Shakespeare Studies Today: Romanticism Lost

Praise for Shakespeare Studies Today: Romanticism Lost “Shakespeare Studies Today is a rigorous critique of the ‘Shakespeare Industry’s’ stillcurrent sociological focus and a call for an aesthetics-based alternative. Considering the quantity of debunking necessarily involved in his project, Pechter is consistently and remarkably gracious. More remarkable still is Pechter’s reader-friendly, jargonfree prose. I am surprised at how much I enjoyed reading his book.” —Stephen Booth, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley “Shakespeare criticism isn’t much fun anymore. It isn’t a lot of fun to read, and it doesn’t seem like it’s all that much fun to write. Shakespeare Studies Today is Pechter’s explanation for how this has come to pass. Pechter is not afraid to mix it up with people he disagrees with, but he is also a writer with admirable forbearance, a great sense of humour and a deep enthusiasm for Shakespeare. He wants to put Shakespeare back into the center of Shakespeare criticism and to restore a sense of appreciation for Shakespeare’s greatness as a writer.” —Michael Bristol, Greenshields Professor Emeritus, McGill University “Pechter’s bold critique of current Shakespeare studies argues for a reappraisal of nineteenth-century readings of the plays. Pechter pulls no punches about current interpretive practice, and his controversial arguments uncover dazzling insights that no one interested in Shakespeare can afford to ignore.” —Dympna C. Callaghan, William Safire Professor of Modern Letters, Syracuse University

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Also by Edward Pechter Dryden’s Classical Theory of Literature. What Was Shakespeare? Renaissance Plays and Changing Critical Practice. Editor, Textual and Theatrical Shakespeare: Questions of Evidence. “Othello” and Interpretive Traditions. Editor, “Othello”: A Norton Critical Edition.

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Shakespeare Studies Today Romanticism Lost Edward Pechter

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SHAKESPEARE STUDIES TODAY

Copyright © Edward Pechter, 2011. All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–11419–7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pechter, Edward, 1941– Shakespeare studies today : romanticism lost / Edward Pechter. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–11419–7 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Criticism and interpretation— History—20th century. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Criticism and interpretation—History—19th century. I. Title. PR2970.P42 2011 822.3⬘3—dc22

2010043217

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: June 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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For E. A. J. Honigmann; and for Ben and Beth and Dave and Ceilidh

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CON T E N T S

Preface

ix

Introduction

1

Part One Discipline and Desire Introduction: Discipline and Desire

15

1 Return of the Aesthetic?

21

2 Negative Desire: Materialism and Its Discontents

53

Part Two

What’s Wrong with Literature?

Introduction: What's Wrong with Literature?

87

3 New Theatricalism and the Repudiation of Literary Interest

91

4 New Textualism and the Crisis in Editing

Part Three

117

Romanticism Lost

Introduction: Romanticism Lost

143

5 Romantic Antitheatricalism and Formalist Values

151

6 Romantic Authorship and Professional Values

177

Conclusion

201

Notes

207

Works Cited

215

Index

231

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PR E FAC E

This book is about how Shakespeareans go about their business at the present time. It argues that we can perform more effectively and with more conviction by relaxing some of the materialist principles guiding current work, and by reconnecting with the traditions of Romantic commentary, beginning with Hazlitt and Coleridge and continuing up to A. C. Bradley, from which our own critical practice has developed. Since the Introduction spells out this argument in detail, I limit myself here to thanking at least some of the many people and institutions who have facilitated my work. A grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada helped with much of the research and writing. During the spring and fall of 2008, I was given the opportunity to try out some of my ideas in a number of academic settings, where the response made me realize that I was writing a very different book from the one I thought I was writing. For setting up these presentations and for filling up the seats with people poised to ask smart and usefully embarrassing questions, I am grateful to Tom Cain, Patrick J. Finn, Marcie Frank, Elizabeth Hanson, Lynne Magnusson, Kathleen McLuskie, Gordon McMullan, and Paul Yachnin. Parts of this book are based on prior publication. For editorial generosity and advice, my thanks go to Graham Bradshaw (Shakespearean International Yearbook 3, Ashgate); Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer (Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare, Palgrave); Peter Holland (Shakespeare Survey 59, Cambridge University Press); Alan Sinfield and Peter Nicholls (Textual Practice, 11 and 17, Taylor and Francis); and Paul Yachnin and Patsy Badir (Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance, Ashgate). I benefited from the encouragement and advice of friends and colleagues at the University of Victoria, including Gordon Fulton, Gary Kuchar, Richard van Oort, and Terry Sherwood of the English Department, and Sara Beam and Matthew Koch of the History

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x

Preface

Department. I got more help than I could have expected from Jo Roberts, Brigitte Shull, and Ciara Vincent at Palgrave Macmillan, and from Rohini Krishnan at Newgen. Special thanks to Michael D. Bristol, for characteristically smart and helpful suggestions, to Marjorie Garson, who made every page of this book better, and to Lesley Wynne Pechter, who conceived and executed the cover illustration, and who made writing the book feel worthwhile.

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Introduction

This book takes off from three claims: (1) in Shakespeare studies at the present time, the level of conviction required to sustain a healthy critical practice is problematically if not dangerously low; (2) the qualities which the Romantics valued in an engagement with Shakespeare are either ignored these days or fundamentally misunderstood; and (3) there is a causal relation between the first two points. The Romantics invented Shakespeare studies (a bald assertion to which I shall return in a moment), and current Shakespeareans, having grown increasingly remote from their origins, have not been able to develop an adequate alternative foundation on which to build their work. The first claim is the least controversial. That Shakespeare studies finds itself at an “impasse”—stuck in a “morass” or stranded in “the critical doldrums”—is regularly asserted in its current work. For the critics using these terms and for many others (they will be identified in chapter 1), we are experiencing a malaise, or even worse. According to Josephine Guy and Ian Small, “English Studies” altogether is “a discipline in crisis,” and many Shakespeareans (the editorial theorists we shall meet in chapters 2 and 4 are striking examples) would probably agree. For even the most phlegmatic, Shakespeare studies looks substantially less robust than might be expected, let alone wished. These accounts may exaggerate the problem. According to Marcie Frank, “literary criticism finds itself ‘in crisis’ with a regularity that could almost be called soothing” (p. 4). Bad news is good news; it makes for a better story; good news is not newsworthy. (This is a version of Tolstoy’s “all happy families are the same.”) There is a wide gap between most people’s daily lives, and the representation of those lives in the accounts of fires, murders, and car accidents that fill up the nightly news. Then too, the particular nature of our enterprise may tend to reinforce exaggeration. Criticism is essentially a problem-solving activity; without a problem to solve, we’d be like the disembodied soul in

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Donne’s “Air and Angels” who “else could nothing do.” We cringe at the clichéd opening claim that “people have noticed X, but no one has noticed Y, and there is a need” (sometimes a “very real need”) “to notice Y.” Kingsley Amis ridicules the maneuver in Lucky Jim. Ref lecting on “this strangely neglected topic,” the phrase he has put at the beginning of his try-not-to-get-fired essay on “The Economic Inf luence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485,” Jim asks, “This what neglected topic? This strangely what topic? This strangely neglected what?” (p. 16). Embarrassing as we know it to be, a version of this strategy nonetheless launches all critical work, including this one. Even those convention-f louting anecdotal beginnings in early Stephen Greenblatt are, as he himself acknowledges, back formations, produced by the convention they purport to f lout (“Writing,” 45). All this notwithstanding, the worried accounts of our current circumstances still deserve to be taken seriously. For one thing, the crisis claims may not be baseless: as Frank adds to her witty comment about soothing regularity, “the rhetoric of crisis masks the fact that the question of legitimacy has haunted literary criticism from its late seventeenth-century beginnings.” Besides, the view that Shakespeare and literary studies are in a precarious condition is shared, as we shall see, among some of the most respected and inf luential scholars writing today, and this consensus extends to a conviction about the originating place (if not the cause) of the problem—namely, the redirection of critical interest, effectively negotiated sometime during the 1980s, away from literary objects and effects to the cultural contexts within which these are produced and experienced. We cannot be dealing just with a predisposition to dramatically bad news or with a make-work project designed to prevent idleness. Something is really wrong. In Shakespeare Studies Today, I am trying to determine what is wrong, how we got into this situation, and what we should be doing about it. The usual way to explain what is wrong is to suggest that Shakespeareans have failed to achieve a coherent agreement about the subject and how to treat it. The absence of an effective cognitive and methodological consensus is a striking aspect of the current critical environment, and it may not be helping our situation; but the claim guiding this book is that our problems derive not so much from having too many different interests pulling us in too many different directions as having too precarious a commitment to the value of any of these interests to sustain a healthy practice. If the energy driving current practice feels intermittent and uncertain, this may have something to do with conceptual incoherence but more to do with unsustainable affect. It is the attenuation of

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Introduction

3

desire that best explains why our critical performances seem unable to furnish a thoroughgoing satisfaction to ourselves or those for whom and with whom we perform them. We need to relocate the problem, so I am arguing here, from the reason to the will. From this perspective, focusing chief ly on desire and will, how should we account for the redirection of critical interest from which our present state of affairs seems to emerge? The trajectory of this still ongoing process may be suggested by means of the following standon-one-foot-and-talk-really-fast synopsis of shifting norms in literary studies during the last thirty years or so. One: In 1981, two junior faculty in the Rhetoric Department at Penn State, Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor, undertook a study of the “institutionalized norms” for and “field-dependent constraints on the published interpretation of literature” as a way of “understanding the available means of persuasion” (p. 77). By analyzing a sample of essays published between 1978 and 1981 in the most prestigious scholarly journals, they determined that this work exhibited the standard marks of Aristotle’s third rhetorical motive—the epideictic: a “ceremonial” and “subtly ritualized form of communication” that has “much in common with religious discourse” in that it “affirms the shared values of a community and harmonizes new insights with what is already believed” (p. 94). They wrote up their work as “The Rhetoric of Literary Criticism” and submitted it to the PMLA, where it was decisively rejected. Fahnestock tells me she doesn’t recall why, but I’d guess that the editorial board mistook the piece to be saying that the emperor had no clothes. As an imperial organ, the PMLA could not be expected to countenance let alone disseminate a view of its own nakedness. Two: According to Stephen Greenblatt in Learning to Curse, “one of the more irritating qualities of my own literary training” was “its relentlessly celebratory character” as “a kind of secular theodicy. Every decision made by a great artist could be shown to be a brilliant one; works that had seemed f lawed and uneven . . . were now revealed to be organic masterpieces[,] the triumphant expression of a healthy, integrated community” (p. 168). As Greenblatt remembers it, graduate school at Yale in the late 1960s “was epitomized” by the “Elizabethan Club—all-male, a black servant in a starched white jacket, cucumber sandwiches and tea,” over which “the imposing figure of William K. Wimsatt” held forth “on poetry and aesthetics” as if presiding at “the hierophantic service” of a “mystery cult” Greenblatt himself “wished to resist” (p. 1). By 1990, when these passages were published, it was no longer taboo to identify academic literary study with epideictic rhetoric,

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as in Fahnestock and Secor, because the identification was no longer taken seriously. The “institutionalized norms” and “field-dependent constraints” had changed radically from those in place sustaining the “secular theodicy” of Greenblatt’s professional formation. Three: In 2001, Greenblatt published a book on Hamlet in Purgatory, in which he predicates his whole endeavor on a passionate engagement with textual energy: My only goal was to immerse myself in the tragedy’s magical intensity. It seems a bit absurd to bear witness to the intensity of Hamlet; but my profession has become so oddly diffident and even phobic about literary power, so suspicious and tense, that it risks losing sight of—or at least failing to articulate—the whole reason anyone bothers with the enterprise in the first place. The ghost in Hamlet is . . . amazingly disturbing and vivid. I wanted to let the feeling of this vividness wash over me, and I wanted to understand how it was achieved. (p. 4) In effect, Greenblatt does an about face from the resistance described eleven years earlier in Learning to Curse, and the resulting position seems to exhibit a surprising sympathy now for the “secular theodicy” he found so “irritating” then. This neat account falls considerably short of adding up to a serious historical interpretation. At once overdramatized and underanalyzed, it allows us to chart a sequence of abrupt changes of mind, or of heart, but not the motivating factors that might connect them within the structure of a coherent understanding. (The effect is like the title Artie Shaw gave to the story of his much-married and divorced life, I love you, I hate you, drop dead!, with a further twist, I love you again.) In order for it to add up as historical explanation, we would need to pull it down from the Key Dates and Great Men mode and fill in the gaps with general trends. The intensity—aversion would not be putting it too strongly— with which Greenblatt repudiated his literary training was not a single doom; a whole generation of critics felt a similar disenchantment. This broad-based realignment of literary studies, which has been the subject of countless analyses, can be summed up with Edward Said’s term, “worldliness.” The attempt to make criticism a more “worldly” enterprise—bringing with it history and power and the body, among many other highly charged terms and ideas, including, of course, race, class, and gender—endowed an exhausted practice with a newly energized sense of purpose.

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Introduction

5

By 1999, however, when Said addressed the members of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) in his capacity as president, he acknowledged that the achieved worldliness in literary studies had turned out to be a mixed blessing. He warns against “the dangers of transforming the classroom into an arena for the solution, or at least the battleground, of social and political problems.” He worries about the effects on “literary and humanistic education” if it comes “under the inf luence of daily issues like citizens’ rights, new legislation, the restructuring of power, the problems of minorities, and so on”; for “our brief time in the classroom” not to be “squandered,” he argues, we need “a patient, scrupulous reading of texts; a detailed respect for the painstaking effort for clarity of utterance; a careful attempt, in R. P. Blackmur’s memorable phrase, to bring literature to performance” (“An Unresolved Paradox”). Said is not backing away from his belief that “all the great literary works are themselves saturated with worldly concerns.” His account, however, recognizes that this belief has by now become more or less routine; the exhilarated expectation with which a worldly practice first coalesced into a critical program (“putting the text back into history” was the phrase of choice in the early 1980s) has largely disappeared. On the other side, meanwhile, an increased anxiety about the negative consequences of the program has emerged into prominence, and Said describes these consequences in the strongest terms. “Squandering our brief time in the classroom” is as much as to suggest that our occupation’s gone. Said’s qualms help to explain the second of Greenblatt’s reversals in the scheme outlined above. In his discomfort—aversion would, in this case, be putting it too strongly—with the “phobic” tone of current work, Greenblatt seems now to be pulling back from his earlier disparagement of “the relentlessly celebratory character” of his literary training. And here too, his position is exemplary rather than eccentric, not so much leading as reading the Zeitgeist: a critical mass of Shakespeareans (and of non-Shakespearean inhabitants of literature departments) share his discomfort and are beginning to look back with a similarly tentative longing to something like the traditional literary values they repudiated a generation earlier. The question, though, is whether this longing is substantial enough to put us on a path out from the malaise in which we are situated, and the answer, I think, is probably not. Greenblatt’s references to the “magical intensity” of “literary power” produce a powerful but only temporary impact. The terms are quickly evoked and then abruptly

