunity to make their lives a Antony, Cleopatra, Richard III, Othello, and many others. Such self-dramatizing characters appear in the work of other playwrights of the era as well, Marlowe’s Edward II and Tamburlaine among them. But Elizabethan playwrights were not alone in realizing that a sense of theater was essential to the exercise of power. Real rulers knew it, too, and none better than Queen Elizabeth. In this fascinating study of political stagecraft in the Elizabethan era, Garry Wills explores a period of vast cultural and political change during which the power of make-believe to make power real was not just a theory but an essential truth.
Wills examines English culture as Catholic Christianity’s rituals were being overturned and a Protestant queen took the throne. New iconographies of power were necessary for the new Renaissance liturgy to displace the medieval church-state. The author illuminates the extensive imaginative constructions that went into Elizabeth’s reign and the explosion of great Tudor and Stuart drama that provided the imaginative power to support her long and successful rule.
Shakespeare’s plays abound with kings and leaders who crave a public stage and seize every opportunity to make their lives a Antony, Cleopatra, Richard III, Othello, and many others. Such self-dramatizing characters appear in the work of other playwrights of the era as well, Marlowe’s Edward II and Tamburlaine among them. But Elizabethan playwrights were not alone in realizing that a sense of theater was essential to the exercise of power. Real rulers knew it, too, and none better than Queen Elizabeth. In this fascinating study of political stagecraft in the Elizabethan era, Garry Wills explores a period of vast cultural and political change during which the power of make-believe to make power real was not just a theory but an essential truth.
Wills examines English culture as Catholic Christianity’s rituals were being overturned and a Protestant queen took the throne. New iconographies of power were necessary for the new Renaissance liturgy to displace the medieval church-state. The author illuminates the extensive imaginative constructions that went into Elizabeth’s reign and the explosion of great Tudor and Stuart drama that provided the imaginative power to support her long and successful rule.
414 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2014
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About the author
Garry Wills
153 books251 followersGarry Wills is an American author, journalist, political philosopher, and historian, specializing in American history, politics, and religion, especially the history of the Catholic Church. He won a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1993.
Wills has written over fifty books and, since 1973, has been a frequent reviewer for The New York Review of Books. He became a faculty member of the history department at Northwestern University in 1980, where he is an Emeritus Professor of History.
Wills has written over fifty books and, since 1973, has been a frequent reviewer for The New York Review of Books. He became a faculty member of the history department at Northwestern University in 1980, where he is an Emeritus Professor of History.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
November 7, 2014
There is a sense of universalism that permeates life after a certain number of years have passed; though experiential variance can seem chasmic at times, there isn’t much that fundamentally changes about people on a grand scale. Childishness isn’t so much a state of incomprehension as it is one of selfishness; the as-yet-to-be examined state of mind that your interpersonal interactions are unique amongst the world.
The term “naiveté” casts a sheen of an innocence upon what is, essentially, this selfishness. It cloths a lack of experience in an air of acceptance; the naive will “grow out of it,” else the big, bad world will chew them up. The sense that fate or karma will mete out what the naive “deserve”—ignoring the dangers of the predatory or shamelessly opportunistic rogues and rascals that survive on rubes and innocents of all stripes—makes the naive fragile creatures, almost pitiable; the sense of animosity that overt selfishness engenders in others is nonexistent. The naive are acted upon, not active; so wrapped up in their own ideals, they cannot see the world around them as anything other than they want it to be. There is magic there; ephemeral and nonthreatening enough to pierce the veil of world-weariness that potential antagonists use to shield themselves from the jagged edges of social living. For those willing to suspend their own sense of self to become part of the shared hallucination, there is nothing more enticing than a charismatic naïf. And if enough people accept your truth as their own, then your naiveté can reshape reality.
Making Make-Believe Real: Politics as Theatre in Shakespeare’s Time banks on this naiveté; it draws its drama from the internecine space created by the inevitable callous manipulation drawn out by the fragile, beautiful world spun from ideals:
The pages are heavy with retellings of events drawn directly from the historical record; never does the “literature” aspect weigh down the straightforwardness of it all. The idea that the record of the past had recorders—that historians might be interpreted as the playwrights of history—nearly arises:
The “reality” that is draped over the book’s discussion of written theatrical productions is often a one-to-one overlay. It is very simple, and can often approach, if not cross, the line of boredom. Text is first attenuated from stage to page—words written with the intention to be spoken often dwindle when read solely within the mind—second from full script to excerpt:
The writing is not bad, by any metric. It’s personable and you can tell the author is engaged with both the material and the idea of writing a book. But the internal story and the sales pitch that gets the reader past the cover don’t align—Making Make-Believe Real is history dressed up in theatrical costume. I wanted it to confront its own make-believe—the masquerade that it is more than a history lesson where lines from temporally appropriate plays are trotted out to match pre-canned political theses. There are facts that pass the time. Interesting, appealing facts:
One chapter does pull the reader through it with alacrity, but with that chapter’s end, the narrative drive dies as well. History is incorporated, as is literature and political posturing:
The rest of text never catches the reader in a wave of wonder, never fully sells the idea that contained within is an idea worth believing. A hope for new, interdependent interpretations of pageantry and politics, literature and reality, remains make-believe from start to finish; another dry march through history as told by a historian. It is difficult to cast aspersions without recognizing, however, that this review follows a similar pattern; it begins with the promise of Elizabeth as naïf and devolves into its own version of repetition. Sometimes, despite our best intentions, our best knowledge—we miss the mark. Call this review a clever simulacrum of the meanderings within Making Make-Believe Real, or recognize it as just another example of the universal condition of digression.
The term “naiveté” casts a sheen of an innocence upon what is, essentially, this selfishness. It cloths a lack of experience in an air of acceptance; the naive will “grow out of it,” else the big, bad world will chew them up. The sense that fate or karma will mete out what the naive “deserve”—ignoring the dangers of the predatory or shamelessly opportunistic rogues and rascals that survive on rubes and innocents of all stripes—makes the naive fragile creatures, almost pitiable; the sense of animosity that overt selfishness engenders in others is nonexistent. The naive are acted upon, not active; so wrapped up in their own ideals, they cannot see the world around them as anything other than they want it to be. There is magic there; ephemeral and nonthreatening enough to pierce the veil of world-weariness that potential antagonists use to shield themselves from the jagged edges of social living. For those willing to suspend their own sense of self to become part of the shared hallucination, there is nothing more enticing than a charismatic naïf. And if enough people accept your truth as their own, then your naiveté can reshape reality.
Making Make-Believe Real: Politics as Theatre in Shakespeare’s Time banks on this naiveté; it draws its drama from the internecine space created by the inevitable callous manipulation drawn out by the fragile, beautiful world spun from ideals:
Courtly praise was, admittedly, a pose. Even Castiglione’s courtliest of virtues, sprezzatura, is the ability to conceal effort under a pose of effortlessness. And restraint (Niccolo Machiavelli’s rispetto) is a way to get things by reining in one’s urgency (Machiavelli’s impeto) after them. Thus some New Historicists see “subversion” (their favorite word) under the professed love of Elizabeth’s courtiers. It is certainly true that there was endless jostling of her courtiers for favor, position, property, family advancement, or one’s religious preference, all under the “colour” of ardently professed love. But even in seeking these favors, men strengthened her power to grant them. One does not keep coming back for reward to an enfeebled source.The book makes a strong case for the oft-unexamined point that Elizabeth’s reign—in fact every reign—is important because it is self-important. While literature and political reality are tentatively comingled within the pages, never does turn its gaze on its own self-importances; literature is important—works becomes classics—because someone once decided it was so and people accepted it. Moby Dick has some wonderfully constructed sentences, but so does Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil; one is a classic, the other a book club monthly selection. Making Make-Believe Real lacks the self-awareness that might turn it from simple history to deep insight. There is a thread buried within that begs to be teased out, that the same fiat coincidences that put Elizabeth on the British throne ensconced Jane Eyre firmly within the American high school curriculum.