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dropped, as if in embarrassment (they sound, he admits, “a bit absurd”). They have little immediate bearing on the discussion in Hamlet in Purgatory, and except for the perfunctory assertions stuck on to the end of chapter 1, that “modern thinkers” have “been dismayingly insensitive to the imaginative dimension that most fascinated” Renaissance audiences, and that “What we call ideology” is what “Renaissance England called poetry” (pp. 45–6), they disappear. Moreover, it is hard to get a handle on “the whole reason anyone bothers with the enterprise in the first place.” After all, Greenblatt’s own engagement with the enterprise “in the first place,” as described in Learning to Curse, included a very substantial element of distaste for the celebratory tone he now uses to describe “literary power,” “aesthetics,” and the “imaginative dimension.” It is as though he is recoiling from the recoil of his previous position, but this disaffection from an earlier aversion—a kind of double negative, “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”—does not inspire confidence as an adequate motivation to propel us out from the “doldrums” in which we feel ourselves to be stranded. The first two parts of this book proceed from the claims I have just set forth. In the Introduction to Part One, “Discipline and Desire,” I develop the idea that the vigor and stability of a critical practice depend more on conviction and desire than on intellectual coherence. Chapter 1, “Return of the Aesthetic?”, reviews some of the many expressions in Shakespearean and literary study of a renewed interest in literary power and tries to account for their failure to add up to much more than the sum of their scattered parts, mainly, as I take it, because of the inadequate desire by which they are motivated. Chapter 2 shifts the focus to materialism, which is what worldly criticism is generally called these days, specifically to the mounting evidence that materialist criticism cannot deliver the political consequence it originally promised. What’s left of materialist criticism, I argue, is little more than its discontent with the purported “idealism” of traditional literary study—hence the title of the chapter, “Negative Desire: Materialism and its Discontents.” Negative desire is the subject of Part Two as well. “What’s Wrong with Literature?” describes the explicit repudiation of literary interest among some Shakespearean performance critics and editorial theorists, the New Theatricalists and the New Textualists, who include the most distinguished and inf luential practitioners in the field. I have so far said nothing about Romanticism, which appears in the title of the book and of Part Three and is central to the second and third of the claims from which this Introduction began. As a way

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Introduction

7

into Romanticism, come back to the phrase I puzzled over just earlier, “in the first place.” I took the phrase in a personal and psychological sense, this is what motivates someone to go into literary study and concentrate on Shakespeare, but it can be taken in a historical and ontological sense as well, this is where Shakespeare and literary study originates and this is what it is, both of which senses lead to Romanticism. The great Romantic critics were, of course, unequivocally invested in the value of “myriad-minded Shakespeare,” as Coleridge called him. “People would not trouble their heads about Shakespear,” according to Hazlitt, “if he had given them no pleasure, or cry him up to the skies, if he had not first raised them there. The world are not grateful for nothing.” Such claims do not originate with the Romantics. As R. W. Babcock demonstrated years ago in The Genesis of Shakespeare Idolatry, the Romantics inherited Bardolatry from their immediate predecessors, who centered their appreciation in the power of Shakespearean drama to generate an intense affective interest in its dramatic characters. But Babcock’s conclusion, that Shakespeare criticism in “the early nineteenth century merely echoed the late eighteenth” (p. 226), overstates the matter. Keats’s admiration for the “camelion” Shakespeare, taking “as much delight in conceiving an Iago or an Imogen” (Scott, p. 195), transports an engagement with Shakespearean character into a territory that William Richardson and Elizabeth Montagu and Dr. Johnson, even if they could imagine what it looked like, had no desire to visit. How Keats (and Coleridge and Hazlitt) found their way to such a place is, like many examples of radical innovation, hard to explain. Maurice Morgann’s Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777) seems irresistible as a source. Dr. Johnson, like the shocked “virtuous philosopher” in Keats’s letter, dismissed Morgann in terms immediately relevant to the discussion here: “as he has proved Falstaff to be no coward, he may prove Iago to be a very good character” (Boswell, p. 1213). At the end of the Romantic line, A. C. Bradley, reviewing an anthology of eighteenth-century Shakespearean commentary, ref lected on “the gradual dawn of the romantic movement” and declared that if Morgann’s Essay “could be taken as a fair example of that generation, we should have to say that the century, some time before it closed, had reached in principle the whole position in which criticism has rested from the days of Schlegel and Coleridge” (“Eighteenth Century,” 294). But Morgann had “disappeared almost completely” by the time the Romantics were writing (Fineman, p. 23), and there is no evidence they knew of him let alone actually read his work. We are dealing with

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a Zeitgeistliche affinity. In the same way, Romantic Shakespeareans, with Coleridge as something of an exception, seem to have had no direct contact with the ideas about aesthetic interest newly systematized by Kant among others in the German Enlightenment. They took advantage of these ideas nonetheless, as part of a concerted effort to expand the range of critical response to Shakespeare qualitatively beyond the established norms. In this respect, to return to my sweeping claim at the beginning, the Romantics invented Shakespeare studies, developing the assumptions, methods, and goals that formed the foundation of our critical practice—from which, I am arguing in this book, we have become problematically far removed. It’s a problem not just for Shakespeareans. It complicates professional life all across academic literary study, and for Romanticists perhaps most of all. The Introduction to Part Three describes a situation among Romanticists similar to (and even more intensely fraught than) the one I have been sketching out here: an uncertainty whether Romanticism exists as a meaningful subject and, at least since Jerome McGann’s hugely inf luential Romantic Ideology appeared in 1983, an agenda defined by the aversion from and repudiation of its own critical traditions. The two chapters in Part Three look in some detail at what Romantic critics said about literary form and about literary authorship. My main contention is that their ref lections on these subjects are very different from what we understand them to be saying. Romantic critics were not, as they are regularly said to be, essentially “looking for the organic unity of the work”; they were interested in the quality and intensity of an interpretive engagement largely independent of the textual object with which it engages. Nor were the Romantics essentially “looking for the author behind the text” (like “impasse” et al. at the beginning, these and many similar phrases will be attributed in due course). Romantic authorship is rather a heuristic than an empirical category: working not forward from textual origins but backward from aesthetic effects, the Romantics attempted to identify the kind of creative agency that might be imagined to account for the interest and delight readers and audiences take in Shakespeare’s plays. Formalism and genius authors may deserve the opprobrium lavished on them at present, but these are not the values on which Hazlitt and Coleridge and the others founded an engagement with Shakespeare. If this underlying misrepresentation of our origins is contributing to the malaise reported in current accounts, then setting the record straight seems likely to help, and this likelihood is at the motivational center of Romanticism Lost. But any attempt to express the book’s

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Introduction

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potentially beneficial consequences comes out sounding faintly—or blatantly—self-serving: I will reveal the Romantic dispensation as in itself it really is, the scales will fall from Shakespearean eyes, and the truth will make us free. This is the lone voice crying in the wilderness, and it won’t do. Quite apart from self-aggrandizement (do I really think my rhetorical or critical powers are sufficient to lead the children of Shakespeare into the promised land?), this agenda stands in direct contradiction to my earlier claim about the subordination of reason to will. It assumes that the truth makes us free, that freedom follows truth as the night the day. This is what Hamlet supposes in his exhortation to the ghost— “Haste me to know’t, that I with wings as swift / As meditation, or the thoughts of love, / May sweep to my revenge” (1.5.29–31)—but events prove otherwise. Distracted with contrary desires, meditation, and love on the one hand, revenge on the other, Hamlet’s conviction that knowledge leads directly to the liberating release of expressive action turns out to be wildly optimistic. From this perspective (comparing small things to great), the therapeutic project I announced for this book needs to be treated with more than a grain of salt. If it is will that is driving the apparatus, then the reason Shakespeareans have abandoned Romantic values is not that they do not understand them; rather, the misunderstanding derives from a loss of conviction. The misrecognition of Romantic Shakespeare would then be not the cause of our malaise, but the effect; and if this is the case, the consequences of historical and critical analysis are bound to be substantially limited. A close look at the values underwriting Romantics engagements with Shakespeare should be of some interest in itself. So too should be a close look at the current situation for an inkling of how it feels to be operating with a less-than-adequately secure belief in the purpose of the operation. Putting the two together, moreover, is likely to make some things happen, but exactly what those things are is hard to determine, and there does not seem to be much basis to expect that the juxtaposition will produce immediately beneficial effects on the large scale I proclaimed a moment ago. That “large discourse, / Looking before and after” (4.4.36–7), is not likely to transform malaise into a situation characterized by energetic desire. The skeptical position outlined here is f leshed out in chapter 1. Focused on arguments designed to recuperate aesthetics for the center of critical practice, it offers an object lesson in the inability of the analytical intellect to produce its hoped-for effects. But if this were the whole story, I cannot imagine how I could have sustained the effort to write this book and, more to the point, how I can be asking anyone to

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sustain the effort to read it. It isn’t the whole story, however; for one thing, the situation is less stark than what I have described. Despite sometimes sounding like the voice crying in the wilderness, I have plenty of company on the present scene, whose work stands in one way or another behind many of the arguments of this book. The so-farunnamed “critical mass” of “discomfited” Shakespeareans referred to earlier are part of this picture. If less than wholly successful in effecting a return to aesthetics, they offer testimony of at least a desire to do so. Part of the picture, too, are the various critical eminences (including, in addition to Greenblatt, John Guillory, Lukas Erne, and Harold Bloom) from whom I have shamelessly looted ideas in the following pages; and although none of these might wish to be associated with Shakespeare Studies Today or, for that matter, with any of the others on the list, they all represent versions of a remediating argument from which I have been able to derive encouragement. And finally, some otherwise unacknowledged presences deserve mention in the many Shakespeareans who have contributed to what looks like a resurgence of interest in character as a legitimate focus of critical attention. As I argued earlier, character is central to the Romantic invention of Shakespeare studies, and its reemergence in current work suggests a new willingness (conscious or not) to embrace the Romantic values described in this book.1 In short, despite all the hedging about with ironic skepticism, I still stand behind the agenda italicized on the top of the preceding page: the time is out of joint for Shakespeareans, and a fresh look at the critics who established the foundation for our practice might at least help to set it right. To be sure, the ironic skepticism stands too, if less tall, and in this context, especially with all the Hamlet echoes resonating around us, I should confess that the working title I used while putting this book together was “Shakespeare Studies and the Distractions of Contrary Desire.” The phrase, which I deployed earlier to describe the ghost’s effect on Hamlet, is lifted from Dr. Johnson, who said of “To be or not to be” that it comes “bursting from a man distracted with contrariety of desires” (Sherbo, 8, p. 981). Dr. Johnson was picking up on Hamlet’s tremendous pun in “this distracted Globe.” The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) takes “distracted” in Hamlet’s speech to mean “much confused or troubled in mind; having, or showing, great mental disturbance or perplexity” (OED 4); but for the audience of a play obsessed with ideas of lunacy, real or imagined, the meaning of “deranged in mind; out of one’s wits; crazed, mad, insane,” must be present as well (OED 5). It is chief ly the high anxiety suggested by

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these implications that led me finally to drop Dr. Johnson’s phrase. The enfeebled will described in this book may be frustrating, but it is not maddening. It might drive us to thoughts of switching fields (though where would we go in literary studies that is not characterized by a similar torpor?), or even of early retirement, but not suicide. Our situation is closer to comedy than to tragedy (“distraction” as “diversion” or “relaxation”; see OED 2a) and closer still to history, in the sense that it offers no definitive sense of an ending, happy or otherwise. If we find ourselves at an impasse, we are not paralyzed like Beckett’s Hamm and Clov; we have what might be called sustainable nongrowth. There may be no way to escape from the general situation, but there are lots of particular things to do inside it. It would be convenient to have a more secure conviction about the value of our practice, but there are still lots of ways to get on with it; and even lacking the sure and certain knowledge that any of these ways is moving the enterprise forward, we continue to have our preferences and an abundant repertoire of arguments to advance in their support. My reliance on Edward Said in this Introduction should suggest as much, and the Conclusion, returning to the claims of practical criticism, aims to reinforce the idea that we have at least as much reason to celebrate the critical possibilities we have than to console ourselves for those we don’t.

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PA RT

ON E

Discipline and Desire

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Introduction: Discipline and Desire

My title may evoke the wrong kind of images. “Discipline” refers to the critical practices and assumptions associated with academic specialization, in particular the kind undertaken by the members of English departments and, more particularly still, by the Shakespeareans inhabiting these (and sometimes theater) departments. The word has no direct connection with inf licting or receiving pain, and any indirect connection, while perhaps interesting to think about, does not concern me here. I am concerned, rather, with the interactions between discipline and desire as Michel Foucault described them in a number of seminal works published thirty years or so ago. By describing power as productive rather than repressive, Foucault reconfigured the relation between discipline and desire from the antithetical forces they were normally taken to be into reinforcing and even mutually constitutive phenomena. From this angle, desire is inevitably involved with the kinds and forms of knowledge by which disciplinary formations not only regulate and define (and therefore limit) but generate and proliferate our affective interests. As Clifford Siskin puts it, “desire is inherently disciplinary” (Historicity, p. 152). The claim is reversible: “academic and scientific discourse,” as George Dillon argues, “is woven out of human actions and is as rooted in human desire as a love letter or a legal complaint” (p. 2). Nonetheless, the standard accounts of academic work continue to emphasize its analytical foundations. When Guy and Small try to explain why “English studies” is “a discipline in crisis,” they locate the problem in a cognitive rather than an affective domain. Any “discipline of knowledge,” they argue in Politics and Value in English Studies, requires agreement on “three constituent elements”—a subject (“the object of study”), a method (the “practices used”), and “a theory” to explain the discipline’s underlying principles and provide an “explicit elaboration” of “the appropriateness and utility of the explanation.” It’s the first that matters most, they claim, the subject, for “if there is no agreement . . . about

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what to study, questions of how to study must be an irrelevance” (p. 38). Without a shared knowledge of what we are talking about, we cannot possibly produce the kind of work required to sustain a disciplinary practice. Fundamental disagreement about the nature of the subject, they conclude, is the main reason why we are “a discipline in crisis.” This plausible claim seems to get immediate confirmation from the fact that a shared knowledge of what we are talking about is something we clearly do not have. The staggering diversity of work produced under the rubric of “Shakespeare criticism” makes it doubtful “whether ‘Shakespeare’ has much more than a nominal significance.” I wrote this in 2000, reviewing “The Year’s Contributions to Shakespeare Studies” (p. 312); but however good it may have felt to get these words off my chest, I wasn’t saying anything readers didn’t already know. Shakespeareans have long recognized that their subject is made up out of—or filled up with—critical practices, the irresolvable differences of which preclude any strict intellectual coherence and prevent any effective consensus. The question is, for how long have we known this? Has there ever been a time when Shakespeare and literary studies have not been required to accommodate an unmanageable variety of practices? “You can never draw the line between aesthetic criticism and moral and social criticism; you cannot draw a line between criticism and metaphysics; you start with literary criticism, and however rigorous an aesthete you may be, you are over the frontier into something else sooner or later.” This is how the situation looked for T. S. Eliot in 1928 (Dryden, p. xxiii), and it looked pretty much the same, a spacious territory with porous borders, as early as its conventionally designated point of origin among the Romantics. For Hazlitt, the imagination was not a specialized poetic faculty but the motor of all human desire and behavior, with the result that literary studies was bound to be more of an eclectic bricolage than a strictly constructed method. The Romantics did not speak with one voice, and Coleridge was more strongly inclined than Hazlitt to define literary study as a critical practice distinct from all others. But the convergences among the Romantics outweigh the divergences (I’ll be developing this claim in Part Three), and the point remains that the practitioners of literary study were from the beginning too inclusive in their interests to allow for any substantial agreement about “the object of study.” The absence of cognitive consensus, then, is not a recent aberration but the variable constant from which Shakespeareans have always worked—the default framework, the humanities equivalent to “normal

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science.” (Thomas Kuhn, in fact, distinguishes between the productive conditions for science, which when it “hesitates to forget its founders is lost” [p. 138], and for humanities disciplines, which proceed not by jettisoning outmoded paradigms but accumulating them in contentious proliferation.) But then if fundamental disagreement has always been with us, it cannot be responsible for a problem that has become generally evident only in conjunction with the “historical turn” of thirty or so years ago. A radical dissensus might even be taken for a sign of disciplinary health. According to G. Thomas Tanselle, reviewing the claims of “some recent editors” that “the field is at present in a state of crisis,” the fact “that different people hold different opinions about basic issues is not a sign of crisis; it points to the perennial situation in any challenging and lively field” (“Historicism,” p. 153). A foolish consistency, you can say, is the hobgoblin of little disciplines, and when the discipline is Shakespeare studies, a smart inconsistency might seem not only good for business but appropriate to the subject. If Shakespearean drama is a gallimaufry or mingle-mangle—text and performance, comedy and tragedy, main and subplot, canting and inkhorn terms, religious ritual and commercial entertainment, high and low culture, etc.—a Shakespeare studies in agreement about its object of study might seem to have abandoned any claim to interpretive authority. But the fact that we hold different opinions about basic issues is no more a cause for celebration than it is for grief. It is just the field on which we are playing, not the game being played, still less evidence that the game is being played badly or well. If we seem to be especially sensitive at present to the disadvantages of disagreement, this is more the symptom of a problem than its cause. In order to identify whatever it is that inhibits Shakespeare studies these days, we need to get beyond the idea of cognitive consensus as the be-all and end-all of disciplinary vitality, and here A. C. Bradley can help. At the beginning of “Poetry for Poetry’s Sake,” Bradley declares his intention “to consider poetry in its essence,” and thus not to dismiss “metrical form” as “mere accident.” Essence-vs.-accident is a standard topos in Platonic and Scholastic traditions, and given Bradley’s philosophical training, we seem to be on track for a more or less analytically rigorous discourse. But then the argument abruptly abjures precise language and veers in a totally different direction: without here aiming at accuracy, we may say that an actual poem is the succession of experiences—sounds, images, thoughts, emotions—through which we pass when we are reading as poetically

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as we can. Of course this imaginative experience—if I may use the phrase for brevity—differs with every reader and every time of reading: a poem exists in innumerable degrees. But that insurmountable fact lies in the nature of things and does not concern us now. (p. 4) All the ontological-sounding claims now hang on to nothing. Poems are described not as objects but as subjective experiences, and the description goes round in a circle: poems are what happens to us when we read poetically, and reading poetically is what we do when we read poems. Moreover, these tail-chasing experiences turn out to be almost infinitely variable, corresponding to the “innumerable” readers and times of reading by whom and during which a given poem is engaged. In this context, what I have called “a given poem” may sound like a meaningless phrase, but Bradley would concede the point. His intention, he declares, is not “to give a definition of poetry. To define poetry as something that goes on in us when we read poetically would be absurd indeed.” His “object,” rather, is to recall for his readers the distinction between “poetical reading” on the one hand and “such experience as is evoked in us when we read[,] let us say, a newspaper article” on the other (p. 28). A long history of philosophical ref lection—not to say roiling contention—is concealed under the placid tone of “Poetry for Poetry’s Sake.” In diverting our attention from a particular kind of text (poetry, literature) to a particular way of engaging with texts (reading poetically), Bradley works out of what John Guillory describes as “the central problem of Kantian aesthetics,” the “attempt to give the grounds or conditions for judgments of taste in the constitution of a perceiving subject . . . rather than in the properties of an aesthetic object” (Cultural Capital, pp. 274–5). As Jonathan Loesberg puts it, Kant’s “third critique analyzes and justifies a form of judgment not a set of objects classed as art” (A Return, p. 74). Furthermore, when Bradley adds that “aesthetic apprehension” is not limited to “a work of art” but available equally whether “the object” of its regard “belongs to ‘Nature’ or to ‘Man’ ” (p. 29), he is again working (consciously or not) out of Kant, for whom aesthetic response was more likely to be produced from engaging with natural phenomena (a sunset is a text that can be read poetically, birdsong can be heard on a register of purely disinterested delight) than with manmade objects, where a consciousness of purpose is bound to compromise the preferred kind of experience. The relevant distinction here is with Hegel, whose Lectures on Art, “in overturning the priorities

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of Kant” and emphasizing “the artistic beautiful against the natural beautiful” (Uhlig, p. 36), sought to transfer the main focus of aesthetic analysis from an interpretive engagement to the properties of a human artifact. Bradley cannot be unaware of the complex philosophical traditions out of which he is making his particular—and, for a self-declared Hegelian, peculiar—choices; but they do not seem to matter. Most of his audience would have been unfamiliar with the details of Kant’s Kritik of Judgment or Hegel’s Lectures on Art; but for Bradley, the “truths thus suggested” by the distinctions between reading poetically and reading journalistically (“say, a newspaper article”) are ones he can “suppose my readers to know” already—“so obvious” that “a bare reminder of them would be enough” (p. 28). Bradley’s program assumes consensus as fully as does Guy and Small’s “discipline of knowledge,” but it is consensus of a different kind. Definitive precision about the ontological status of poetic language, detailed understanding of the phenomenological processes involved in reading poetically—all this (to recall the end of the paragraph I quoted earlier) “does not concern us here.” The consensus for reading poetically is rather, Bradley declares, based on “these things. First this experience is an end in itself, is worth having on its own account, has an intrinsic value. Next, its poetic value is this intrinsic worth alone” (p. 4). Intrinsic value; reading poetically is a good thing. The “truths” that we may be “supposed . . . to know” turn out to be values that we can be expected to share; they are centered not in the conclusions of the reason but in the convictions of the will. Reading poetically is something we want to do—a discipline, first and foremost, of desire. The distinction I am making here, between reason and will or knowledge and desire, has a venerable pedigree. It was already traditional in 1644, when Milton’s Of Education argued, unlike Bradley, for the primacy of knowledge: “The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him” (pp. 366–7). It was a contentious issue among thirteenth-century theologians: they divided their subject between the Franciscans, represented by Bonaventure, whose “affective voluntarism” emphasized “the role of will and love, more than of intellect and knowledge,” and the Dominicans, represented by Aquinas, whose “trust in reason” dictated that “the intellect leads in theology, not the will or the heart” (New Catholic Encyclopedia, pp. 906–7). In the Sphere of the Sun, Paradiso XI and XII, St. Francis and St. Dominic are represented in relation to the angelic orders associated with their specific beliefs:

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“The one was all seraphic in ardor; the other, for wisdom, was on earth a splendor of cherubic light.” The distinction is firmly established, then decisively erased. “I will speak of one,” Aquinas tells Dante, “because in praising one, whichever be taken, both are spoken of, for their labors were to one same end” (Singleton, p. 121). In what follows, St. Francis’s life story is put in Aquinas’s mouth, St. Dominic’s in Bonaventure’s, the reversal of affiliation playing out the inconsequentiality of the difference, the whole episode culminating in a dance. That’s the way it is in Paradise, but for those of us who have not yet been assumed into the celestial harmony, the “jealousies and disputes which often estranged the orders” remain (Sinclair, p. 172). In aligning myself with Bradley and maybe Dante (though where he comes down on this issue is not clear), I do not mean to minimize the importance of intellectual coherence. Guy and Small are right. A clear sense of subject and method along with the ability to theorize critical practice, to explain its underlying principles and provide an “explicit elaboration” of “the appropriateness and utility of the explanation”—all this is indispensable for academic discourse, and much of chapter 1 will be arguing the case for disciplinary norms as the custodians of clarity and interpretive authority. But disciplinary norms have been developed over time, and the interpretive authority they produce is similarly subject to change. Coherence is what counts as coherence in a particular context, and this context is determined in large part by the felt needs of the historical subjects inhabiting it. From this angle, the ability to theorize a critical practice, while necessary, is not sufficient to sustain that practice; theoretical explanation cannot ground critical activity without itself being grounded in a conviction of the value of the activity explained. The conviction of value is crucial. Despite the cheery aphorism that even a job not worth doing is worth doing well, it is hard keep up a performance without believing in it. If we take care of will, reason will take care of itself. Whatever the malaise, maybe even crisis in Shakespeare studies, it originates in the realm of desire.

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CH A P T E R

ON E

Return of the Aesthetic?

When Stephen Greenblatt expresses “dismay” at the “insensitivity to the imaginative dimension” among members of “my profession,” his tone takes on a bit of the voice crying in the wilderness, but this wilderness is well populated with other voices; a significant number of critics have, in recent years, been similarly lamenting our apostasy from (or at least “losing sight of ”) the core values of our discipline—the experience of “literary power,” which is “the whole reason anyone bothers with the enterprise in the first place” (Hamlet, p. 4). Books appear called Revenge of the Aesthetic (Clark) and A Return to Aesthetics (Loesberg); others appear called Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (Rasmussen) and Shakespeare and Historical Formalism (Cohen); MLA sessions are devoted to a “new formalism,” and a critical mass of interest develops around this idea to the point where the PMLA commissions a full-scale ref lection on the question “What Is New Formalism?” for its regularly scheduled section on The Changing Profession (Levinson). If a new formalism is emerging in Shakespeare studies, what happened to the old one? If the aesthetic is returning, when and why did it go away? This chapter begins with a review of recent developments, more analytically ref lective than the breathless Cook’s Tour in the Introduction, which can account for the concerted efforts to restore an aesthetic dimension to critical work. These efforts have not been generally successful, and the rest of the chapter offers two explanations why that may be. The first, under the rubric “Disciplinary Development, Disciplinary Identity,” argues that the attempt to reconcile aesthetics with the sociological interests dominating current work violates the requirement for distinct identity established by the long history of disciplinary development. The second, “Desire,” claims that we lack the

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conviction necessary to bring about a more-than-nominal restoration of aesthetic interest to the center of critical practice. Desire is, I take it, the fundamentally decisive factor, so let me introduce the idea here, beginning with the title of this chapter. As an off-key conf lation of Jonathan Loesberg’s and Michael P. Clark’s titles cited just above, “Return of the Aesthetic?” is designed to highlight the equivocations in these phrases. Loesberg’s chief claim in A Return to Aesthetics is that the critique of aesthetic discourse in Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Pierre Bourdieu depends on the principles and assumptions of the very discourse it purports to critique. As Loesberg describes it, the process by which Foucault and Derrida return to aesthetics occurs in a way largely independent of their own critical purposes. From this angle, it appears that Foucault and Derrida are not so much returning to aesthetics as that aesthetics is returning to them. In the case of Bourdieu, this reversal of trajectory is even more striking. Since Bourdieu wants to claim “scienticity” for “what he does” (p. 201), he is eager to occlude the fact that a subjectivity of judgment, like that of aesthetic experience, “permeates” his own “key anthropological concepts and ideas” (p. 202). As a result, when the aesthetic returns to haunt Bourdieu’s critique, it does so in a way that is not only independent of but f latly contradictory to his intentions. Loesberg’s way of putting this, that Bourdieu “represses the aesthetic basis of his analysis of culture and finally of aesthetics” (p. 201), makes explicit what I have been trying to suggest: a return to aesthetics might be characterized as the return of the repressed. Clark’s title points in the same direction. Revenge of the Aesthetic comes from Murray Krieger’s claim that the “aesthetic can have its revenge upon ideology by revealing a power to complicate that is also a power to undermine.” The reactive tenor of this assertion is striking, and Clark, who takes Krieger’s words as the head-quotation for his Introduction, absorbs their aggressive defensiveness into his own originating claim: “the importance of aesthetic values,” he declares, “has taken on a contrarian quality today as aesthetic issues have often been displaced from a field that only twenty years ago could still be called ‘literary’ theory” (p. 1). A similar tone is sustained through to the end of Clark’s Introduction, where we find another quotation from Krieger, this one claiming that poetry “ ‘warns us to distrust the decisions we must make’ ” and “ ‘to tread with a light foot and a heavy heart.’ ” As Clark acknowledges, this is “a rather somber burden for a defense of poetry” (p. 22). What is common to these discussions is equivocation—frequently reluctance and sometimes even resistance. No one welcomes the

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aesthetic with open arms. There is little here of the pleasure of the text, as Roland Barthes describes it, or of the joyous surprise Wordsworth finds in an imaginative engagement with the natural world, or of the unalloyed delight in such an engagement that Kant, hearing the spontaneous song of a bird, describes as a “pure aesthetical judgment” (Kritik, §42, p. 181). All this suggests why, despite all the protestations about a desire to do so, we have been unable to bring aesthetic interest back into the center of literary study. The desire is not adequate to the undertaking. We haven’t returned to the aesthetic because we do not really want to. * *

*

During the past thirty years or so, Shakespeareans have transferred critical energy away from literary analysis. We tend to focus less on aesthetic than on historical topics. Instead of asking how Shakespeare’s texts work to engage interpretive interest, we ask from what situations the plays were generated, by what audiences engaged, and for what purposes. It was not new for Shakespeareans thirty years ago to ask historical questions. Historical understanding had become obligatory during the nineteenth century, when literary studies took on the responsibilities of disciplinary professionalism. But the more recent “historical turn” was to a different area of subjectivity, situated nearer the bottom of the social order. As this new subject emerged from below the radar of previous work, we focused more on the way different beliefs and assumptions produced different versions of what really happened, so that history, at least as practiced in literature departments, turned into an increasingly historiographic—that is, epistemologically self-conscious—enterprise. From these new perspectives, the often unifying and idealizing conclusions of earlier analysis began to look like strategies for containment, and the formal properties—verbal, structural, generic, conventional— with which Shakespearean artifacts seemed formerly to be put together exerted a less compelling claim on our attention than the competing sociopolitical interests that tended to tear Shakespearean texts—and our understandings of these texts—apart. One corollary of the new historical context for Shakespeare studies has been a relocation of the subject from literary to theatrical experience—from the page to the stage, as the familiar binary puts it. Writing and reading are never wholly private or transcendent activities, motivated exclusively by a disinterested “purposiveness without purpose” (Kant’s phrase, to which I shall return). Rather, to recall Edward Said’s

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point from the Introduction, texts “are always enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society—in short, they are in the world, and hence worldly” (“The World,” p. 35). But theatrical production and playgoing are more immediately implicated in the commercial realities of a public market and more closely attuned to the appropriative and often contending interests of its spectators. From this angle, the redistribution of critical energy I mentioned at the beginning can be characterized as a turn from the literary to the performance text. Performance was not a new term for Shakespeareans thirty years ago, not even when Dr. Johnson’s Prologue at the opening of Drury Lane (1747) acknowledged the theater’s economic dependence on popular taste: “The drama’s laws the drama’s patrons give, / For we that live to please, must please to live” (McAdam, p. 89). But like the new history, the new performance criticism has taken a different object of interest. “What,” W. B. Worthen asks, “are dramatic performances performances of?” (“Drama,” 1100). The question is part of an attempt to liberate performance from what Worthen construes as its debilitating attachment to an author and a text. Instead of looking behind them for a static and closed origin, performance critics now look around them to other current performances as the field within which to locate theatrical meaning. Moreover, they extend this field far beyond the normative confines of earlier work. “Since the 1960s,” as Elin Diamond sees it, “performance has f loated free of theatre precincts to describe an enormous range of cultural activity” (p. 2). Books appear called The Performance of Power (Case and Reinelt) and Performing Nostalgia (Bennett). Judith Butler describes gender as “a kind of doing, an incessant activity performed” (p. 1). Our “ideas of national identity and imagined history” are now, according to Thomas Postlewait and Tracy C. Davis, regularly “constructed” in terms of “performed identity,” part of a process by which “the idea of performance” has been “expanded to embrace” a variety of concepts, institutions, and practices, including (all their terms) myth, play, role-playing, ceremony, carnival, everyday life, conventional behavior, and religious and social rituals (pp. 28–9). Surveying the “energetically expanding field” of performance studies, Worthen catalogs a similarly wide “range of aims, methods, and objects of inquiry,” made up of (all his terms) ethnographies of performance, psychoanalytic and postcolonial models of representation, institutional studies, studies of street performance, performance art, performance in everyday life, and identity performance (1094). For Diamond, the “terminological expansion” of “performance discourse, and its new theoretical partner, ‘performativity,’ ” has reached “almost to the point