The pages are heavy with retellings of events drawn directly from the historical record; never does the “literature” aspect weigh down the straightforwardness of it all. The idea that the record of the past had recorders—that historians might be interpreted as the playwrights of history—nearly arises:
England was scrapping a densely ritualized history bound up with Catholic Christianity. There was a tendency in earlier days to think of this as a clean break, but a group of “revisionist” religious historians have shown how toughly resistant were old Catholic ties. The “clean break” was actually a long and difficult process of disengagement. G.K. Chesterton struck the right note when he wrote: “The Tudors had begun to persecute the old religion before they had ceased to belong to it.” Victor Turner would think of this as the forming of an antistructure within the framework of a structure. And the goal toward which society was moving was still hazy and inchoate, while Elizabeth held together the loose religious improvisations of what has been called her unsettled “settlement.” To quote Chesterton again: “The mass of common people loved the Church of England without having even decided what it was.”But then it is dropped. There is a clearly pejorative pall to the preceding passage; ‘“revisionist” historians’ is not complementary, and the implication the hangs in the air is that there is a true version of events, uncolored by authorial voice, that could—should—be relayed to the reader. History as timeline, not as story. Which seems an odd position from which to approach writing a historical treatise on the political overtones of Elizabethan theatre. Historical reality—as written—and make-believe—also written—could have been so neatly entwined; they end up posited as unrelated, if not quite anathema to each other.
The “reality” that is draped over the book’s discussion of written theatrical productions is often a one-to-one overlay. It is very simple, and can often approach, if not cross, the line of boredom. Text is first attenuated from stage to page—words written with the intention to be spoken often dwindle when read solely within the mind—second from full script to excerpt:
Some have objected to such a narrowly topical set of references to Garnet as too trivial for a play of such cosmic dimensions as Macbeth. But great poets like Milton and Donne did not think the Gunpowder Plot trivial. In fact, Shakespeare seems to have taken very seriously the concept voiced by Coke and Donne, that the divorce of words from meaning in equivocation introduced chaos into the very use of concepts, thwarting communication. At the deepest level, Macbeth is about the loss of meaning in life. If you divorce words from things, then all reality becomes twistable in the hand. All things slip from one’s mental grasp in this drama—in a world where “foul is fair” (i.i.ii), where a battle is “lost and won” (i.i.4), where witches are neither female nor male (1.3.45-46), where news “cannot be ill; cannot be good” (1.3.131), where a devil can “speak true” (1.3.107) because “the instruments of darkness tells us truths” (1.3.124), where Lady Macbeth is a woman yet unsexed (1.5.41), in a castle that is a gate of hell yet blessed with “heaven’s breath” (1.6.5), where dawn is not dawn (2.4.6-9), 3.4.125-26), where Malcolm speaks “welcome and unwelcome things” (4.3.138), where a forest walks (4.1.93-94), and Macduff was born but not “of woman born” (5.8.15). Equivocation is a kind of universal drunkenness, as the Porter describes that condition:Factually accurate—perhaps informative—but a litany of quotes paraded past the reader as evidence for a theory about MacBeth as then-current political satire seems, well, tedious. Particularly when it is little more than single phrases divorced from plot, setting, or mood. The destruction of language as meaning: how it is frittered away at the edge of comprehensibility by those who comprehend and control power over the linguistic mutability inherent to politics, juxtaposed with those that weave the linguistic threads that make up the very fabric of fates within theatrical productions—there’s the historical narrative I wanted, the narrative Politics as Theater in Shakespeare’s Time implied. Perhaps those expectations were unreasonable. The attention-grabbing title and potent subtitling being so far off from the meat of the text left me disillusioned and a smidge resentful towards a genuinely acceptable book.Much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery: it makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him, and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep and giving him the lie, leaves him. [2.3.31-36]
The writing is not bad, by any metric. It’s personable and you can tell the author is engaged with both the material and the idea of writing a book. But the internal story and the sales pitch that gets the reader past the cover don’t align—Making Make-Believe Real is history dressed up in theatrical costume. I wanted it to confront its own make-believe—the masquerade that it is more than a history lesson where lines from temporally appropriate plays are trotted out to match pre-canned political theses. There are facts that pass the time. Interesting, appealing facts:
When Tuccia [vestal virgin] of Rome was accused of having broken her vow of chastity, she prayed to her tutelary goddess: “If, Vesta, the hands I use to touch your sacred objects have always remained chaste, let me carry water in this sieve from the Tiber to your temple.” To show that Elizabeth was as pure as Tuccia, she was painted holding a sieve in the Siena portrait (c. 1580) and in the Madresfield portrait (c. 1585). She also held a sieve-shaped jewel in the Charlecote portrait (c. 1590), which indicates that the symbol was familiar enough for a courtier to have given her a special gift in that form.You learn something specific about paintings, about Elizabeth, and about allegorical depictions of historical figures. It tempts the mind into a space of fantastical wonder and possibility, as myth and history collide in a dazzling clash of beauty and art. But it simply doesn’t go anywhere. That’s a Wikipedia article, not a book. There is no grand thesis, no undercurrent that ties each chapter to the next, nor propels the reader anywhere, let alone through the book at anything faster than a cludgy amble.
One chapter does pull the reader through it with alacrity, but with that chapter’s end, the narrative drive dies as well. History is incorporated, as is literature and political posturing:
Elizabethan jousts were as much political propaganda as the Attic festivals had been. Ambassadors from the great powers and key cities like Venice—attuned to court gossip, as their dispatches show—regularly attended these events. In fact, Elizabeth and James put on special jousts for visiting royalty and their representatives. There they would have seen the prominent champions of the war party mounting pageants in favor of military action. Sir Henry Lee, the master of the Royal Armory, ran the show. Protestants in the Earl of Leicester’s circle starred in shows meant to be bristling with threats. Diplomatic gossips stressed desired propaganda points—that the queen wanted peace, but she had trouble controlling her warlike subjects. She could let others present a threat while offering herself as a necessary corrective for it. It was one of her shrewdest maneuvers. Shakespeare’s Mark Antony threatens to “cry ‘Havoc!’” and let slip the dogs of war. Elizabeth was seen as constantly crying, “Danger!” and reining in the dogs of war. There was a use for tournaments after all, not as preparation for wars but as prophylactic of them. All the expense and trouble of the shows were what Alcibiades called a “shrewd wastefulness.” (ouk akhrestos anoia).It goes beyond rote pedantry and applies insight; pageantry can draw from both contemporary literature and the historical page to affect a political sphere. A full novel like this would hum, drawing the reader through a doubled scrim veil of textualized reality: past events are recorded into words that alter the world; those impacted events, recorded—again—in words are now doubly attenuated from the originals but still impactful to a modern reader viewing them through the fixed perspective of the printed text on the pages of Making Make-Believe Real.
The rest of text never catches the reader in a wave of wonder, never fully sells the idea that contained within is an idea worth believing. A hope for new, interdependent interpretations of pageantry and politics, literature and reality, remains make-believe from start to finish; another dry march through history as told by a historian. It is difficult to cast aspersions without recognizing, however, that this review follows a similar pattern; it begins with the promise of Elizabeth as naïf and devolves into its own version of repetition. Sometimes, despite our best intentions, our best knowledge—we miss the mark. Call this review a clever simulacrum of the meanderings within Making Make-Believe Real, or recognize it as just another example of the universal condition of digression.
May 15, 2015
This is a study of the theatricality of power in Elizabethan England and how Elizabeth and her advisors used the flourishing iconography of the English Protestant state to project substance and power that the state alone lacked. No one exemplified the creative use of language and symbol more than Shakespeare and the remarkable group of writers that were his contemporaries. Among them was Edmund Spenser (whose “Faerie Queene” I am beginning to appreciate a mere forty years after first encountering it) compared Elizabeth to Augustus Caesar and the Tudor dynasty to the Roman Empire. Spenser layers semi-transparent images and allegory one over the other but continues to circle back to Elizabeth (St. George, the Redcrosse Knight) defending England from the rapacious Hapsburgs of Spain (the dragon, the Souldan). Sir Philip Sidney, today known as a great writer of poetry and prose, was during his lifetime and in the decades after his death at thirty-two, an English Renaissance version of a rock star, invented the pastoral drama so he could better praise his queen.