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of stupefaction” (p. 2). As Richard Schechner puts it, “Performativity or, commonly, ‘performance’ is everywhere in life” (quoted in Postlewait and Davis, p. 33). There is another term whose explanatory reach competes with and probably even exceeds the grasp of “performance” in recent criticism, and Diamond identifies it with her reference to “cultural activity.” “Culture” has been an accommodating concept pretty much from the beginning. According to Raymond Williams in Keywords (a book that in fact originated with ref lection on the complicated history of “culture”), the term was “decisively introduced into English” by Edward Burnett Tylor in 1871 (p. 91). In Tylor’s definition, “Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (p. 1). When Clifford Geertz acknowledges the “originative power” of “Tylor’s famous ‘most complex whole’ ” (“Thick Description,” p. 4), he is misquoting; but the added word, “most,” faithfully represents the expansive spirit of the original. Tylor’s definition is notable for its comprehensive range of reference. He enumerates an extensive list of the “capabilities and habits” by which people articulate and enact their identities in relation to one another and then, with “any other,” he invites us to extend the list as far as we can, toward an ever-increasing array of practices, the limits of which, like the Topsy-like performancestudies catalogs of a moment ago, are indefinite. (This suggests a way to solve Worthen’s problem of the limiting referent: “dramatic performances,” we can say, are “performances of culture.”) If, as Walter Benn Michaels suggests, “your culture is nothing more than what you do” (p. 138), it is also nothing less, and nothing seems to be left—or left out. Culture in this “wide ethnographic sense,” is all-inclusive. Culture is everything in life. The shifts I have been describing, from literary study to historical, performance and cultural studies, can be generalized as a turn away from textualism toward the contextualism that Said characterizes as “worldliness.” (The terminology is more convenient than precise: “textualism,” strictly speaking, is just a particular kind of contextualism, one in which interpretation is regulated by aesthetic interest.) The contextualist turn has often been celebrated for opening up a depleted critical practice to new vistas of experience and newly energized forms of an interpretive will to explore them. Writing in 1989, Stanley Fish affirmed his conviction that “the imperialistic success of literary studies” was “heartening” and “the emergence of cultural studies as a field

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of its own exhilarating” (“Being Interdisciplinary,” p. 242). In 2008, however, Fish’s attitude toward this expansion of critical horizons has become notably ambivalent, more inclined to acknowledge “its casualties” as well as its benefits (“French Theory”). In this respect, he expresses qualms similar to Said’s and Greenblatt’s described in the Introduction, and to many other commentators as well, who have been with increasing regularity asking skeptical questions whether the contextualist turn is giving us more freedom than we can manage. Postlewait and Davis, for instance, suggest that the “global reach” of performativity has made the idea too powerfully inclusive for its—or our—own good: “it is pleasing to subsume the various scholarly disciplines in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences under the rubric of performance, but . . . all human thought and behavior cannot be usefully explained by the single idea of performativity” (p. 33). Comparable doubts have been expressed about the infinitely expandable range of material now subsumed under the idea of culture. W. J. T. Mitchell is concerned about the extent to which “culture,” with its claim to constitute “a homogeneous field or grid of relationships governed by a single principle,” is “taking on renewed force as the master-concept for the humanities and social sciences.” For Geertz, the “Tylorean kind of pot-au-feu theorizing about culture,” though it was “a seminal idea,” has lost “the grandiose, all-promising scope, the infinite versatility of apparent application, it once had” and now leads to a “conceptual morass.” The “whole discipline of anthropology,” he adds, “has been increasingly concerned to limit, specify, focus, and contain” the term (“Thick Description,” p. 4). According to Stephen Greenblatt, whose piece on “Culture” takes Tylor’s definition in full as its starting point, “the term as Tylor uses it is almost impossibly vague and encompassing” and thus inadequate to serve as “the backbone of an innovative critical practice” (p. 225). As William B. Warner and Clifford Siskin put it, “The strategic vagueness of the term and concept ‘culture,’ which was so important to the inclusiveness, emancipatory promise, and growth of cultural studies, can no longer take literary studies where it needs to go” (p. 95). This apprehension, that the expanded subject matter of cultural studies actually diminishes its explanatory power, is given a presciently systematic expression by Fredric Jameson in a 1984 piece on “Periodizing the 60s.” For Jameson, the ubiquity of “culture” may be traced back to an earlier master-concept—“theory.” From the pan-textualist position of theory, with all knowledge immersed in a sea of signs, the claim of any “particular traditional discipline” to “express something

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other than itself, namely truth or meaning,” is “contemptuously characterized as the illusion of reference,” the “mere addition of another text to what is now conceived as an infinite chain of texts . . . drawn from the most wildly distant disciplines.” Jameson’s primary exhibit for the collapse of disciplinary prestige is philosophy, though he adds in a laconic parenthesis that the “analogy with the evolution of literary and cultural studies”—that is, the evolution of a specifically literary into an all-inclusive cultural studies—is “obvious” (pp. 193–4). When culture replaces language as the substance within which all being is constituted, it experiences a “prodigious expansion” and “becomes coterminous with social life in general; now all the levels become ‘acculturated,’ and in the society of the spectacle, the image, or the simulacrum, everything has at length become cultural, from the superstructures down into the mechanisms of the infrastructure itself.” In this situation, “artifacts have become the random experiences of daily life itself,” and “further discussion of what used to be called ‘culture’ proper” (or, it would seem, of anything else in its distinct specificity) has become “problematic”—if not, indeed, impossible (p. 201). As these ref lections trickled down into the professional conversation, we have been led back toward those “particular traditional disciplines” whose truth- or meaning-claims now seem less worthy of “contemptuous” dismissal. In the case of literary study, this has entailed a renewed interest in an aesthetic engagement with texts. In 1993 it seemed to John Guillory that “the thorough dismissal of the aesthetic as an ‘ideology’ has . . . become a ubiquitous gesture on the contemporary critical scene” (Cultural Capital, p. 271), but this situation was beginning to change even as Guillory described it. In the following year, George Levine, concerned with the tendency in recent work to the “assimilation of literature to ideology” (p. 1) and of “critical practice to exercises in political positioning” (p. 2), introduced a collection on Aesthetics and Ideology with a piece designed to “reclaim the aesthetic”—that is, to “imagine the aesthetic” as “a mode that operates differently from others and contributes in distinctive ways to the possibilities of human fulfillment and connection” (p. 3). By December 1998, Levine had his wish, at least to judge from the headline on the front page of the Chronicle of Higher Education. “Beauty is Back,” it declared, hooking readers to a piece with the lead, “Wearying of Cultural Studies, Some Scholars Rediscover Beauty” (Heller, A15). Another Chronicle piece the next July began with an inversion of Guillory. “Bashing cultural studies has become a popular academic pastime,” Rita Felski declares, a result of the “upsurge of interest in aesthetics” that portrays cultural

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studies as hostile (B6). Unfairly so, she claims, because cultural studies “has always been concerned with language and form . . . as much about the aesthetic dimension of the social world as it is about the social dimension of a work of art” (B7). That same year, the idea of a return to aesthetics was represented as a “hopeful sign” in Andrew Delbanco’s otherwise gloomy New York Review piece on “The Decline and Fall of Literature”: “One hears of ‘defending the literary,’ and of the return of beauty as a legitimate subject for analysis and appreciation” (38). Felski’s accommodating tone resonates with the bridge-building program that prompted the editors of PMLA, two years earlier, to invite “comments on the actual or potential relations between cultural studies and the literary”—an invitation so compelling that thirty-two readers took the trouble to respond (Forum 257). According to the journal’s program issues, MLA conferences around this time include membergenerated sessions representing the same set of concerns: “Formalism,” “Toward a New Formalism in Renaissance Studies,” “Does Cultural Studies Have Bad Taste?”; and a three-part program arranged by the Division on Middle English Language and Literature devoted to “Historicism and Literary Values.”1 Michael Clark’s reference to the “contrarian quality” of aesthetic interest sounds like a toned-down version of Guillory’s “thorough dismissal of the aesthetic,” but by the time Clark made it, seven years after Guillory’s pronouncement, a felt need to find room for the old aesthetics within the newly dominant mode of cultural studies is a vitally motivating factor, if not “a ubiquitous gesture on the contemporary critical scene.” Within Shakespeare studies, one of the earliest acknowledgments of this felt need may be found in Patricia Parker’s Literary Fat Ladies (1987). Parker worries about an overcompensating “reaction” among Shakespeareans to the “decades of formalism” dominating previous work: “to focus exclusively on questions of social and political context,” she cautions, to foreground the “political Shakespeare” without also taking seriously the linguistic one, is, for all its recontextualizing value, not just to work to the detriment of the kind of formal analysis that still so much needs to be done but unnecessarily to shortcircuit or foreclose the process of moving from literary text to social text. (p. 94) Parker concludes her argument with the suggestion “that the impasse of a now apparently outworn formalism and a new competing emphasis

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on politics and history might be breached by questions which fall in between and hence remain unasked by both” (p. 96). Parker features prominently in Russ’s McDonald’s Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts, which develops more systematically both the idea of an impasse in current work and of a remedial negotiation between an earlier and a more recent critical practice. McDonald builds his analysis from the situation in the 1980s when a “ ‘New Historicism’ or a ‘cultural poetics’ established the terms . . . in which context supplanted text and history dominated poetry.” Conceived as an alternative to the “mechanical readings of an exhausted New Criticism,” this “new phase” itself quickly became a routinized “formula” and “fostered its own excesses”: the “capacious angle of vision” required by the “practice of reading culture” has “perforce diminished the details of the textual object,” resulting in “a virtual disappearance of the particular and a devaluation of the ‘artistic.’ ” In McDonald’s conclusion, “We are in need of some means of reconciling the distant and recent pasts,” an “attempt at a rapprochement” (pp. 2–3). The scrupulously evenhanded balance of McDonald’s argument struck a responsive chord. In Shakespeare and Social Dialogue (1999), Lynne Magnusson starts with the claim that “as the new historicism or cultural poetics took hold in the 1980s,” it “drained much of the energy and interest out of language-oriented studies” and so produced an “impasse” (again) in “Renaissance and Shakespeare studies with regards to close verbal analysis.” She urges Shakespeareans “to negotiate some common ground between close reading and cultural poetics” (pp. 5, 7). In the same year, Catherine Belsey builds her argument in Shakespeare and The Loss of Eden on a similar foundation: while she “unreservedly welcome[s]” the new cultural studies and does “not want to return to . . . New Criticism,” she is “uneasy about the predominantly thematic character” and “decline of close reading” in current work. It is “imperative,” she concludes, “if we are to make good cultural history, to take account of the modes of address of the texts we analyse” (p. 14). Three years later, Mark Rasmussen begins “New Formalisms?”, the Introduction to his collection on Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements, with the claim that the “movement toward cultural studies” in “virtually every area of literary study today” has tended “to interpret Renaissance works as bundles of historical or cultural content, without much attention to the ways that their meanings are shaped and enabled by the possibilities of form.” Although he would “encourage a shift” toward “a fuller and more selfconscious engagement with questions of form” (p. 1), he has no desire, he assures us, “to replace other critical approaches” (p. 9).

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These arguments are not identical to one another, but their extraordinary convergence seems to add up to a shared project for remediating the malaise felt to exist in Shakespeare studies. In 2007 this project—call it the reconciliation agenda—acquires a kind of general status in “What Is New Formalism?”, Marjorie Levinson’s PMLA piece mentioned earlier,2 reinforced by two specifically Shakespearean events: the Shakespeare Association of America conference devoted its unique plenary to “Historical Formalism in Shakespeare Studies”; and Stephen Cohen’s Shakespeare and Historical Formalism offered the most systematic version so far of the argument for “reconciling distant and recent pasts.” As Cohen sees it, where the “ahistorical formalism” of New Criticism led in “the 1960s to its own repudiation by a cultural studies movement wary of any sort of literary exceptionalism,” New Historicism, rising “to prominence in the early 1980s” and determined to retain formalist interests within its own culturalist focus, seemed “poised to break this cycle” (p. 1). But New Historicism never “engaged the complex question of form,” so the “promise of a historical formalism has gone largely unfulfilled.” For a way out of “the resultant critical doldrums” (p. 2), Cohen urges us to explore the “mutual implication” of “literature’s formal individuation and its historical situation” (p. 3), thereby to realize the values of “a true historical formalism” (p. 21, note 7). These signs of intensified interest, however, are ambiguous as evidence for interpretive power. Conference Program Committee decisions are overdetermined by unknown contingencies, and it would be foolhardy to make much of a plenary title. Levinson’s piece uncovers a vast body of material in “post-2000 scholarship that lays claim to a resurgent formalism” (558) and, in an expanded version available online, an even more vast body over a longer period of time; but she acknowledges that the critics she cites are frequently at odds with one another and reluctant to view their work as part of any general trend. Although her piece appeared under the rubric of “New Theories and Methodologies,” she concludes that the “new formalism” is “better described as a movement than a theory or method” (558). Cohen’s Introduction testifies to the sustained appeal of the reconciliation program but also, in its felt need to go over the ground Parker and the others had already marked out, to the sustained failure of the program to have taken us anywhere. Remarkable as it is in itself, this consensus around the desirability of harmonizing textualist and contextual interests is even more remarkable for having apparently produced no decisive consequences.

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The inertia is highlighted in Cohen’s claim that by “ ‘crossing’ form and history,” historical formalism “refines and reforms [Louis Adrian] Montrose’s ‘historicity of texts and textuality of histories’: the historicity of forms, and the forms of history” (p. 14). In troping Montrose’s chiasmus with one of his own, Cohen knows he is traveling a road paved with rhetorically similar intentions (p. 4; p. 22, note 11; p. 26, note 48). In 1982, prior to Montrose’s earliest use of the figure (he would go on to massage it into two distinct versions distributed among three separate publications), Stephen Greenblatt produced The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance. Since this publication effectively established “New Historicism” as the phrase used to identify the endeavor, chiasmus may be said to inhere in the very origin of the line Cohen wishes to extend. Parker carries on this line in her final words about Shakespeare in Literary Fat Ladies, referring to “the order of discourse and the discourse of order” in the plays (p. 96). Chiasmus, moreover, is not limited to Shakespeare studies. In an expansive echo of Felski’s “as much about the aesthetic dimension of the social world as it is about the social dimension of a work of art,” Michael Clark tells us that Roland Barthes’s concept of Text does not situate the word in the world, as historicists would attempt to do, nor the world in the word, as formalists might argue: it confounds those terms entirely by treating the word as world, by recognizing in the word the weighty materiality of its worldly existence as part of our lived experience. (p. 7) The presence of chiasmus in so much current work is probably explained by the aura of authority derived from ideas dating back to antiquity, Concors discordia and the Aristotelian mean, which seek not to split the difference between opposing values but to include them within a comprehensively balanced response (Pechter, Dryden, pp. 62–87). The classical origins are mediated by neoclassicism, as evident in the last of the two “Thames couplets” in Sir John Denham’s Coopers Hill (1668), “Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull, / Strong without rage, without ore-f lowing full,” which were, according to Brendan O Hehir, “imitated, parodied, contemplated and admired to infinity during the following century” (p. 36). Charged with the powerful ideas and feelings of this rich tradition, chiasmus may be said to be the defining trope of the reconciliation agenda. Even those critics who do not actually use the figure implicitly appropriate its values as the structure by which their own claims to harmonize divergent interests are sustained.

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Or, rather, left unsustained; for as Cohen’s finely detailed analysis demonstrates, even as the language works to convey the impression of reconciliation, the actuality of reconciliation continues to elude our grasp. Despite the strong arguments with which it has been represented by so many critics over so long a period of time, the endorsements it has received from the most inf luential of scholars (over-the-top blurb puffs on the back cover of Rasmussen’s book from Stanley Fish, David Bevington, and Arthur Kinney), and its immediate appeal to common sense and goodwill—despite all this, the desire for a “rapprochement” between “close reading and cultural poetics” is as fully unsatisfied now as when it was first expressed. Given this long history of frustration, the project begins to look like a rhetorical construction in the strictly pejorative sense—stylistic effects substituting for a critical coherence. If this is so, there is some basis to fear that “the historicity of forms and the forms of history” will turn out to be just one more dead chiasmus f loating around us as we stagnate in the critical doldrums. I: Disciplinary Coherence, Disciplinary Difference What makes the reconciliation agenda so much easier to put into words than into action? What obstacles limit its fulfillment? One answer is suggested by “The Rhetoric of Literary Criticism,” the piece synopsized in the Introduction, which describes the “institutionalized norms” and “field-dependent constraints on the published interpretation of literature” (p. 77). Fahnestock and Secor assume (1) that uncommunicated knowledge is inert (as the Duke puts it in Measure for Measure, “if our virtues / Did not go forth of us, ’twere all alike / As if we had them not” [1.1.33–5]); and (2) that effective communication, in the case of a complex discourse like Shakespeare studies, depends on a myriad of rhetorical protocols and conceptual guidelines. Shakespeareans play an elaborate and highly conventionalized language game, and to play it well requires playing by the rules. The same might be said about the participants in other language games—campaign orators, car salesmen, pastoral poets, et al.; but as practitioners of academic discourse, Shakespeareans have a particular responsibility to the norms of intellectual coherence specific to our game, and these norms are defined by the boundaries that differentiate the territories of specialized knowledge. It is first of all here, in our obligations to the discipline-specific value of intellectual coherence, that the reconciliation agenda runs into problems.

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Stephen Orgel, addressing the World Shakespeare Congress convened in 1981 under the rubric “Shakespeare, Man of the Theater” (both the date and the rubric are worth noting), argues that the playscript behind every Shakespearean text, as “the property of the performers, not of playwrights, audiences, or readers,” is “essentially unstable and changes as the performers decide to change it.” From this perspective, Orgel concludes “that the real play is the performance, not the text; that to fix the text, transform it into a book, is to defeat it” (“Shakespeare,” p. 43, Orgel’s emphases). Five years later, Orgel teases out the implications of this argument for a critical practice aspiring to historicist claims. In the Renaissance, he claims, Even authorial texts would have been far more f luid, far more unstable, than most of us, with our yearnings toward final and authoritative versions, will wish to allow. We believe that texts develop and evolve toward publication, and that publishing texts fixes them; we expend great efforts on “establishing” texts that we can then call “authentic.” The claim is historically inaccurate, and blinds us to the true nature of the phenomena we are dealing with. (“Authentic Shakespeare,” 10) With “true nature,” “historically accurate,” and “essentially . . . real,” Orgel deploys highly charged concepts to promote a far-reaching claim. His argument is directed in the first instance against the practices of Shakespearean critical editing; but since editing, by establishing the object of study, is interpretive through and through—“not a prerequisite to scholarly literary criticism,” as G. Thomas Tanselle puts it, but “a part of that criticism” (“Textual Study,” p. 337)—Orgel’s claim has consequences for interpretive activity in general, especially for the kind of practical criticism by which New Critics sought to represent the unified design of literary texts. As Orgel sees it, such a method, at least when applied to Renaissance plays, is “historically inaccurate” and “blind to the true nature of the phenomena.” To exemplify his preferred practice, Orgel focuses on five Fuseli and Zoffani illustrations of Garrick and Mrs. Pritchard in a scene “deriving initially” from a 1744 production of Macbeth (“Authentic Shakespeare,” 14). “Each in its way makes claims to authenticity,” he says, “but means something quite different by the concept. . . . What we want is not the authentic play, with its unstable, infinitely revisable script, but an authentic Shakespeare, to whom every generation’s version of classic drama may be ascribed” (“Authentic Shakespeare,” 24). Orgel describes

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these illustrations as “performances of the same Shakespearean scene,” but his claim is rather their dissociation from anything we might imagine as an originating Shakespearean authority: the “substitution of the elegant attire of high society for the costumes of the stage makes a clear . . . assertion that has nothing to do with Macbeth: that actors and actresses are gentlemen and ladies” (“Authentic Shakespeare,” 20). “Nothing to do with Macbeth”: in disconnecting the “authentic play” as infinitely revisable performance so sharply from the “authentic Shakespeare,” the cultural icon (the Bard, the commodity with the right stuff ), the entire apparatus of “The Authentic Shakespeare” might be transferred to the authorship controversy. Instead of eighteenthcentury illustrations, we could study the texts of J. Thomas Looney and Charlton Ogburn, say, as cultural artifacts in a struggle for the legitimating power of Shakespeare. The authorship question has regularly centered on questions of social legitimation (how could an ignorant glover’s son from a provincial market town know so much about the ways of the Court? how produce such monumental achievements?), and it still centers on legitimation, though now that the concept of an inherited aristocracy has lost its cachet, the issue has been re-framed in terms of an elite professionalism. Hence Ogburn’s analogy between the professors and the bureaucrats, one group resisting his parents’ Oxfordian claims, the other his pleas to disengage from Vietnam: “I fought the Indo-China battle while I was helping my parents fight the Shakespeare battle, and, by God, they had a lot in common! What I was saying was not the thing to say. The State Department had the authority. Who was I?” (Lardner, 89). Through all these modifications, one feature remains constant, precisely the feature Orgel emphasizes—dissociation. The authority of the name “Shakespeare” has nothing to do with the plays Shakespeare (or somebody else) wrote. You might argue that both the illustrations and the authorship controversy have something to do with Macbeth, since Macbeth itself has something to do with rank and social legitimacy, equivocally right and wrong ways to become Thane of Cawdor or King of Scotland, for instance, or with those violated gender norms—doing more than “all that may become a man”; “unsex me here”—that prevent us from attaining the status of “gentlemen and ladies.” Presumably, though, this argument would rely on a notion of textual stability, “Macbeth itself,” that is blind to the true nature of the phenomena. How in any case should we understand the assumptions motivating such a strong dissociative claim? To synopsize the current story: the transformation from a religious and aristocratic to a secular and

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mercantile realm democratizes but also commodifies culture, generating the need for a re-auratized measure of authority within an emergent public sphere. This need produces literature as a back formation, which entails the establishment of a literary canon, which in turn requires the determination of a center. Since any center will do, the accession of “Shakespeare” to the privileged position Michael Dobson describes as the “national poet” is essentially independent of any intrinsic qualities attributed to the plays. (I take the skeptical quotation marks around Shakespeare from W. B. Worthen, whose brilliant Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance shares Orgel’s strong advocacy of performative rather than literary values.) “Shakespeare” is a structural necessity without positive content; its full power derives from malleable emptiness. “Shakespeare” is that it is. Not everyone understands the study of Shakespeare in these terms. Michael Bristol, for instance, claims that there is more to Shakespeare’s staying power than the repetitive chronicle of appropriation and return on investment. Shakespeare’s plays are not just ephemeral products of the culture industry. [I] would suggest that the supply side hypothesis is at best incomplete, and that the story of Shakespeare’s cultural endurance can be “nothing so crude” as an account of commercial practices all by itself, no matter how detailed or how revelatory. A full explanation of Shakespeare’s cultural authority also has to consider the specific shape of “the great stories.” (Big-time Shakespeare, p. 117, 123) From Bristol’s perspective, the staying power of “Shakespeare” is not totally disconnected from Shakespeare: the “specific shape” of the plays themselves contributes to their enduring interest. In subsequent editorial work, Orgel has apparently come around to something like Bristol’s position. Merely by undertaking editorial work, as in his Oxford Winter’s Tale, Orgel seems to ignore the claim, advanced eight years earlier in “The Authentic Shakespeare,” that “to fix the text [in] a book is to defeat it”; and in the specific procedures implemented in his edition, as John Jowett remarks, “Orgel edits undef lected by” the “theoretical complications” of his previous work (“Year’s Work,” p. 267). Nora Johnson notes the same inconsistency. In contrast to earlier claims on behalf of an authorless and infinitely revisable play script, the “essential drifting” with which Derrida characterizes “orphaned writing” (Margins, p. 316), Orgel now declares that “James represented the royal mind as

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programmatically occluded, a politic obscurantism that may certainly be ref lected in the linguistic obscurity of Leontes’s (or Macbeth’s, or Cymbeline’s) court” (“Introduction,” p. 13). The comment restabilizes and reunifies the text (three texts, in fact, separated by several years and distinct generic signals) by simply transferring its ownership—coherent authorial-cum-parental control—from the Bard to the King. “The risk here,” as Johnson shrewdly remarks, “lies in substituting a broadly historical referent—‘authority’—for the kinds of verbal indeterminacy that Orgel himself values as a textual editor” (433). Orgel himself had remarked on the inconsistency earlier than either Jowett or Johnson: “I am the first to admit that my own practice in my Oxford Tempest and Winter’s Tale hasn’t done much to take into account my own arguments in ‘What is a Text?’ and ‘The Authentic Shakespeare’ ” (“What is an Editor?”, p. 25). As Orgel’s insouciant tone suggests, there is no scandal here. People change their minds from one project to the next. We should distinguish between the people producing criticism, whose beliefs are changeable and even contradictory, and the arguments of the criticism they produce, which are internally consistent, at least if the critics are any good. Orgel, who is as good as it gets, argues as though the intrinsic qualities of a Shakespeare play are hallucinations, disconnected from the “real play,” “historically inaccurate,” and “blind to the true nature of the phenomena.” This repudiation of aesthetic interest may not correspond to Stephen Kitay Orgel’s personal belief, but it provides a foundation for the materialist cultural studies on which the author of “Shakespeare Imagines a Theater” and “The Authentic Shakespeare” can build an effective argument. Elizabeth Hanson makes the point explicitly, claiming that Lady Mary Wroth is “entitled to serious and detailed consideration” not despite but precisely because the “aesthetic limitation” of her work “activates important questions about the relation between social experience and literary production in this period.” If you’re interested in “a strategy of socio-political reading,” according to Hanson, “the recognition of aesthetic limitation, as opposed to the denial or bracketing of it,” serves as the “point of departure” (167). It works the other way round as well. If you’re interested in aesthetic engagement, then the exclusion of the sociopolitical serves as your starting point. Consider Coleridge who, in his Table Talk for March 15, 1834, declared: I believe Shakespeare was not a whit more intelligible in his own day than he is now to an educated man, except for a few local

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allusions of no consequence. As I said, he is of no age—nor of any religion, or party, or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind. (Woodring, p. 468) This is someone truly indifferent to historical context. Sometimes Coleridge even willfully suppresses historical knowledge, as when he dismisses the “black African” Othello he understands to be the intention of “Shakespeare himself ” in favor of the “tawny Moor” he deems appropriate to the “poet for all ages” (Raysor, Shakespearean Criticism, 1. p. 42). How could Coleridge so f lagrantly disregard the material conditions for the production and reception of Shakespeare’s plays? The answer is, he didn’t. According to R. A. Foakes, Coleridge “attempted from the first” to set Shakespeare in the context of the development not only of English drama, using the recent work of Warton and Malone, but of ancient drama too, and citing Hooker, Ralegh, Chapman, Bacon, Spenser, Davies, and Sidney in his lectures, he demonstrated that the sixteenth century provided a context “favourable to the existence & full development of Shakespeare.” (Foakes, Editor’s Introduction, p. lxviii) If Coleridge really believed that social conditions did not matter, he would not have written the agonized lines in “Fears in Solitude” about British participation in the enslavement and transportation of black Africans (“We have offended, Oh! my countrymen! . . . the sons of God, / Our brethren!”); and he would not have produced the often fiercely engaged political arguments that fill up Volumes 2, 3, 6, and 10 of the Princeton edition. Coleridge too seems to have changed his mind from one project to the next. But whatever Samuel Taylor Coleridge believed, the author of the Shakespearean commentary published (posthumously) under his name writes as though the sociopolitical does not matter. Its absence occupies the same foundational position in Coleridgean aesthetics as the erasure of the aesthetic does in a materialist cultural studies. *

*

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By now, one reason why the reconciliation agenda has been so difficult to implement should be evident. You cannot reconcile a worldly

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cultural studies and aesthetic interest—the sociology of literature and literary study, historicism and formalism, contextualism and textualism—because they are mutually exclusive modes of understanding. The result is bound to be incoherence, which is not only an undesirable effect in academic discourse, but a potentially destructive one as well. After all, these differences not only exclude but constitute each other. Academic disciplines require exclusion (you can do something only by delimiting the area of action—not doing something else); without differences, academic disciplines would cease to exist (like Iago, they are “nothing if not critical”). From this angle, the reconciliation agenda is likely to undermine the precarious stability it was designed to shore up. Instead of remedying a malaise, it will (if it doesn’t first disintegrate into its own contradictions) terminate the patient. It is not just epistemological constraints, the rules of the disciplinary language game, that work against the reconciliation program; there are historical pressures as well. The rules have been developed over a long period of time, during which the institutional sites of the disciplines were being established; and these sites—the academic field on which the game is played—rely on the same processes of mutual exclusion described here. According to Stephen Schryer, literature and sociology departments achieved identity during the middle of the twentieth century “in a dialectical interplay with their own disciplinary other” (668). John Guillory pushes the origin back a little “to the scene of discipline formation in the earlier twentieth century,” when “both literary criticism and the social sciences achieved the status of university disciplines, often in competition with each other” (“Sokal,” 482). We can go back further still. Academic disciplines developed out of a prior tendency toward fragmentation and specialization, the origins of which considerably antedate the twentieth century. Milton is a good place to begin this story, since Milton’s own story begins at the very beginning of things. When Of Education argues the need “to repair the ruins of our first parents,” it locates the disintegration of truth at the advent of history. Any attempt to “regain” prelapsarian unity, Milton goes on to argue, needs to build from the bottom up, proceeding from “sensible things” in order “to arrive” at “the knowledge of God and things invisible”; the “same method,” he adds, “is necessarily to be followed in all discreet teaching” (pp. 368–9). In according value to particularist knowledge, Milton participates in a process of educational reorganization undertaken broadly throughout Protestant Europe. Along with the other reformers contributing to this project, Milton’s particularism does not undermine his commitment to

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the larger goal of an inclusive totality of knowledge and to the religious framework within which it resonates (Sirluck, pp. 184–216). But this commitment diminishes during the subsequent (and now more historically than theologically situated) fragmentation of the Enlightenment; the natural realm dissociates itself more decisively from the sacred, and particularist knowledge moves toward autonomy and a fully developed specialization. At the cusp of this process, Hegel suggests that totality may be grasped through the dialectic of history, but with the staggering expansion of knowledge during the nineteenth century and the institutionalization of distinct academic disciplines, the Hegelian synthesis comes to seem increasingly tenuous. It was still available to a late Hegelian like Bradley, who attributed the impulse “to translate the one [art or discipline] into the other” to the intuition of “something boundless . . . which, we feel, would satisfy not only the imagination but the whole of us” (“Poetry,” p. 26). Bradley was disinclined to dismiss this intuition as does Freud, for whom the “oceanic feeling,” as it is designated in Civilization and its Discontents, is attributed to infantile regression (pp. 11–20). Nonetheless, Bradley understood that this sense of something far more deeply interfused was unsustainable without realizing the (in historical terms) unrealizable Miltonic endeavor of “regaining to know God aright.” The quest for meta-disciplinary Truth is after all vain, and pending the final revelation of all in all, Bradley focuses on the intrinsic values of distinct discourses. Poetry, he tells us, embodies in its own irreplaceable way something which embodies itself also in other irreplaceable ways, such as philosophy or religion. And just as each of these gives a satisfaction which the other cannot possibly give, so we find in poetry, which cannot satisfy the needs they meet, that which by their natures they cannot afford us. But we shall not find it fully if we look for something else. (p. 25) Poetry for poetry’s sake; philosophy, religion, politics, ethics, etc.—all for their own sakes. Disciplinary distinctness, as Bradley sees it, allows us to achieve whatever partial (in both senses) knowledge we can in the cognitive domain available to us—strength in what remains behind. Placed in this context, the reconciliation program faces obstacles not just in the differential nature of language but in the accumulated experience of history. “Form and history” are not just ideas to be “crossed” at will. A “rapprochement” between literary and sociological interest