It would be hard to imagine a more perilous political time, both on the world stage and at home in England. It was a nightmare of dynastic insecurity, a childless monarch who represented the Established Church that had broken from Rome only fifty years before. Next in line to the throne was her cousin Mary, militant Catholic, queen of Scotland, very much a Tudor and with a lot of support in England. Elizabeth had to succeed as the head of state and the head of the church while keeping devious courtiers in line and deal with threats of invasion from Spain. England’s army, made up of “trained bands” and county militias faced the disciplined, professional army with its all-conquering tericos of Philip II. The leader of a maritime nation, she had to rely on privateers who were little more than freebooters given a letter of marque and double-dipping Admiralty officials who owned the companies that sold supplies, cordage and sails to the navy.
Elizabeth had to depend on skilled diplomats, audacious captains and according to Wills, the imaginative construction of real power from a facade of fantasy. Wills discusses the “make-believe monarchy, make-believe religion and make-believe war” created by Shakespeare and his comrades and rivals, tying performances of plays to the performances that Elizabeth gave during the many “pageants, interludes and country progresses of the queen’s court”. The entertainment at stops on these processions often included several days of oratory, poetry, plays, music performances, (most if not all dedicated to the glory of the queen) athletic competition and jousting—lots of jousting.
Jousts staged at tournaments served a number of purposes in early modern England; for Wills the joust that didn’t take place in Act One of “Richard II” is illustrative. Elizabethan jousts were used as political propaganda—ambassadors from the great powers and independent cities, all attuned to court gossip regularly attended these events and saw the leaders of the war parties staging pageants in favor of military action on the continent and were meant to be seen as threats with bellicose nobles and knights winning points by breaking lances against the armor of their counterparts. The story told was that the queen wanted peace but she could barely control her warlike subjects—pacific though she may be, Elizabeth ruled a bunch of belligerent subjects including nobles who could raise armies and whose idea of a pleasant afternoon was to spend a great deal of money so they could face the onslaught of a thousand pounds of horse, armor and rider.
During the joust itself, the two men rode at each other along a dividing wall that kept their horses from colliding and kept errant lances from hitting a horse or the lower body of the rider. To break a lance one had to hit an opponent on the near side—left—side, solidly in the heart area. Riders wore a “grand guard” made of extra armor plate that both protected the wearer and give a solid target for the opponent’s lance.
Jousting was an impressive spectacle but also served as formal and codified means of resolution when courts couldn’t decide a matter—the outcome could be attributed to God’s judgment. There would be no appeal from the celestial court. An example, although thwarted, of this was illustrated in “Richard II”, scenes one and three of Act one. King Richard tries to adjudicate a dispute between Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk and Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Herford and cousin of the king. They accuse each other of truly heinous crimes: murder, treason, plotting against the king himself. The only resolution available is a trial by combat—both challenge the other, both take up the challenges. Richard II cannot calm them, so he allows them to compete in a joust, but stops them before it begins and sentences the two to banishment from England Mowbray forever and Bolingbroke for six years.
Shakespeare, sympathetic to the Tudor view of history (he was serving a Tudor queen) saw Richard’s dithering and indecisiveness part of the misrule that led to the War of Roses, civil unrest that didn’t end until Henry VII’s accession in 1485. Henry was Elizabeth’s grandfather. The sources for this very partisan history were chronicles written by men who were part of the Tudor propaganda machine and were accepted as accurate when Shakespeare wrote “Richard II”
Shakespeare used existing historical narratives, especially Holinshed’s Chronicles, for the history plays and much else. Wills does a meticulous comparison of Holinshed with events in the life of Henry IV showing the parallels between the Chronicles and both parts of “Henry IV” something which has been done a lot. However the use that Wills makes of the historical Prince Hal, at least as depicted by Holinshed, is odd and an example of the only real failing of the book—something that I find strange to write. I have read many of Wills’ books going all the way back to “Nixon Agonistes”. He writes what he knows and he knows a lot; classical Rome, history of the Papacy, Lincoln, Shakespeare and plenty more. He is a meticulous and exhaustive researcher and a masterful stylist. “Making Make-Believe Real”, though, seems like two books that have been stuck together, one is his account of the representation of English power in symbols and icons that Shakespeare and his contemporaries helped to shape. The other is a settling of accounts with “feminists, New Historicists and post-colonialists”, the critics that Wills calls “Hal haters”. He is really incensed with Stephen Greenblatt who he calls the “John the Baptist” of the anti-Henry group.
Wills attacks Greenblatt and other critics at what I consider to be their strongest points, their reading of literary texts, including those that Wills loves the most, in light of colonial struggle, class exploitation, gender politics, and race. His prose goes from fluent and persuasive to sarcastic and mean-spirited when he moves from interpreting Shakespeare’s words to responding to those who have a different view of his protagonists. Wills is brilliant, convincing, can be acerbic and has written more books than many people have read. The best way to approach this one, though, is to slide over the polemics against readers who disagree with him.
It would be hard to imagine a more perilous political time, both on the world stage and at home in England. It was a nightmare of dynastic insecurity, a childless monarch who represented the Established Church that had broken from Rome only fifty years before. Next in line to the throne was her cousin Mary, militant Catholic, queen of Scotland, very much a Tudor and with a lot of support in England. Elizabeth had to succeed as the head of state and the head of the church while keeping devious courtiers in line and deal with threats of invasion from Spain. England’s army, made up of “trained bands” and county militias faced the disciplined, professional army with its all-conquering tericos of Philip II. The leader of a maritime nation, she had to rely on privateers who were little more than freebooters given a letter of marque and double-dipping Admiralty officials who owned the companies that sold supplies, cordage and sails to the navy.
Elizabeth had to depend on skilled diplomats, audacious captains and according to Wills, the imaginative construction of real power from a facade of fantasy. Wills discusses the “make-believe monarchy, make-believe religion and make-believe war” created by Shakespeare and his comrades and rivals, tying performances of plays to the performances that Elizabeth gave during the many “pageants, interludes and country progresses of the queen’s court”. The entertainment at stops on these processions often included several days of oratory, poetry, plays, music performances, (most if not all dedicated to the glory of the queen) athletic competition and jousting—lots of jousting.
Jousts staged at tournaments served a number of purposes in early modern England; for Wills the joust that didn’t take place in Act One of “Richard II” is illustrative. Elizabethan jousts were used as political propaganda—ambassadors from the great powers and independent cities, all attuned to court gossip regularly attended these events and saw the leaders of the war parties staging pageants in favor of military action on the continent and were meant to be seen as threats with bellicose nobles and knights winning points by breaking lances against the armor of their counterparts. The story told was that the queen wanted peace but she could barely control her warlike subjects—pacific though she may be, Elizabeth ruled a bunch of belligerent subjects including nobles who could raise armies and whose idea of a pleasant afternoon was to spend a great deal of money so they could face the onslaught of a thousand pounds of horse, armor and rider.
During the joust itself, the two men rode at each other along a dividing wall that kept their horses from colliding and kept errant lances from hitting a horse or the lower body of the rider. To break a lance one had to hit an opponent on the near side—left—side, solidly in the heart area. Riders wore a “grand guard” made of extra armor plate that both protected the wearer and give a solid target for the opponent’s lance.
Jousting was an impressive spectacle but also served as formal and codified means of resolution when courts couldn’t decide a matter—the outcome could be attributed to God’s judgment. There would be no appeal from the celestial court. An example, although thwarted, of this was illustrated in “Richard II”, scenes one and three of Act one. King Richard tries to adjudicate a dispute between Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk and Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Herford and cousin of the king. They accuse each other of truly heinous crimes: murder, treason, plotting against the king himself. The only resolution available is a trial by combat—both challenge the other, both take up the challenges. Richard II cannot calm them, so he allows them to compete in a joust, but stops them before it begins and sentences the two to banishment from England Mowbray forever and Bolingbroke for six years.
Shakespeare, sympathetic to the Tudor view of history (he was serving a Tudor queen) saw Richard’s dithering and indecisiveness part of the misrule that led to the War of Roses, civil unrest that didn’t end until Henry VII’s accession in 1485. Henry was Elizabeth’s grandfather. The sources for this very partisan history were chronicles written by men who were part of the Tudor propaganda machine and were accepted as accurate when Shakespeare wrote “Richard II”
Shakespeare used existing historical narratives, especially Holinshed’s Chronicles, for the history plays and much else. Wills does a meticulous comparison of Holinshed with events in the life of Henry IV showing the parallels between the Chronicles and both parts of “Henry IV” something which has been done a lot. However the use that Wills makes of the historical Prince Hal, at least as depicted by Holinshed, is odd and an example of the only real failing of the book—something that I find strange to write. I have read many of Wills’ books going all the way back to “Nixon Agonistes”. He writes what he knows and he knows a lot; classical Rome, history of the Papacy, Lincoln, Shakespeare and plenty more. He is a meticulous and exhaustive researcher and a masterful stylist. “Making Make-Believe Real”, though, seems like two books that have been stuck together, one is his account of the representation of English power in symbols and icons that Shakespeare and his contemporaries helped to shape. The other is a settling of accounts with “feminists, New Historicists and post-colonialists”, the critics that Wills calls “Hal haters”. He is really incensed with Stephen Greenblatt who he calls the “John the Baptist” of the anti-Henry group.
Wills attacks Greenblatt and other critics at what I consider to be their strongest points, their reading of literary texts, including those that Wills loves the most, in light of colonial struggle, class exploitation, gender politics, and race. His prose goes from fluent and persuasive to sarcastic and mean-spirited when he moves from interpreting Shakespeare’s words to responding to those who have a different view of his protagonists. Wills is brilliant, convincing, can be acerbic and has written more books than many people have read. The best way to approach this one, though, is to slide over the polemics against readers who disagree with him.
April 2, 2015
Fascinating, clear, and with fresh insight about a lot of aspects about Elizabethan life and theater. I had never thought before about the theme of "equivocation" in Macbeth--lying by telling misleading partial truths or riddling contradictions--and how that was exactly what James I's government was criticizing Jesuits for doing. Wills has no time for the "New Historicists"--he is gratuitously sarcastic about them even when they aren't his immediate subject--that is, those who find every work of art "subversive" of authority, and if there is no direct evidence, then it is all in the "subtext", that source of pretty much whatever you want the work to say. These people, he says, all came of age in the rebellious 1960's and have never grown up. He names names, some of them quite prominent. They are wrong, wrong, wrong to find Shakespeare "subversively" criticizing Prince Hal (later Henry V) when in fact, uniquely in his plays, he was trying to present Hal as the ideal king in a fallen world. They are equally wrong to find Falstaff admirable in his honest dishonesty, a man of integrity. He specifically goes into a many-page criticism of the view that the Earl of Essex had Shakepeare's company put on Richard II just two days before his unsuccessful rebellion as a means of rousing the populace. He is devastating and convincing in his criticism of this theory, which has pretty much become standard boiler-plate in introductions to the play; but on the other hand, he never offers his own explanation of why Essex's men insisted on that particular play--and paid a premium to get it--if they didn't have something like this in mind. Just because it was a stupid and ineffective idea doesn't mean it wasn't part of the conspiracy. The book is further marred by evidence of haste and poor proofreading--after a discussion of the seige of Harfleur, and moving on to the battle of Agincourt, Wills refers confusingly to "Harcourt." He misquotes poetry, sloppily leaving out words or letters: "There is a tide in the affairs of men,/Which taken at the food, leads on to fortune." He refers to "the planet Virgo." Either his editors or his graduate-student drudges didn't serve him well. But in spite of all this nit-picking, the book is compulsively readable, mostly very convincing, and like all of Wills's writing, very clear.
July 11, 2014
What a great book. It was wonderful to read something at higher than grade-school level. Most of what we read on the Internet is not challenging. Wills vocabulary is not exiguous. Elizabeth I was irenic and latitudinarian. I have been reading Wills books since the 1970s: Nixon Agonistes and Bare Ruined Choirs.
January 24, 2015
I reviewed "Making Make-Believe Real: Politics as Theater in Shakespeare's Time" for
The Arts Fuse
August 20, 2014
Anyone acquainted with contemporary politics recognizes the immense amount of pageantry, pomp, and theater displayed in political life, from stage-managed political conventions, to inaugurals full of solemn oaths and speeches, to the blare of trumpets announcing the arrival of the president followed by “Hail to the Chief”. Lesser and innumerable examples abound, even in a day and age when theater is a lesser art (at least measured by the numbers of patrons and artists). But in the time of Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth, the play was the thing to capture anyone’s attention, including the English populace that Elizabeth ruled (and that ruled her).
I expected this book (2014) to focus on the works of Shakespeare since Wills has twice before published books on Shakespeare topics: Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1995) and Verdi’s Shakespeare: Men of the Theater (2011). However, while Wills does spend some time on Shakespeare—including an especially enlightening discussions of The Taming of the Shrew and Henry V—this book addresses the wider cultural milieu. Wills explores how the need to hold and wield political power in Elizabethan England uses theater, poetry, and public spectacle to influence popular perceptions. Indeed, entire lives seem dedicated to gaining and maintaining the audience, whether courtiers seeking the approval of Elizabeth, such as Essex, or Elizabeth herself courting her subjects. Wills writes:
A self-dramatizing trait is so common in plays of the time [referencing various rulers from Shakespeare] that we must suspect it is more than mere personal foible, in the character or the playwright —more even than the convention of theatrical characters being theatrical. The best indicator of this is that the most grandiose self-presenters are men and women who seek or hold power. And power, after all, must always find a way to project its claims onto the people it would control.
Wills, Garry (2014-06-10). Making Make-Believe Real (Kindle Locations 94-97). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Wills notes that “performance theory” now addresses not only the particulars of production, but also the why and wherefore of the efforts. He states:
Performance has become an ever widening and ever -deepening concept. It can indicate all the ways a society enacts meaning. It can apply to speech acts as primarily enacting rather than signifying— the “performative speech” of J. L. Austin. It can mean the achievement of identity by adopting a role— the “performativity” of Judith Butler. There is such a sprawl of performance theory that it is necessary to narrow the focus to see what is distinctive about Elizabethans’ way of dramatizing their culture’s meaning. I will try out three approaches, to see if they help concentrate on Elizabethan self-dramatizations. The three are the theater -state of Clifford Geertz, the emblem systems of the Warburg School, and the process rites of Victor Turner.
Wills, Garry (2014-06-10). Making Make-Believe Real (Kindle Locations 115-122). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Based on these theoretical foundations, Wills considers Elizabeth’s predicament: “Elizabeth was an anomaly— as a female ruler, unnatural; illegitimate by birth; disowned by her royal father; not sure of marriage or issue; not allied by family with other rulers; caught precariously between entrenched religious factions at home and abroad”. Kindle Locations 259-260. Not an easy situation. And one that required her to jealously guard her prerogatives and to cultivate popular support in every way. Wills notes:
The expenditure of so much effort, thought, and money on these great theatrical enterprises [plays, masques, and festivals] must have seemed justified in the reign of a queen known for parsimony. These were not frivolous games or ornaments. They were the expression of a transition period trying to articulate its own meaning to itself. The communal effort had to mobilize all the resources that are suggested by Geertzian sacred rites, Warburgian iconology, and Turnerian liminality. It was a society’s way of fighting for its life. There are many meanings discoverable in Christopher Haigh’s oracular statement about Elizabeth: “Her power was an illusion— and an illusion was her power.”