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entails more than finding “some common ground” among some divergent methods. It requires reconfiguring the processes—conceptual, institutional, social, and political—which separated these methods (and the values which underwrote them) in the first place, and which subsequently reinforced their separation as distinct practices over a long period of time. In the case of literary interest, the process goes back at least as far as to the aesthetic discourse systematized by Kant and the Romantics. Kant’s claim for “the pure disinterested satisfaction” entailed in “judgments of taste” (§2, p. 48) underlies the idea of “purposiveness without purpose” (§10, p. 68) I quoted earlier on. The same kind of idea underlies Coleridge’s claim for “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (Engell, p. 6). For Wordsworth, a fit reader meets poetry shorn of the special interests derived from professional competence, theoretical understanding, and working knowledge: “possessed of that information which may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a natural philosopher, but as a Man” (Owen, p. 123). As Bradley puts it, writing near the end of the Romantic line, poetry “makes no direct appeal to those feelings, desires, and purposes” that touch “us as beings occupying a given position in space and time” (“Poetry,” p. 6). Bradley does not identify these excluded positions, but they seem to coincide with Wordsworth’s catalog of special interests, and presumably approximate the normative (“correct”) sociopolitical categories (race, class, gender, et al.) underlying recent work. “Citizenship,” might be a neutral umbrella term here—as in Said’s warning against an excessive emphasis on “daily issues like citizens’ rights” (“An Unresolved Paradox”). Bradley, ref lecting later on Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s decision to suppress “one of his best sonnets” because “it was called f leshly,” concludes that Rossetti “judged in his capacity of citizen, not in his capacity of artist” (“Poetry,” p.11). This is where the current desire to harmonize textualist and contextualist interest confronts an apparently insurmountable obstacle in the aesthetic tradition. Contextualism takes various forms these days (historicism, performativity, and cultural studies at the beginning of this chapter are only three of many), but they all tend to be centered on a sociological foundation. They proceed from the belief that aesthetic engagement has real (that is, sociopolitical) consequences in the world, helping to construct the motivations that assign us, “as beings occupying a given position in space and time,” to positions on the grid of power relations, imparting (or imputing) legitimacy, as when

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theatrical performance is said to raise actors to the rank of “gentlemen and ladies.” According to Douglas Bruster, “New Formalism” proceeds by “scrutinizing the cultural work that forms do”—that is, “examining the social, cultural and historical aspects of literary form, and the function of form for those who produce and consume literary texts” (pp. 44–5). The instrumentality of form here is echoed by Cohen, for whom the critic’s job is to distinguish “the historically specific origins and functions” of the literary (p. 4) and to identify the “role” played by form “in the cultural function of literature” (p. 13). With form thus subordinated to function, aesthetic experience is relocated from what Bradley calls “the contemplative imagination” to a purposeful will; instead of “reading poetically,” we read “as beings occupying a given position in space and time”—with the result, presumably, of acquiring “such experience as is evoked in us when we read[,] let us say, a newspaper article” (“Poetry,” p. 7, 28). As a consequence, any claim to “engage systematically with formal complexity” has become compromised—at least as such engagement was valued in the line of thought following from Kant. Cohen argues that Robert Weimann is more responsive to formal complexity than is Louis Adrian Montrose, because Weimann detects not a “single ‘purpose of playing’ ” (like Montrose) “but a variety of sociopolitical functions and effects” (p. 24, note 31). Nonetheless, a variety of functions still adds up to functionalism, and the multiplicity of purposes contradicts the Kantian “without purpose” as fully as a single one. Finally, the effort of “historical formalism” to “take seriously the theoretical commitments and complexities of both halves of its name” (p. 14) collapses into contradiction, as do all the harmonizing projects reviewed here. Reconciling literary study with the sociology of literature, negotiating a rapprochement between language-oriented and cultural studies, finding common ground for New Criticism and New Historicism, etc.—these programs issue not in a coherent synthesis but in something like Geertz’s jumbled-up “pot-au-feu theorizing,” thereby reproducing the problem it was meant to solve: an overabundance of interests, “drawn from the most wildly different” domains, generates an “impossibly vague and encompassing” range of reference inadequate to serve as “the backbone of an innovative critical practice.” Or of any practice at all. If new formalism is (as Levinson says) “better described as a movement than a theory or method,” so historical formalism, Cohen admits, is not “a particular method but a critical commitment” (p. 3), which is, in turn, “not defined by a single critical practice” (p. 14). In the absence of a method or a practice, however, all

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the reconciliation agenda can do is say that the reconciliation agenda would be a good thing to do, in reiterated affirmations of hope that, if we persevere, we’ll eventually reach the point where an unimplementable and even self-defeating idea will have been transformed into a program for action. II: Desire In accounting for the failure of the reconciliation agenda, I have pointed to the obstacle of intellectual incoherence: the path to rapprochement is blocked as a result of the extended process during which the disciplines have differentiated themselves into specific identities. But historical precedent is never absolutely determinative, no matter how long it has been sustained, and intellectual coherence is not a transcendental signified; intellectual coherence takes different forms in different contexts, shaped by the desire to accommodate particular needs. Desire is, I take it, the key word here. If the desire for a return to the aesthetics were strong enough, the requirements of intellectual coherence and disciplinary difference would not by themselves prevent its realization. The underlying problem is in the adequacy—or inadequacy—of the desire itself. In order to develop this claim, we need to be more specific about what the aesthetic has come to mean in current work, and this entails going back to the place where the earlier account of aesthetic discourse left off, Bradley’s “Poetry for Poetry’s Sake.” I identified Bradley’s “poetical reading” with an interpretive rather than a formalist aesthetics—the Kantian line focused on a “perceiving subject” rather than an “aesthetic object,” as John Guillory puts it (Cultural Capital, p. 275), on “a form of judgment” rather than “a set of objects classed as art,” in Jonathan Loesberg’s words (A Return, p. 74). In returning to these distinctions, I ask a historical question, when does one or the other of these two emphases come to dominate the discourse? and a theoretical one, how crucially decisive is the distinction between them to begin with? Loesberg takes on both of these, setting up his argument in A Return to Aesthetics. His first chapter, he tells us, begins, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, with Coleridge’s development of the idea of organic form. The Coleridgean criterion of organicism does indeed mean to describe the special feature of an art object, and it describes that feature in terms of an

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immanental design particular to it and to nature, and thus especially valuable. But Coleridge and his followers arrived at this concept through a pointed misinterpretation of Kant and other German sources, who did not think of the design of nature as, in itself, numinous and whose concept of aesthetic design entailed a certain way in which the mind perceives the world, in the first instance, and not a mysterious quality of art objects. (p. 4) As Loesberg sees it, (1) the break from a subjective Kantian aesthetics comes with the formalism of “Coleridge and his followers”; and (2) this break is crucial, “a pointed misinterpretation.” Both these claims could use some fine tuning. In the first place, Coleridge’s formalism is subject to exaggeration. Coleridge certainly has formalist interests, and the standard identification of Coleridge with the concept of organic form is a way of recognizing these interests. But Coleridge’s formalism, as I’ll try to show in chapters 5 and 6, is subordinate to his interest in interpretive activity. A willing suspension of disbelief, the other tag regularly quoted to identify Coleridge’s position, better represents the hierarchy of his critical values; he is concerned more profoundly with the processes of engaging texts than with the properties of the texts we engage. From this perspective, Coleridge looks to be continuing in the Kantian line rather than departing from it. If there is a decisive shift from subjective to objective aesthetics, from Kant to formalism, this occurs not with “Coleridge and his followers,” but only with those (highly selective) followers of Coleridge who come after Bradley, whose position may be exemplified by Archibald MacLeish’s claim (if that’s the right word) in “Ars Poetica” that “A poem should not mean / But be.” As for the second question, the relation between an interpretationcentered Kantian aesthetics and an artifact-centered formalism, this is not necessarily the stark contrast Loesberg’s “pointed misinterpretation” suggests. There is a more or less natural fit between the two. If you engage a text with a disinterested judgment, independently of its immediate consequences for your behavior “as a being occupying a given position in space and time,” you might well find yourself contemplating its formal arrangement, wondering how it was put together. “A poem should not mean / But be” is something Bradley would not have been inclined to say; he was more interested in the interpretive activity of perceiving subjects than in the ontological status of aesthetic objects. But he would have been sympathetic to MacLeish’s sentiments; and although not given to inventing formulas and legislating rules, “Poetry

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for Poetry’s Sake” affirms in considerable detail the values underwriting the arguments against “The Intentional Fallacy” (Wimsatt, pp. 3–18) and “The Heresy of Paraphrase” (Brooks, pp. 192–214) and the other touchstones of New Critical method. These elements of conceptual continuity, moreover, allow us to revisit the historical question in a way to reinforce my claim earlier for the absence of any decisive break. A tradition of formalist aesthetics, associated with Hegel’s Lectures on Art and, in Shakespearean commentary, with A. W. Schlegel, coexisted peacefully with the interpretive or Kantian line. Coleridge’s primary allegiance to the Kantian line did not prevent him from shifting around between the two modes, and this eclecticism may help to explain the persistence of Coleridgean inf luence almost to our own day. It is probably a factor, too, in the insouciance we have seen with which Bradley treats the differences of detail he inherited from philosophical traditions. My point in all this is not to dissolve difference into an amorphous continuum. On the contrary, I think that a very significant break does indeed occur after Bradley, but not so much in theoretical or cognitive as in affective terms. The decisive issue is conviction rather than coherence. Bradley is unambiguously convinced of the value of “reading poetically”: the practice, he declares, has “intrinsic worth” as “an end in itself.” Like virtue, reading poetically is its own reward. Bradley’s indifference to any subsequent or subsidiary benefits accruing to poetical reading is of a piece with Kant’s “purposivity without purpose.” In fact, aesthetic experience is not without a kind of worldly purpose in Kant’s scheme of things (as Guillory remarks, “Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck is not the same thing as purposelessness” [Cultural Capital, p. 291]), and Bradley, thanks to his philosophical training, would have had no trouble developing this idea if he had felt the need to do so. But in “Poetry for Poetry’s Sake,” he evidently does not feel the need to do so. He may “suppose my readers” to understand and sympathize with his claims—they are “so obvious” that “a bare reminder of them would be enough.” Bradley is confident not only in his own convictions but in the shared convictions of his audience. The question is whether these shared convictions survive the transition from a late Romantic interpretive aesthetics to a New Critical—or, in Paul Alpers’s more inclusive term (p. 136), a Modernist—formalism. There are some reasons to believe that it does. If “reading poetically” is “an end in itself,” so the poems read and the readings of them undertaken by Brooks and Ransom and Empson et al. are presumably deemed to have “intrinsic worth” as well. Indeed, since Modernists do not

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simply presume intrinsic worth but spell out the values of their practice, including not just its methods (as in the touchstones mentioned earlier), but its history (Wimsatt and Brooks) and its theory (Wellek and Warren, Krieger), this last designed not only to explain what they are doing but to provide (in Guy and Small’s terms) an “explicit elaboration” of “the appropriateness and utility of the explanation”—given all this, it might seem that Modernist convictions of the worth of their enterprise actually exceed Bradley’s. But the systematic theorizing of Modernist aesthetics can be read the other way round as well. “When philosophy paints its grey in grey,” Hegel says in The Philosophy of Right, “a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the grey in grey of philosophy; the owl of Minerva begins its f light only with the onset of dusk” (p. 31). From this angle, Modernist self-ref lection suggests not the intensification or energizing of the critical practice initiated with Kant and the Romantics, but its exhaustion. Developments subsequent to Modernism suggest that Hegel’s perspective is the right one here, for even as Modernism enriched the theoretical sophistication by which it described the value of its own practice, the conviction of that value diminished into an impoverished replica of itself. The term of choice for this replica is “close reading.” Close reading grew out of but then away from the values of “poetical reading.” Increasingly remote from its generative origins in Romanticism, its strategies for lavishing attention onto the nuances of poetic texts dwindled into empty routines, the detailed instructions for performing a critical practice passed along by teachers to students many if not most of whom (the teachers, probably, as well as the students) no longer had any clear idea why they might want to perform it. Close reading is like “degree” in Troilus and Cressida; the “ladder of all high designs,” Ulysses calls it (1.3.162), but it points up at nullity. Close reading is the means to a nonexistent end, the triumph of technique over purpose. The vitiation of purpose, of conviction and desire, is central to the sense of impasse from which we began, and to the program of “Reclaiming the Aesthetic” proposed for its remediation. This is the title of George Levine’s Introduction to Aesthetics and Ideology, one of the earliest and most thoughtful ref lections on the “radical” potential in the contextualist turn (as I have called it) to “challenge the very existence of departments of literature in universities.” As Levine sees it, this challenge raises a fundamental question. “Can, in fact, a category, literature, be meaningfully constituted? If so, once constituted, is it worth much attention?” And if not, then why engage with it?—or, in

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Levine’s later synecdochic version of the question, “Why, for example, read Dickens?” (pp. 1, 9). In a 1999 piece on “Cultural Studies, Victorian Studies, and Formalism,” Loesberg takes up this question. Ref lecting on the possible advantages of renouncing cultural for literary studies, Loesberg invites us to “abandon [the] intellectual imperialism,” which allows us to interpret “the subject matter of other disciplines” in favor of a “formalism” that proceeds on the basis of “declaring its own enclosure on the face of its disciplinary concerns.” This is an invitation most of us will refuse, and Loesberg, who extends it only half-heartedly, knows as much. After all, a “formalism held with an awareness that its position is an artificial boundary” can hardly address the problem of inadequate purpose. “Such a voluntary askesis,” he acknowledges, would obviously not give us the benefits normally attached to attempts to recuperate notions of aesthetic value. It would not by itself return us to an attention to the literariness of literature, answering the question Levine asks of why we read Dickens. And while a turn to the aesthetics motivated by the desire to answer that question might produce the desired end, the wilfullness of the turn I am espousing here would tend to work against the kind of consequential claim necessary to produce such an answer. In other words, if we turn to formalist analysis as an act of will rather than as a consequence of knowing why we read Dickens, then we obviously won’t know any better why we read him as any direct effect of making the formalist turn. (540–1) The manufactured will to renounce desire (“askesis” comes from the same root as “ascetic”) merely reiterates the problem of inadequate desire. In retrospect, Loesberg’s f lirtation with formalism seems like an early attempt to work out a problem subsequently treated more fully in A Return to Aesthetics, though I am not sure it is solved there or that it can be solved anywhere. It is certainly not solved among those Shakespeareans who claim that reconciliation offers a way out of our impasse. When, for example, Russ McDonald expresses regret about the “devaluation of the ‘artistic,’ ” the inverted commas around the object of desire represent equivocation (like Worthen’s “ ‘Shakespeare’ ”), and this attenuated interest seems inadequate to the task of “reconciling the distant and recent pasts.” (If “a shape of life has grown old,” it will not be “rejuvenated” by a love that dare not speak its name.) Shakespeare Reread partakes of

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the general diminution that comes after Modernist criticism. The close reading it endorses has been disconnected from any specific object (what kind of text should we read closely?) or purpose (why should we read it closely?). It has become method tout court, and although method is necessary for all critical practices (historians and philosophers and lawyers and certified public accountants all read closely), by itself it is insufficient to sustain any of them. Some alternative is required to replace the conviction we have lost. Shakespeare Reread identifies this substitute value with the “new and potentially illuminating ways of reading closely” (p. 3) designated as New Contexts in the book’s subtitle, “all these shifts in the critical atmosphere” that have brought about “the increased importance of politics” and added “topics such as race and gender” to “virtually all discussion of literature” (p. 10); in short, precisely those sociopolitical interests, the “feelings, desires, and purposes” that touch “us as beings occupying a given position in space and time,” to which Bradley’s poetical reading “makes no direct appeal.” The “purpose” that aesthetic engagement sought temporarily (“for the moment,” as Coleridge put it) to displace is now securely installed at the foundation of the new practice. All this suggests a gap between conception and action—what Shakespeare Reread means to do and what it actually does. The declared intention is reconciliation, to negotiate a common ground between the implicitly equal claims of past and present critical modes, but the effect is appropriation, to render the diluted remnants of aesthetic tradition available for the urgent needs of a new, sociologically inf lected practice. With this gap in mind, we might return to the effective origins of “the reconciliation agenda”—a phrase that sounds increasingly in need of inverted commas of its own—in Patricia Parker’s hope “that the impasse of a now apparently outworn formalism and a new competing emphasis on politics and history might be breached” (Transfigurations, p. 96). Breaching an impasse is almost as hard to translate into a specific action as taking arms against a sea of troubles. But if rapprochement disintegrates into immobilized gestures pointing in different directions, appropriation—the use of textual features to analyze contextual effects, the “process of moving from literary to social text”—predicates a definite trajectory with both traction and impetus. Close reading may seem temporarily to retard the rate of progress, but even its deferrals and dilations, by guaranteeing that we do not “unnecessarily shortcircuit or foreclose the process,” turn out only to intensify the climactic revelations of the sociopolitical determinants when we come upon them at the last.