Wills, Garry (2014-06-10). Making Make-Believe Real (Kindle Locations 231-236). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
From these premises, Wills dives into the Elizabethan world that seems quite alien to us, although it continues to intrigue us. From me as a school boy reading about Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake as swash-buckling adventurers to movie-goers intrigued by films depicting Elizabeth played by actresses from Sarah Bernhardt to a Cate Blanchet, Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, and Vanessa Redgrave (of late!), the public has an appetite for this foreign time. But for all its foreignness—like the plays of Shakespeare that we still devour—it all has a feel of familiarity as well.
Wills is just the person to perform this reconnaissance. His depth of learning from things ancient Greek and Latin to contemporary America, including his ability (and patience) to cull the relevant texts, makes him an expert guide. And for all his worldly knowledge of the intrigues of our lives, he doesn’t play the cynic. Remarking on what seems to us to be the overweening flattering and fawning aimed at Elizabeth, he finds non-trivial ends:
One may think the endless tributes to Elizabeth nothing but an elephantiasis of flattery. But Spenser [author of The Faerie Queene] was using his poem to shape an ideal of the England he wanted to see as the final product of Reformation. England, tested against the template of Faerie Land, should become Faerie Land. Which means the queen should become the Faerie Queene. As A. Bartlett Giamatti put it, “He wishes to influence her as he deifies her, to shape the state as much as to construe the state’s ruler as a model for the individual.”
Wills, Garry (2014-06-10). Making Make-Believe Real (Kindle Locations 409-413). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Wills even defends the courtiers, with their literary guides Castiglione and Machiavelli, from charges of simple flattery:
Courtly praise was, admittedly, a pose. Even Castiglione’s courtliest of virtues, sprezzatura, is the ability to conceal effort under a pose of effortlessness. And restraint (Niccolò Machiavelli’s rispetto) is a way to get things by reining in one’s urgency (Machiavelli’s impeto) after them. Thus some New Historicists see “subversion” (their favorite word) under the professed love of Elizabeth’s courtiers. It is certainly true that there was endless jostling of her courtiers for favor, position, property, family advancement, or one’s religious preference, all under the “colour” of ardently professed love. But even in seeking these favors, men strengthened her power to grant them. One does not keep coming back for reward to an enfeebled source.
Wills, Garry (2014-06-10). Making Make-Believe Real (Kindle Locations 413-419). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Wills continues:
Those who see nothing but selfish interest in all human action cannot explain why, for some causes, good and bad— nationalism, racism, religion, patriotism— people sacrifice themselves. Of course, selfish aims can be masked as all these “higher” goals. But dissimulation of selfishness, faction, or zealotry is a social lubricator, and in some cases an essential one. It must, admittedly be a plausible pretense. To work, make-believe must be believable , and an array of talents, political and poetic, labored the illusion into place for Elizabeth.
Wills, Garry (2014-06-10). Making Make-Believe Real (Kindle Locations 423-427). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Following these introductory observations that set the perspective for Wills’s project, he delves into details, and in particular, into Shakespeare. He writes authoritatively and convincingly about gender, dealing with the problematic Taming of the Shrew in a way that makes sense of it and that is quite contrary to many popular conceptions. He takes umbrage at the treatment given the play in such productions as the film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (directed by Zeferelli). Wills notes:
There is nothing more boring than the brute-on-brute wrestling match of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor— as if they were still playing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—in Franco Zeffirelli’s production. Ann Thompson rightly prefers John Cleese’s insouciant approach, all the while blowing Kate verbal kisses in Peter Hall’s version. The anger Cleese puts on is all directed at others, whom he takes to be insulting his goddess, offering her inferior food or clothes. By doing so, of course , he satirizes her own beating of her sister and her servants— a sign of her changing character comes when she pleads that he stop beating the servant.
Wills, Garry (2014-06-10). Making Make-Believe Real (Kindle Locations 861-866). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Wills quotes Germaine Greer at length on the character and relative merits of Bianca, Kate, and Petruchio:
Kate is a woman striving for her own existence in a world where she is a stale, a decoy to be bid for against her sister’s higher market value, so she opts out by becoming unmanageable, a scold. Bianca has found the women’s way of guile and feigned gentleness to pay better dividends; she woos for herself under false colors, manipulating her father and her suitors in a perilous game which could end in her ruin . Kate courts ruin in a different way, but she has the uncommon good fortune to find Petruchio, who is man enough to know what he wants and how to get it. He wants her spirit and her energy because he wants a wife worth keeping . He tames her as he might a hawk or a high-mettled horse, and she rewards him with strong sexual love and fierce loyalty. Lucentio finds himself saddled with a cold, disloyal woman, who has no objection to humiliating him in public. The submission of a woman like Kate is genuine and exciting because she has something to lay down, her virgin pride and individuality: Bianca is the soul of duplicity, married without earnestness or good will. Kate’s speech is the greatest defense of Christian monogamy ever written. It rests upon the role of a husband as protector and friend , and it is valid because Kate has a man who is capable of being both, for Petruchio is both gentle and strong (it is a vile distortion of the play to have him strike her ever). The message is probably twofold: only Kates make good wives, and then only to Petruchios; for the rest, their cake is dough.
Wills, Garry (2014-06-10). Making Make-Believe Real (Kindle Locations 923-934). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition, quoting Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (Bantam, 1972), 220– 21.
To my mind, Wills’s consideration of Henry V provides the most intriguing insight. Wills counters interpretations of this play running back to Harold Goddard (The Meaning of Shakespeare, in which I’ve found great merit), Harold Bloom, Stephen Greenblatt, and the New Historicists in general. In short, the later critics see Henry V as a war-mongering lout. Wills sets out the problem:
Most of Shakespeare’s kings are terrible people. They often attain the crown by murder, then keep on murdering to retain it. When a king like Henry VI is not evil, he is a simpleton . To get sympathy , the arrogant King Lear has to go crazy. Once, Shakespeare did try to create a wise and good king, but critics will not allow him to do it. Audiences in the past used to believe the play’s Chorus when he called Henry V “this star of England,” but now we know better. We see Henry V for what he really is—a cruel and lying war criminal, believing none, deceiving all, cut off from decent human feeling. The king may have fooled his own play’s Chorus, but he can’t get away with it at the Modern Language Association, where convened scholars have spent years peeling away this king’s lies to reveal the cold deceiver under them.
Wills, Garry (2014-06-10). Making Make-Believe Real (Kindle Locations 1683-1689). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Wills notes that those who deprecate Henry (Hal) tend to glorify Falstaff. But to my naïve mind, Falstaff has always, in the end, seemed a lout. Intriguing, but in the way that cynics and manipulators can be—for a while—as comic relief. I’d never really felt that Harold Bloom’s glorification of Falstaff made sense. Now I know I have an ally (and one that I trust). After performing his takedown of the glorification of Falstaff and denigration of Henry/Hal for rejecting his wayward days, others go after Henry as a warmonger, starting with Goddard and moving into the much more recent New Historicists. Wills reminds us that he (Wills) is a pacifist, rather disarming potential critics from labeling him a warmonger, but Wills appreciates that we’re talking about a different world. He writes:
Much of modern criticism is justifiably antimilitaristic. Militarism is an evil in our time, and it should be opposed at any time. But this causes problems in studying a culture that was not only militaristic but monarchical and imperialist . This gives the sixteenth century a number of problems it could not be expected to solve (such as getting rid of monarchs or living with the dream of a United Nations). And it is anachronistic to compare too simply our militarism and that of Elizabethan England, which had no standing army.