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Parker’s finesse in teasing out the links and slippages in Shakespearean wordplay has been characterized as “madly creative” (Bly), “rich and fascinating in its linguistic detail” (Cartwright, p. 305), “dazzling” (Howard), and “wonderful” (Maurer, 1045). But this generous engagement with textuality is never permitted to threaten the authority of contextualist values at the center of the enterprise. Linguistic interest is focused on a semantic polyvalence registered in thematic terms; it rarely extends to rhythm, rhyme, and other aural effects that might be hard to fix in a conceptual framework; and to this framework itself, defined as “the power relations implied by gender[,] class, race and sexual identification” (Shakespeare, p. 2), the details are systematically referred. In the words of one otherwise sympathetic reader, Parker’s “privileging of individual words over the wildly different theatrical contexts of their utterance tends to f latten the Shakespeare canon into . . . an immense verbal system in which nothing can be allowed not to mean something important” (Dobson, “Cold Front,” 25). Thus even as one breathtakingly nuanced textual analysis follows another, we are reminded “that words . . . function in relation to a larger field of discourse,” and these reiterated reminders keep us focused on the “larger questions” about “the larger contemporary discursive networks”—the “institutions, practices, and laws” that constitute the big sociopolitical picture (Shakespeare, p. 3; “Transformations,” p. 93; “Othello,” p. 106; my emphases). If the reconciliation agenda is, from the beginning. really an appropriation agenda, it remains so up to its most recent version. Like Parker, who subordinates textual properties to the interests of their sociopolitical masters and then describes the relationship as a chiastic symmetry, “the order of discourse and the discourse of order,” so Stephen Cohen subsumes literary within sociological interests and calls it “mutual implication.” The language of harmonious reciprocity shared among all these critics cannot be disingenuous, but the desire it represents is not adequate to displace contextual interest from its position of dominance. The vision of concord suggested by this language is just a stop on the way to a terminal destination, where the wolf ’s love is not to dwell with the lamb but, as in Menenius’s troping of Isaiah, “to devour him” (Geneva Bible, 11.6; Coriolanus, 2.1.9). I’ll make the point one last time with a look at the presidential address Marjorie Perloff delivered to the MLA Convention in 2006. Reporting on her survey of the forty-nine literature department dissertations completed at Stanford during the preceding six years, Perloff remarks that “only a handful have any specifically literary

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component.” She quotes three “typical titles”—“The Garden and the Crop: Revising Rural Labor in the United States Urban Imagination, 1870–1915”; “Offending Lives: Subjectivity and Australian Convict Autobiographies, 1788–1899”; “The Sway of Chance in Eighteenth Century England”—and comments: These dissertations may well use literary texts as examples, but if so, the fiction, dramas, or poems in question are taken to be means to an end—they are windows through which we see the world beyond the text, symptoms of cultural desires, drives, anxieties, or prejudices. . . . the literary, if it matters at all, is always secondary; it has at best an instrumental value. (654–5) Perloff ’s own title, “It Must Change,” suggests that this situation is both undesirable and unsustainable; and while her judgment in the first instance is debatable, in the second, since all situations are unsustainable (change is the only constant), she must be right. Perloff, however, anticipates a very specific kind of change. “It is time to trust the literary instinct that brought us to this field in the first place,” she argues; “instead of lusting after those other disciplines that seem so exotic primarily because we don’t really practice them, what we need is more theoretical, historical, and critical training in our own discipline” (662). What we need, in other words, is a return to aesthetics; but for the reasons I have been developing here, this prospect is unlikely to materialize in the near future—if it happens at all. When Perloff declares that a “literary instinct brought us to this field in the first place,” she uses the same phrase as Greenblatt in his bid to restore “literary power,” and it raises the same problem. While literary instinct may have been the decisive factor for Perloff ’s generation, most of Perloff ’s MLA audience were in different situations when they entered the field, and their motives are hard to read. About the training they encountered once in graduate school, however, we are on firmer ground. It must have been the kind that led them to take on the nonliterary dissertation topics Perloff catalogs, and if they were smart and perseverant and lucky enough to finish their degrees and get jobs, they have probably been busy writing essays with sociological—that is, nonliterary—orientations (Stephen Schryer’s piece on “The New Criticism and Harvard Sociology,” from which I borrowed earlier, immediately follows Perloff ’s address in the pages of PMLA), and they are now probably training still newer people to write dissertations with orientations similar to their own.

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In short, Perloff ’s proposal runs into an elaborate apparatus working to promote precisely those critical interests she wishes to transform. Inertia inheres in all institutions, but the resistance to change in academia seems peculiarly intense. As Richard Posner puts it, trying to explain why the Chicago economists persist in advocating free-market theories in the face of the crisis that seems to have discredited their position, correctives work very slowly in dealing with academic markets. Professors have tenure. They have lots of graduate students in the pipeline who need to get their Ph.D.s. They have techniques that they know and are comfortable with. It takes a great deal to drive them out of their accustomed way of doing business. (Cassidy, 29) If it takes such a great deal to get professors to change—more, apparently, than it does doctors and attorneys, say—this may be because we are better insulated against any immediately tangible consequences that might be claimed for our work. When surgeons and trial lawyers stick to their accustomed ways of doing business instead of adopting better ones, Craig’s List will make it clear that their mortality or conviction rates are higher than those of more innovative competitors. In the same way, CEOs whose corporations do not produce short-term profits will find their shareholders inclined to replace them, or at least not to line their pockets with such hefty bonuses. The accountability of the nonacademic professional marketplace is no doubt subject to exaggeration, as is the impunity of tenured professors. But the difference remains significant. Academics are discernibly freer from external pressures to change, humanists especially so. (We are rarely asked to confront evidence of apparent error—in the interpretation of Hamlet, say, or the causes of the Thirty Years War, or Heidegger’s relation to Nietzsche—the way economists are to answer for deregulation, not that, as Posner remarks, they have had any problem doing so.) In the absence of external pressures, we are dependent on generating pressures from within, but these are not likely to add up to much. As Louis Menand puts it at the end of a book devoted to “Reform in the American University,” the “conclusion to be drawn from this exercise” is “that the academic system is a deeply internalized one” (Marketplace of Ideas, p. 157). An equally deep internalization extends to the disciplinary systems that comprise the academic institution. But then, having internalized the disciplinary and institutional

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values, how can we be expected to change these values, or even find a position from which to say that these values must change? Changes do occur, of course, but if the obstacle is in the internalization of institutional values, the prospect for a return of the aesthetic looks remote indeed. As a psychological process, internalization has an affective as well as a cognitive dimension, and if my argument for the priority of desire makes sense, affect is what chief ly counts. When Hamlet tells Gertrude that “use almost can change the stamp of nature” (3.4.168), he is talking not about ideas but about fundamental appetites; and in the thirty years or so during which we have gotten used to the contextualism represented by the titles of those Stanford dissertations, we have come not only to appreciate the truth and knowledge claims available to us by performing this kind of work but, more important, to take pleasure in the performance. Perloff acknowledges the element of pleasure, but the acknowledgments tend to work against her case. She tells us to stop “lusting after those other disciplines that seem exotic,” but if at one time cultural studies looked like a perverse pursuit of the outré, it has by now become naturalized, the default—one might say, the missionary—position. “Instinct is a great matter,” as Falstaff says (1 Henry IV, 2.4.268), but “the literary instinct” Perloff asks us to trust has been displaced, and we are now sociologists “on instinct.” It will take more than reasoned arguments to talk ourselves out of these instincts. If, despite all these arguments, we have not returned to aesthetics, or even managed to reconcile aesthetics to contextualism, this is because we do not really want to.

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CH A P T E R

T WO

Negative Desire: Materialism and Its Discontents

In chapter 1, I asked why we have been unable to return to aesthetics, but it might be better now to ask why, in the face of so many disappointments, we keep trying. Disciplinary inertia must be an issue again, pulling now in the opposite direction from where it was pushing earlier on: instead of preventing us from a return to aesthetics, it prevents us from dropping the project. (As Kuhn says, humanists tend to throw nothing out.) But inertia cannot be the whole story. The effort persists because the problem that initiated the effort—the overextension of critical interest and a consequential loss of analytical focus—persists as well. Perloff ’s remark about lusting after exotic disciplines resonates with a skepticism expressed elsewhere about the legitimacy with which we claim territory not really our own. Ref lecting on the “intellectual imperialism” that allows us to “interpret the subject matter of other disciplines,” Jonathan Loesberg questions the “not very deeply buried confidence” that we “may unaided, by doing a literary reading of a Parliamentary blue book or accounts of a sensational criminal trial in a newspaper, do the work of a number of disciplines at once” (“Cultural Studies,” 538). As Jane Gallup puts it, “We have become amateur, or rather wannabe, cultural historians”; without “professional training in historical methods,” we cannot be expected to perform historical analysis “nearly as well as our colleagues in history departments” (p. 183). These concerns take us back to where we started, arguments about the inability of all-inclusive terms like culture and theory to provide disciplinary stability or coherence—“the backbone,” as Greenblatt put it, “of an innovative critical practice.” But where Greenblatt and Geertz and Jameson et al. warned against the overinvestment of hope in an ascendant practice, these more recent claims reflect discouragement in the face of

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evidence that those earlier warnings were in fact justified. According to Toril Moi, for example, invited in 2006 to contribute to the PMLA’s “Theories and Methodologies” section, the fact “that so much feminist work today produces only tediously predictable lines of argument” is “not a problem for feminist theory alone. The feeling of exhaustion, of domination by a theoretical doxa that no longer has anything new to say, is just as prevalent in nonfeminist theory” (1735). The next year, moderating a PMLA roundtable on “The End of Postcolonial Theory,” Patricia Yaeger declares that we are experiencing “now a sense of exhaustion in postcolonial studies” (633). This tone of elegiac disenchantment is widely dispersed throughout current work, a feature of the oscillating trajectory of critical interest since the contextualist turn, the breathtaking rapidity with which enthusiastic expansion has contracted into chastened retrenchment and then led to new investments of temporarily excited desire. The process seems to have begun sometime in the early 1980s when, coinciding with the publication of Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning and Fredric Jameson’s Political Unconscious, a declared interest in historicism emerged into prominence. It became obligatory to identify ourselves (or others) as historicists, new or otherwise, and to associate with “Always historicize!”, the slogan Jameson unfurled as “the one absolute and we may even say ‘transhistorical’ imperative of all dialectical thought” (p. 9). Table-thumping rhetoric like this appeared in uncharacteristic places (Orgel’s “true nature,” “historically accurate,” and “essentially . . . real” date from this period), and although almost no one had the muscle to historicize in a way that respected the massive and nuanced complexity of Jameson’s apparatus, and despite the absence of anything like a consensus about the meaning or value of historicism, new or otherwise, the question Carolyn Porter asked near the end of the 1980s, “Are We Being Historical Yet?”, was the one anyone looking to establish critical authority had to ask. And then it wasn’t; charisma, like the god Hercules whom Antony loved, deserted history; the enchanted aura by which the historical could identify a shared conviction—in hoc signo vinces—vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. Or rather it migrated, as by metempsychosis, into a different site, and the political emerged as the new gold standard for interpretive work. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, politics became a word to conjure with. Louis Althusser and Laura Mulvey proliferated in our notes; we puzzled over interpellation and authentic agency; and declarations of political conviction (“Always politicize!”) or accusations of its absence filled up publications with “the politics of ” displayed provocatively in their titles.

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During this period, Shakespeareans were given to claiming that their work had an immediate impact on the psychosexual and sociopolitical order. Valerie Traub imagined that, since “prohibitions on incest or homosexuality” are “arbitrary political constructs, and thus open to transformation,” we can, “by deconstructing and refiguring the anxieties that regulate and discipline erotic life,” hope “to contribute modestly to the project of carving out space within the social structure for greater erotic variety” (p. 8). Margreta de Grazia imagined that by “bring[ing] into full view the scheme in which [Shakespeare] has been so effectively reproduced from the late Enlightenment to the present,” the “needs it has satisfied can be acknowledged and the possibilities it has elided can begin to be taken into account” (Shakespeare Verbatim, p. 13). Traub acknowledged that a deconstructive feminist analysis of Shakespeare was not about to eradicate heteronormativity, only “contribute modestly” to loosening its grip on our instincts, and de Grazia understood that interrogating Edmond Malone’s editorial assumptions could do no more than divert a rivulet from the tidal wave of Enlightenment that had swept us into modernity. But even hedged about with qualifications, such claims for direct worldly consequence abruptly disappeared into the background of a more ambitious past, as have Althusser and Mulvey from our notes. Historical and political criticism have not themselves disappeared; they continue to stand behind some of the most compelling examples of current critical practice. What has been lost, however, is the excited conviction they used to generate. Much the same pattern is evident with the various replacement modes that have, during the past thirty years or so, succeeded each other into an intensely, but only temporarily exhilarating prominence. Cultural and postcolonial studies, interdisciplinarity, feminism and queer theory, the new ethical and ecological criticism, etc.—they all remain with us, undiminished in explanatory reach; but as those reiterated laments that we are living “after theory” and “post-feminism” and at “The End of Postcolonial Theory” suggest, they have lost their power to engage hope and desire. Their interpretive power is no less than what it was, but the ravishing aura of unlimited possibility with which they first came onto the critical stage has been exhausted. Ravishing is meant to bring Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus into view. The abrupt shifts of interest during the last thirty years or so bear an uncanny resemblance to the wildly f luctuating desires acted out in the opening soliloquy of the play: Faustus unreservedly devotes himself to a succession of intellectual pursuits, dramatized in his eager

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brandishing of one book after another, each taken to encapsulate the object of his newly “ravished” interest; but when he finds his exhilarated expectations abruptly disappointed, he repudiates the professions in which he had invested such apparently unrealistic hopes by throwing away his books, one after another, in gestures of unmitigated disgust. The stakes are higher for Faustus than for us, and his situation is evidently more desperate; but if there is a useful analogy here, it resides in the idea of bad faith. Bad faith in a theological sense is, arguably, the factor that determines Faustus’s wavering commitments, and bad faith in a looser sense, neither theological nor existential, denoting merely the absence of any firm critical conviction, can account for the instability of current critical commitments as well. From this angle, the “not very deeply buried confidence” Loesberg sees in our readiness to take on a multidisciplinary work looks rather like its opposite, a manic bravado, driven by the intuition of illegitimacy, upon which disappointment is the inevitable—or at least “tediously predictable”—consequence. The problem is not necessarily an overreaching will; it can be located as readily on the other side of the situation, in the world’s failure to provide interests commensurate with a capacity for intellectual wonder. In either case, the result is disaffection, a restless instability that generates ever new objects of always unsatisfiable desire. In the following pages, the name I propose for this cycle of exhilaration and disappointment is materialist discontent. *