Wills, Garry (2014-06-10). Making Make-Believe Real (Kindle Locations 1917-1920). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Wills explicates the place of honor in this society:
Keeping mutual obligation alive was a matter of honoring honor. This involved dangerous self-importance and boasting in the contenders for honor, which are deplorable . But to empty out the concept of honor would have unstrung every nerve of Elizabethan society. Today’s intellectual class cultivates self-doubt as a virtue. It has difficulty understanding a culture in which that trait was not esteemed. Some cultures, we forget, cultivate self-confidence, and did it productively. Even now we suspect that successful men and women are usually self-confident. A man can be humble like Bach, or bitter like Swift, or pessimistic like Johnson, but retain enough self-regard to fuel creative energies. And whole civilizations— Periclean Athens, Renaissance Venice, and Elizabethan England— were hypertrophically confident. That does not mean they were incapable of self-criticism. It means they were not crippled by it. T. S. Eliot, whatever his other shortcomings, was a great reader of Tudor and Stuart drama, and he said that its basic social commitment was one of affirmation.
Wills, Garry (2014-06-10). Making Make-Believe Real (Kindle Locations 1926-1939). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Wills concludes this section with a quote from Henry’s heart-felt musings on the eve of Agincourt (well presented by Kenneth Branagh in his film, in my opinion). Wills compares Henry’s imperfections with those of Lincoln:
Though all that I can do is nothing worth,
Since that my penitence comes after all,
Imploring pardon. [H5 4.1.303– 5]
But no earthly power is immaculately conceived. America’s birth was flawed by its induration of slavery. Lincoln’s rise was through many compromises with the slave power, including his promise in the First Inaugural not to tamper with its bases in the South. The instinct of most patriots is to deny the flawed beginnings, or to think that a gesture of penitence is sufficient to make the stain disappear. It is a mark of the realism of Shakespeare’s patriotism in this play that Henry does neither. He does not simply throw up his hands and resign the tainted power. But he does not pretend the stain is not there. He will, instead, do all he can to blunt its effects by doing better than his father had the chance to do. It is all that a Washington or a Lincoln could pledge. Shakespeare has not written a defense of brutal imperialism in Henry V. He has made his protagonist a searching king, a self-questioning one, acting in an imperfect world without any illusions about that fact. Yet nothing Hal/ Henry does can find acceptance among his dogged denigrators.
Wills, Garry (2014-06-10). Making Make-Believe Real (Kindle Locations 2486-2495). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Only when we better understand this context can we appreciate the subtleties and nuances of Henry. The critics, in professing their dislike of war and authority must denigrate the whole enterprise of the play, which, as Wills shows in detail, makes no convincing sense. Reading and appreciating this part along (along with his consideration of Taming) makes that book worthwhile. But there’s more.
While Shakespeare wrote, around him great changes in religion occurred. Astrology was a prominent endeavor (reference to the stars can be found in most of Shakespeare’s plays), while some Jesuits and other Catholics were drawn and quartered for their faith. It was not an easy time. All of these changes presented challenges to Elizabeth. As she dealt with these changes in the world around her concerning religion, war, and profit, she had to deal with the dramatic and capable men who orbited around her. Wills spends time and attention on these men who played a significant role in the era. His consideration of the several of the great figures, Phillip Sidney, Lord Essex, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Prince Henry (son of King James) makes for entertaining reading, as we get mini-biographies of these dashing figures. (I would like to have learned more about Francis Bacon, who remains on the periphery of the stories.) Men like Sidney, Essex, and Raleigh were adept with pens as well as swords and ships.
I’ve discussed only some of what I found to be the highlights of the book. Truly, this was an amazing and intriguing period; a pivot point that allowed England to emerge as a great world power and that profoundly affected Western culture. Wills has provided us with a thorough guide about how the appearances of the day helped create and mold the realities of the day, and his effort proves not only entertaining, but also enlightening.
I expected this book (2014) to focus on the works of Shakespeare since Wills has twice before published books on Shakespeare topics: Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1995) and Verdi’s Shakespeare: Men of the Theater (2011). However, while Wills does spend some time on Shakespeare—including an especially enlightening discussions of The Taming of the Shrew and Henry V—this book addresses the wider cultural milieu. Wills explores how the need to hold and wield political power in Elizabethan England uses theater, poetry, and public spectacle to influence popular perceptions. Indeed, entire lives seem dedicated to gaining and maintaining the audience, whether courtiers seeking the approval of Elizabeth, such as Essex, or Elizabeth herself courting her subjects. Wills writes:
A self-dramatizing trait is so common in plays of the time [referencing various rulers from Shakespeare] that we must suspect it is more than mere personal foible, in the character or the playwright —more even than the convention of theatrical characters being theatrical. The best indicator of this is that the most grandiose self-presenters are men and women who seek or hold power. And power, after all, must always find a way to project its claims onto the people it would control.
Wills, Garry (2014-06-10). Making Make-Believe Real (Kindle Locations 94-97). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Wills notes that “performance theory” now addresses not only the particulars of production, but also the why and wherefore of the efforts. He states:
Performance has become an ever widening and ever -deepening concept. It can indicate all the ways a society enacts meaning. It can apply to speech acts as primarily enacting rather than signifying— the “performative speech” of J. L. Austin. It can mean the achievement of identity by adopting a role— the “performativity” of Judith Butler. There is such a sprawl of performance theory that it is necessary to narrow the focus to see what is distinctive about Elizabethans’ way of dramatizing their culture’s meaning. I will try out three approaches, to see if they help concentrate on Elizabethan self-dramatizations. The three are the theater -state of Clifford Geertz, the emblem systems of the Warburg School, and the process rites of Victor Turner.
Wills, Garry (2014-06-10). Making Make-Believe Real (Kindle Locations 115-122). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Based on these theoretical foundations, Wills considers Elizabeth’s predicament: “Elizabeth was an anomaly— as a female ruler, unnatural; illegitimate by birth; disowned by her royal father; not sure of marriage or issue; not allied by family with other rulers; caught precariously between entrenched religious factions at home and abroad”. Kindle Locations 259-260. Not an easy situation. And one that required her to jealously guard her prerogatives and to cultivate popular support in every way. Wills notes:
The expenditure of so much effort, thought, and money on these great theatrical enterprises [plays, masques, and festivals] must have seemed justified in the reign of a queen known for parsimony. These were not frivolous games or ornaments. They were the expression of a transition period trying to articulate its own meaning to itself. The communal effort had to mobilize all the resources that are suggested by Geertzian sacred rites, Warburgian iconology, and Turnerian liminality. It was a society’s way of fighting for its life. There are many meanings discoverable in Christopher Haigh’s oracular statement about Elizabeth: “Her power was an illusion— and an illusion was her power.”
Wills, Garry (2014-06-10). Making Make-Believe Real (Kindle Locations 231-236). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
From these premises, Wills dives into the Elizabethan world that seems quite alien to us, although it continues to intrigue us. From me as a school boy reading about Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake as swash-buckling adventurers to movie-goers intrigued by films depicting Elizabeth played by actresses from Sarah Bernhardt to a Cate Blanchet, Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, and Vanessa Redgrave (of late!), the public has an appetite for this foreign time. But for all its foreignness—like the plays of Shakespeare that we still devour—it all has a feel of familiarity as well.
Wills is just the person to perform this reconnaissance. His depth of learning from things ancient Greek and Latin to contemporary America, including his ability (and patience) to cull the relevant texts, makes him an expert guide. And for all his worldly knowledge of the intrigues of our lives, he doesn’t play the cynic. Remarking on what seems to us to be the overweening flattering and fawning aimed at Elizabeth, he finds non-trivial ends:
One may think the endless tributes to Elizabeth nothing but an elephantiasis of flattery. But Spenser [author of The Faerie Queene] was using his poem to shape an ideal of the England he wanted to see as the final product of Reformation. England, tested against the template of Faerie Land, should become Faerie Land. Which means the queen should become the Faerie Queene. As A. Bartlett Giamatti put it, “He wishes to influence her as he deifies her, to shape the state as much as to construe the state’s ruler as a model for the individual.”
Wills, Garry (2014-06-10). Making Make-Believe Real (Kindle Locations 409-413). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Wills even defends the courtiers, with their literary guides Castiglione and Machiavelli, from charges of simple flattery:
Courtly praise was, admittedly, a pose. Even Castiglione’s courtliest of virtues, sprezzatura, is the ability to conceal effort under a pose of effortlessness. And restraint (Niccolò Machiavelli’s rispetto) is a way to get things by reining in one’s urgency (Machiavelli’s impeto) after them. Thus some New Historicists see “subversion” (their favorite word) under the professed love of Elizabeth’s courtiers. It is certainly true that there was endless jostling of her courtiers for favor, position, property, family advancement, or one’s religious preference, all under the “colour” of ardently professed love. But even in seeking these favors, men strengthened her power to grant them. One does not keep coming back for reward to an enfeebled source.
Wills, Garry (2014-06-10). Making Make-Believe Real (Kindle Locations 413-419). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Wills continues:
Those who see nothing but selfish interest in all human action cannot explain why, for some causes, good and bad— nationalism, racism, religion, patriotism— people sacrifice themselves. Of course, selfish aims can be masked as all these “higher” goals. But dissimulation of selfishness, faction, or zealotry is a social lubricator, and in some cases an essential one. It must, admittedly be a plausible pretense. To work, make-believe must be believable , and an array of talents, political and poetic, labored the illusion into place for Elizabeth.
Wills, Garry (2014-06-10). Making Make-Believe Real (Kindle Locations 423-427). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Following these introductory observations that set the perspective for Wills’s project, he delves into details, and in particular, into Shakespeare. He writes authoritatively and convincingly about gender, dealing with the problematic Taming of the Shrew in a way that makes sense of it and that is quite contrary to many popular conceptions. He takes umbrage at the treatment given the play in such productions as the film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (directed by Zeferelli). Wills notes:
There is nothing more boring than the brute-on-brute wrestling match of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor— as if they were still playing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—in Franco Zeffirelli’s production. Ann Thompson rightly prefers John Cleese’s insouciant approach, all the while blowing Kate verbal kisses in Peter Hall’s version. The anger Cleese puts on is all directed at others, whom he takes to be insulting his goddess, offering her inferior food or clothes. By doing so, of course , he satirizes her own beating of her sister and her servants— a sign of her changing character comes when she pleads that he stop beating the servant.
Wills, Garry (2014-06-10). Making Make-Believe Real (Kindle Locations 861-866). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Wills quotes Germaine Greer at length on the character and relative merits of Bianca, Kate, and Petruchio:
Kate is a woman striving for her own existence in a world where she is a stale, a decoy to be bid for against her sister’s higher market value, so she opts out by becoming unmanageable, a scold. Bianca has found the women’s way of guile and feigned gentleness to pay better dividends; she woos for herself under false colors, manipulating her father and her suitors in a perilous game which could end in her ruin . Kate courts ruin in a different way, but she has the uncommon good fortune to find Petruchio, who is man enough to know what he wants and how to get it. He wants her spirit and her energy because he wants a wife worth keeping . He tames her as he might a hawk or a high-mettled horse, and she rewards him with strong sexual love and fierce loyalty. Lucentio finds himself saddled with a cold, disloyal woman, who has no objection to humiliating him in public. The submission of a woman like Kate is genuine and exciting because she has something to lay down, her virgin pride and individuality: Bianca is the soul of duplicity, married without earnestness or good will. Kate’s speech is the greatest defense of Christian monogamy ever written. It rests upon the role of a husband as protector and friend , and it is valid because Kate has a man who is capable of being both, for Petruchio is both gentle and strong (it is a vile distortion of the play to have him strike her ever). The message is probably twofold: only Kates make good wives, and then only to Petruchios; for the rest, their cake is dough.
Wills, Garry (2014-06-10). Making Make-Believe Real (Kindle Locations 923-934). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition, quoting Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (Bantam, 1972), 220– 21.
To my mind, Wills’s consideration of Henry V provides the most intriguing insight. Wills counters interpretations of this play running back to Harold Goddard (The Meaning of Shakespeare, in which I’ve found great merit), Harold Bloom, Stephen Greenblatt, and the New Historicists in general. In short, the later critics see Henry V as a war-mongering lout. Wills sets out the problem:
Most of Shakespeare’s kings are terrible people. They often attain the crown by murder, then keep on murdering to retain it. When a king like Henry VI is not evil, he is a simpleton . To get sympathy , the arrogant King Lear has to go crazy. Once, Shakespeare did try to create a wise and good king, but critics will not allow him to do it. Audiences in the past used to believe the play’s Chorus when he called Henry V “this star of England,” but now we know better. We see Henry V for what he really is—a cruel and lying war criminal, believing none, deceiving all, cut off from decent human feeling. The king may have fooled his own play’s Chorus, but he can’t get away with it at the Modern Language Association, where convened scholars have spent years peeling away this king’s lies to reveal the cold deceiver under them.
Wills, Garry (2014-06-10). Making Make-Believe Real (Kindle Locations 1683-1689). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Wills notes that those who deprecate Henry (Hal) tend to glorify Falstaff. But to my naïve mind, Falstaff has always, in the end, seemed a lout. Intriguing, but in the way that cynics and manipulators can be—for a while—as comic relief. I’d never really felt that Harold Bloom’s glorification of Falstaff made sense. Now I know I have an ally (and one that I trust). After performing his takedown of the glorification of Falstaff and denigration of Henry/Hal for rejecting his wayward days, others go after Henry as a warmonger, starting with Goddard and moving into the much more recent New Historicists. Wills reminds us that he (Wills) is a pacifist, rather disarming potential critics from labeling him a warmonger, but Wills appreciates that we’re talking about a different world. He writes:
Much of modern criticism is justifiably antimilitaristic. Militarism is an evil in our time, and it should be opposed at any time. But this causes problems in studying a culture that was not only militaristic but monarchical and imperialist . This gives the sixteenth century a number of problems it could not be expected to solve (such as getting rid of monarchs or living with the dream of a United Nations). And it is anachronistic to compare too simply our militarism and that of Elizabethan England, which had no standing army.
Wills, Garry (2014-06-10). Making Make-Believe Real (Kindle Locations 1917-1920). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Wills explicates the place of honor in this society:
Keeping mutual obligation alive was a matter of honoring honor. This involved dangerous self-importance and boasting in the contenders for honor, which are deplorable . But to empty out the concept of honor would have unstrung every nerve of Elizabethan society. Today’s intellectual class cultivates self-doubt as a virtue. It has difficulty understanding a culture in which that trait was not esteemed. Some cultures, we forget, cultivate self-confidence, and did it productively. Even now we suspect that successful men and women are usually self-confident. A man can be humble like Bach, or bitter like Swift, or pessimistic like Johnson, but retain enough self-regard to fuel creative energies. And whole civilizations— Periclean Athens, Renaissance Venice, and Elizabethan England— were hypertrophically confident. That does not mean they were incapable of self-criticism. It means they were not crippled by it. T. S. Eliot, whatever his other shortcomings, was a great reader of Tudor and Stuart drama, and he said that its basic social commitment was one of affirmation.
Wills, Garry (2014-06-10). Making Make-Believe Real (Kindle Locations 1926-1939). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Wills concludes this section with a quote from Henry’s heart-felt musings on the eve of Agincourt (well presented by Kenneth Branagh in his film, in my opinion). Wills compares Henry’s imperfections with those of Lincoln:
Though all that I can do is nothing worth,
Since that my penitence comes after all,
Imploring pardon. [H5 4.1.303– 5]
But no earthly power is immaculately conceived. America’s birth was flawed by its induration of slavery. Lincoln’s rise was through many compromises with the slave power, including his promise in the First Inaugural not to tamper with its bases in the South. The instinct of most patriots is to deny the flawed beginnings, or to think that a gesture of penitence is sufficient to make the stain disappear. It is a mark of the realism of Shakespeare’s patriotism in this play that Henry does neither. He does not simply throw up his hands and resign the tainted power. But he does not pretend the stain is not there. He will, instead, do all he can to blunt its effects by doing better than his father had the chance to do. It is all that a Washington or a Lincoln could pledge. Shakespeare has not written a defense of brutal imperialism in Henry V. He has made his protagonist a searching king, a self-questioning one, acting in an imperfect world without any illusions about that fact. Yet nothing Hal/ Henry does can find acceptance among his dogged denigrators.
Wills, Garry (2014-06-10). Making Make-Believe Real (Kindle Locations 2486-2495). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Only when we better understand this context can we appreciate the subtleties and nuances of Henry. The critics, in professing their dislike of war and authority must denigrate the whole enterprise of the play, which, as Wills shows in detail, makes no convincing sense. Reading and appreciating this part along (along with his consideration of Taming) makes that book worthwhile. But there’s more.
While Shakespeare wrote, around him great changes in religion occurred. Astrology was a prominent endeavor (reference to the stars can be found in most of Shakespeare’s plays), while some Jesuits and other Catholics were drawn and quartered for their faith. It was not an easy time. All of these changes presented challenges to Elizabeth. As she dealt with these changes in the world around her concerning religion, war, and profit, she had to deal with the dramatic and capable men who orbited around her. Wills spends time and attention on these men who played a significant role in the era. His consideration of the several of the great figures, Phillip Sidney, Lord Essex, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Prince Henry (son of King James) makes for entertaining reading, as we get mini-biographies of these dashing figures. (I would like to have learned more about Francis Bacon, who remains on the periphery of the stories.) Men like Sidney, Essex, and Raleigh were adept with pens as well as swords and ships.
I’ve discussed only some of what I found to be the highlights of the book. Truly, this was an amazing and intriguing period; a pivot point that allowed England to emerge as a great world power and that profoundly affected Western culture. Wills has provided us with a thorough guide about how the appearances of the day helped create and mold the realities of the day, and his effort proves not only entertaining, but also enlightening.
August 29, 2017
Mostly being familiar with Gary Wills' flagrant misunderstanding of the American experience and its key texts in order to support an illegitimate progressive worldview [1], it was interesting to see him try the same techniques when it came to the drama of the Elizabethan world [2]. As someone familiar with and hostile to the author's approach, I wanted to see if the same political agenda would come off the same way when the author was looking at a history of importance in political history that was less personally important. And while this book was less irritating than most of the author's work, there were at least a few basic flaws that the author shared. For one, the author was particularly hostile to "new historians" who were critical of the legitimacy of authorities in the Elizabethan world just as they are in the contemporary world. Despite my own disagreement with much revisionist history, this shared skepticism towards the legitimacy of authorities is definitely something we share. Less praiseworthy still is the author's scorn for C.S. Lewis, who was a master of the same Elizabethan literature that Wills uses in such a shady fashion here.
In terms of its contents, this book is a large one at close to 350 pages before the endnotes, but definitely one whose bias and selection is pretty obvious to those who are familiar with the author's approach. The book is divided into six parts, and it is pretty obvious from even the titles of the parts that the author and I are simply going to disagree on a lot: Make-Believe (Courtly) Love, Make-Believe (Divine) Monarchy, Make-Believe (Cosmic) Religion, Make-Believe (Faerie) Nation, Make-Believe (Chivalric) War, and Make Believe (Courtier) Warriors. The author looks not only at familiar authors like Shakespeare and Sidney but also figures like Essex, Raleigh, Prince Henry, and even the Puritans the author views with a great degree of scorn for their hostility to theater as well as their anti-authoritarian stance. The author combines two unpleasant positions in tension, a lack of faith in biblical religion and a lack of acceptance for limitations on the power of central governments and authorities. Even when reading about a period hundreds of years ago and in another country I could not help but to be disgusted by the author's worldview and offended by his belief in the expansive powers of tyrannical rulers and states.
Unfortunately, this book demonstrates that the author likely will bring his worldview and bias to just about any book he writes, and makes it very unlikely that I will look forward to reading any book of his even out of intellectual curiosity. The author's worldview is such that it taints nearly every comment he makes, as he simply cannot avoid showing his bias even in his comments about fellow historians and researchers. By passing himself off as an authority and using a book on Elizabethan drama as a way of smuggling his worldview in a less obvious and less obviously objectionable fashion than his writings on the Declaration of Independence or the Emancipation Proclamation. Unfortunately, neither a progressive nor a leopard can change their spots, and books by progressives seeking to justify their worldview are just as unappealing regardless of what subject they are writing about. At least this book did one thing for me that it will likely do for many readers, whether or not they like the author's approach to literature, religion, politics, history, or historiography, and that is that it encouraged me to read more of the originals and less of the author's slanted interpretations. That is likely for the best.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...
[2] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
In terms of its contents, this book is a large one at close to 350 pages before the endnotes, but definitely one whose bias and selection is pretty obvious to those who are familiar with the author's approach. The book is divided into six parts, and it is pretty obvious from even the titles of the parts that the author and I are simply going to disagree on a lot: Make-Believe (Courtly) Love, Make-Believe (Divine) Monarchy, Make-Believe (Cosmic) Religion, Make-Believe (Faerie) Nation, Make-Believe (Chivalric) War, and Make Believe (Courtier) Warriors. The author looks not only at familiar authors like Shakespeare and Sidney but also figures like Essex, Raleigh, Prince Henry, and even the Puritans the author views with a great degree of scorn for their hostility to theater as well as their anti-authoritarian stance. The author combines two unpleasant positions in tension, a lack of faith in biblical religion and a lack of acceptance for limitations on the power of central governments and authorities. Even when reading about a period hundreds of years ago and in another country I could not help but to be disgusted by the author's worldview and offended by his belief in the expansive powers of tyrannical rulers and states.
Unfortunately, this book demonstrates that the author likely will bring his worldview and bias to just about any book he writes, and makes it very unlikely that I will look forward to reading any book of his even out of intellectual curiosity. The author's worldview is such that it taints nearly every comment he makes, as he simply cannot avoid showing his bias even in his comments about fellow historians and researchers. By passing himself off as an authority and using a book on Elizabethan drama as a way of smuggling his worldview in a less obvious and less obviously objectionable fashion than his writings on the Declaration of Independence or the Emancipation Proclamation. Unfortunately, neither a progressive nor a leopard can change their spots, and books by progressives seeking to justify their worldview are just as unappealing regardless of what subject they are writing about. At least this book did one thing for me that it will likely do for many readers, whether or not they like the author's approach to literature, religion, politics, history, or historiography, and that is that it encouraged me to read more of the originals and less of the author's slanted interpretations. That is likely for the best.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...
[2] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
October 22, 2016
Interesting. Not much to do with Shakespeare after the midpoint but he makes an interesting thesis that almost everything done by the queen and court was political theater. And his interpretation of "Taming of the Shrew" was absolutely brilliant and should be read by anyone who's going to produce or attend that play. (Essentially, every twentieth century production of it has been a distortion or at best a missing of the point.)
Given that Garry Wills is a tremendously intelligent scholarly person, I was puzzled by some of the strange errors. More than once he said Mary Tudor when he meant Mary Stuart of Scotland, and vice versa - and not just in a typo manner, he actually said James I's mother was "Mary Tudor" and Elizabeth's predecessor was "Mary of Scotland." I'm not a scholar and I know that's backwards... And once he said Henry V was going back to France to be betrothed to "Anne" when everywhere else he correctly said Katherine. There were a few of these and I found it baffling.
Given that Garry Wills is a tremendously intelligent scholarly person, I was puzzled by some of the strange errors. More than once he said Mary Tudor when he meant Mary Stuart of Scotland, and vice versa - and not just in a typo manner, he actually said James I's mother was "Mary Tudor" and Elizabeth's predecessor was "Mary of Scotland." I'm not a scholar and I know that's backwards... And once he said Henry V was going back to France to be betrothed to "Anne" when everywhere else he correctly said Katherine. There were a few of these and I found it baffling.
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May 22, 2015822.30935 W7414 2014
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