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In 1996, the International Shakespeare Association (ISA) invited Stanley Cavell to address a plenary session of its World Congress, meeting in Los Angeles. Cavell is a philosopher, and his Shakespearean interests, though substantial, derive from a prior investment in the traditions of philosophical inquiry. As he puts it at the outset of his talk, “I found in Shakespeare a diffusion of the modern philosophical problematic of skepticism, as portrayed in Descartes, and Hume, and Kant, and . . . the later Wittgenstein” (“Skepticism,” p. 231)—a different set of portraits from Marlowe and Burbage and King James, and whoever else might be supposed to occupy space in the minds of the dues-paying members of the ISA to whom Cavell was speaking. As an acknowledged “outsider” (p. 232), Cavell prepared for his talk by consulting the insiders: “I asked several real Shakespearean scholars what they were thinking about these days.” Cavell’s “real Shakespearean scholars” may be disingenuous. He claims “surprise on learning the

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extent to which philosophy, strikingly in its skeptical mode, has come in recent years to inhabit the Shakespearean field” (p. 232); but he must have had some idea how smoothly his kind of philosophy-talk had been translated into our kind of Shakespeare-talk. Maybe it didn’t even need translation at all. In his comment about Kenneth Burke a little later in the talk, “I do not think I know more food for thought in so few clear pages about the literary conditions of political praise and the political implications of literary praise” (p. 239), Cavell does just what so many of the real Shakespeareans encountered in the previous chapter are doing— use chiasmus to convey the impression of an achieved harmony between literary and political interests. He was speaking our language. Although Cavell probably didn’t need it, the expert testimony he elicited is worth considering for what it tells us about the state of the art as insiders saw it. They told Cavell he needed to catch up with two recent developments as a result of which some of his own earlier claims “had been repudiated.” One was the “continuing importance” of the Lear-text hypothesis—that the Quarto and Folio represent not two versions of the same play but distinct and independent entities, one of them Shakespeare’s own revision; the other that “the word ‘character’ in Shakespeare refers always and solely to traces of inscription and not to traits of persons.” For the far-reaching consequences of these developments, both based on new understanding rather than new knowledge, Cavell was referred to “the paper ‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text’ by Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass,” which was said to put forward “the further, more radical claims of what is called the New Textualism”—namely, “that the Shakespearean text does not exist; and not because of some fancy theory concerning the inevitability of incommensurable interpretations, but rather literally and simply as a material thing, does not exist” (p. 252). Whether or not this synopsis fairly represented the argument in “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” Cavell’s consultants were certainly right in describing the “radical” nature of as its claims. Here is the opening paragraph in full: For over two-hundred years, King Lear was one text; in 1986, with the Oxford Shakespeare, it became two; in 1989, with The Complete “King Lear” 1608–1623, it became four (at least). As a result of this multiplication, Shakespeare studies will never be the same. This is not simply because we may now have more Shakespeare than before—many Lears instead of one; a mere enlargement of the canon requires no rethinking of how the works are to be

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prepared and interpreted. Shakespeare studies will never be the same because something long taken for granted has been cast into doubt: the self-identity of the work. We are no longer agreed on the fundamental status of the textual object before us. Is it one or more? The significance of this uncertainty cannot be overestimated. Identity and difference are, after all, the basis of perception itself, the way we tell one thing from another. The possibility of multiple texts, then, constitutes a radical change indeed: not just an enlargement of Shakespeare’s works but a need to reconceptualize the fundamental category of a work by Shakespeare. (255) According to de Grazia and Stallybrass, the disintegration of King Lear into distinct versions serves to confirm the new set of assumptions— about authorial and textual stability, historical recovery, the status, and value of literary study—driving critical practice at the cutting edge of the discipline. The stakes are high: not just editing procedures for multiple text plays, and not just what to say about King Lear’s variant components (how we understand the Fool, say, or the relative authority of Albany and Edgar), but whether we should engage in the interpretation of King Lear at all, at least in Northrop Frye’s terms, as a process that “begins in a complete surrender of the mind and senses to the impact of the work as a whole, and proceeds through the effort to unite the symbols toward a simultaneous perception of the unity of the structure” (Anatomy, p. 77). As the lead article in in Shakespeare Quarterly, the premier journal of North American Shakespeare studies, “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text” was bound to get noticed, and given its farreaching claims, heralding the termination of Shakespeare studies as we know it, the piece was likely to generate substantial controversy; but even Cavell’s informants, recommending it as a leading indicator of what real Shakespeareans were thinking about, must have been surprised by the amount and intensity of the engagement it received. Two years after the piece appeared in 1993, Graham Holderness, Bryan Loughrey, and Andrew Murphy devoted four closely argued pages to the claim that “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text” collapses disappointingly into the idealist traditions it sets out to dismantle (100–3). In 1996, Michael Bristol concludes an essay on “How Good Does Evidence Have to Be?” with three closely argued pages maintaining that de Grazia and Stallybrass’s conclusions are not justified by their evidence. (If for Holderness et al. the piece does not go far enough, for Bristol it goes too far.) When in 1999, Richard Levin characterized

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“The Materiality” as a “well-known article,” he was thinking of these pieces among others, including one of mine that underlies some of the discussion below. Perhaps the most striking evidence of resonance with what “real Shakespeare scholars” are “thinking about these days” occurred in the same year as Levin’s piece, with the publication of Orgel and Keilin’s Shakespeare and the Editorial Tradition. The editors of this collection reprint their contributors’ essays without regard to the chronological order of original publication, and by making “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text” their lead piece, they reinforce the impression of its exemplary importance. By 2009, this impression, to judge from Jeffrey Knight’s casual reference to the piece as the “most prominent summary discussion of materiality in relation to early modern literature and to Shakespeare” (306), has evidently achieved the status of common knowledge. “Materiality” itself must have a lot to do with this impression; the word and its cognates, “materialism” and “materialist,” have, as Levin remarks, “been very prominent in Shakespeare criticism for almost fifteen years,” appearing “in the titles of four anthologies” and “in the names chosen by two major critical schools” (p. 87). The prominence has only increased since the time Levin’s piece appeared. According to Gabriel Egan writing in 2010, if “idealism asserts that reality is just an effect of ideas,” then “its opposite, which has become virtually the default setting for all literary scholars these days, is materialism, which insists that the basic stuff of the universe is matter and that we know about it through it material form” (“Intention,” p. 378; my emphasis). As Levin sees it, the extraordinarily large “number of different meanings” given to “materialism” betrays a fundamental failure to achieve anything beyond a nominally stable intelligibility. He devotes seven pages to demonstrating the “slippage in the materialism avowed” by “The Materiality”; and since de Grazia and Stallybrass’s piece “collects the doctrines as a kind of manifesto of the movement,” Levin concludes that the materialist program as a whole fails to provide a foundation for coherent critical practice (pp. 92, 93). Egan is more sympathetic to materialism, but he too is concerned with slippage in current uses of the term. If the “distinctions between [metaphysical and epistemological] kinds of idealism are frequently elided in theoretico-historical work,” so too are the distinctions between the kinds of materialism that oppose them. His example is the “New Textualism” to which Cavell’s consultants had referred. In New Textualism as Egan describes it, a “pragmatic concern for surviving physical artefacts in preference to the ideas that are supposed to have created them” metamorphoses into a claim that not

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only these ideas but “the lost predecessor artefacts” themselves may be dismissed as immaterial in the literal sense—as, in effect, hallucinations. “To minds captured by such a decidedly unMarxist caricature of materialism,” Egan wryly remarks, “the hypothetical status of authorial papers can even come to mean a healthy scepticism that they ever existed outside of the imaginations of New Bibliographers” (“Intention,” p. 379). As Levin and Egan see it, “materialism” as it currently functions designates (or gestures at) an encompassing area of interest so broad as to lack a definite shape. The critics inhabiting this area are bound together by nothing more than the working assumption that texts are generated out of and interpreted within particular social and political situations. From this angle, “materialism” is just another word for what I have been calling contextualism or worldliness; but if historicism and political criticism and interdisciplinarity and poco and ecocrit et al. may all be lumped together as “materialist” modes, then “materialism,” like “culture” in Greenblatt’s description, may be too amorphous to serve as “the backbone of an innovative critical practice.” Coherent stability, however, is not always the be-all and end-all of critical work. There are occasions when imprecision serves the general critical interest, and given the malaise we are so often said to be experiencing at present, now may be such a time. With the dilution and dispersion of conviction among a variety of much-less-than-fullypersuasive points of view, anything that might reinforce the impression of a common ground, no matter how vulnerable that impression to the sort of analytical rigor usually expected of philosophical inquiry, might be welcome. “Materialism” would then serve the function John Guillory attributes (disapprovingly, to be sure) to “the spontaneous philosophy of the critics”—“circulating what is given for this discourse community” and thereby helping to “produce solidarity in the marginalized humanist sector of the professoriate” (“Sokal,” 477, 499). Despite the fact that “materialism” stands for too many different things, or rather because it does, it reinforces the conviction that we are not alone, doing whatever we are doing in conjunction with a ratifying community of fellow believers. It may be true that “in current critical discourse ‘materialism’ does all the testing and is not itself tested” (Levin, p. 87); but if our true need at present is for an “essentially uncontested concept” (pace W. B. Gallie), then the claim stands, as France says in King Lear, “aloof from th’entire point” (1.1.240). In the following pages, I will be following up on some of the suggestions in Levin and Egan, pointing out “slippages” in “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” not just in the meaning of “materialism”

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but in the disconnection between the essay’s conclusions and the evidence claimed for their support. Incoherence, however, seems to me less of a problem than what I described earlier as bad faith, the tenuousness of the convictions by which the materialist project is driven. This tenuousness seems to derive from the essentially adversative sentiment on which the enterprise is predicated—its being “opposite,” as Gabriel Egan shrewdly points out, to the “idealism” of literary study. The ideas in materialist work may not add up, but it is the negative and reactive nature of the desire motivating these ideas—disaffection—that is the fundamental problem. I: Materialism Lost De Grazia and Stallybrass organize their discussion into five topics, the first four of which—“work,” “word,” “character,” and “author”— are said to describe the main categories of understanding that generate Shakespeare studies; all these categories, they claim, need to be rethought. Hence the stability we may assume to exist in a “work,” since it derives from a later tradition of copyright law where ownership had to be fixed with relation to a determinate and stable object, is a quality imposed anachronistically on Shakespeare’s text. The rules governing (or, better, the practices characterizing) print in the Renaissance were more f luid and volatile, and they were dispersed more widely among a variety of contributory agents than what we currently assume. De Grazia and Stallybrass make a similar argument about “word,” using an example from early texts of Macbeth: “the boundaries that separate weyward / weyard / weird / wayward into four discrete and mutually exclusive lexical units had not yet been drawn and systematically reproduced. Until dictionaries fixed these boundaries, cognates blurred, phonetically and orthographically, without regard to the post-lexical determinations that subsequently divided them” (266). And again for “character”: the word meant handwriting in the Renaissance, as Cavell’s consultants informed him; the idea of a fixed inner nature as a self-evident category of existence came only later into general currency. The normal absence of dramatis personae lists and the diversity of speech prefixes in texts prior to Nicholas Rowe’s edition in 1709 suggest that characters should be understood not as producing but rather as produced by the various and variable textual signs described under “work” and “word.” Finally (in both senses), “the author”: here, too, de Grazia and Stallybrass’s strategy is to assimilate the concept into the instability that

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it has come in our minds to govern. Not only did Shakespeare take no apparent interest in the printing of his plays; he could not establish authorial control over even presumably more manageable and intimate interests. For example, “the standard spelling of the author’s name is not that of the author’s hand but that of the printer’s press and ref lects not a personal investment in the question of identity but rather an economic one in the preservation of typeface” (274). It is not clear that Shakespeare could have even imagined such authorial control as we are now said routinely to attribute to him, since the concept, once again, does not establish itself till much later: “Our post-Enlightenment critical tradition has imagined the author standing above or beyond[,] generating words, constructing characters, and creating texts that form his collected works. But all the above illustrations lend support to the simple but profound insight that ‘whatever they may do, authors do not write books’ ” (273, quoting Roger E. Stoddard). What should we be studying, then, if not the books author write? De Grazia and Stallybrass answer this question in the fifth and final section of their essay, where we are urged to abandon “the sense that the value of Shakespeare lies elsewhere, in the inner regions of the text rather than in the practices recorded on its surfaces . . . in the materials of the physical book itself: in paper” (280). What follows is a fascinating description of the Renaissance production of paper (“the rags which quite literally composed the works of the National Bard were themselves the heterogeneous products of an international capitalist industry” [281]); and of ink, made up not only of ingredients like juniper gum, linseed oil, and lampblack but also the residual traces of the urine of the printshop workers, who each night used urine to soak the leather casing of the balls that inked the press. It is these material practices that, even when noted, are ignored in favor of a transcendent “text” imagined as the product of the author’s mind. (281–2) As promised, this is a “radical change indeed”; de Grazia and Stallybrass are proposing a thoroughgoing disciplinary shift whereby we renounce the study of literature and move into the history of the book. Any decision whether or not to follow this counsel will be determined by many things but not, I believe, by the claims de Grazia and Stallybrass make for their own evidence. The many illustrations gathered in “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text” do not, as they are asserted to do, support “the simple but profound insight that ‘whatever

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they may do, authors do not write books’ ”; far from justifying the conclusion, these illustrations, rather, derive from it. They demonstrate merely that Shakespeare’s texts may be studied as an aspect of the history of the book (Printing History is the name of the journal from which Stoddard’s words are quoted), and that if they are examined from within the assumptions of this discipline, Shakespeare will be produced not as an author, as he might be from within the assumptions of literary study, but as a product of the early modern printing industry—that is, as a phenomenon of its own disciplinary practices. To be sure, this circularity characterizes the argument on the other side as well. R. A. Foakes, for example, examines in detail the differences between Q and F Lear (“Hamlet” versus “Lear”, pp. 99–111) and claims that they do not justify the disintegrationist conclusion: Works of art have frequently been revised or reworked by the artist, and may exist in several versions, but if the basic structure remains roughly the same, these versions are rightly considered as variants of one work. Hamlet and King Lear are works on a huge scale [and] though the changes between Q and F modify the presentation of some characters and events, their impact on the shaping of the play can be seen as one of emphasis or balance. . . . a concept of artistry begins from the whole as structure or pattern, in which the details may vary considerably, as in variants in a large narrative painting or a long novel, so that it is nuanced differently, but not essentially changed. (p. 135) Working within the tradition of literary study described by Frye (“the unity of the structure,” “the whole as structure”), Foakes offers manifold evidence and powerful arguments to suggest that a “basic” or “rough” similarity is equivalent to an “essential” identity (“nuanced differently, but not essentially changed”), and he is therefore relatively indifferent to substantial variations among “characters and events.” But Foakes’s evidence is strong and his arguments persuasive only within the framework of literary study in the service of which they have been produced. Operating out of an entirely different set of assumptions, de Grazia and Stallybrass think more along the lines Jonathan Culler sets out in The Pursuit of Signs: “the interpretation of individual works is only tangentially related to the understanding of literature. To engage in the study of literature is not to produce yet another interpretation of King Lear but to advance one’s understanding of the conventions and operations of an institution, a mode of discourse.”

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Instead of looking for coherent literary texts that, as Culler goes on to say, is “one thing we do not need” (pp. 5–6), we should, like de Grazia and Stallybrass, be looking at the differentiated products of the early modern book trade. From this perspective, the slippages among “weyward,” “weyard,” “weird,” and “wayward,” though in themselves “small verbal points” trivial by comparison to the variations Foakes can absorb, are judged to be significant nonetheless, because “a text is literally composed of just such small points” (266). According to Hayden White, it is fruitless to try to arbitrate among contending conceptions of the nature of historical process on cognitive grounds which purport to be value-neutral in essence, as both Marxist and nonMarxist social theorists attempt to do. . . . The Marxist view of history is neither confirmable nor disconfirmable by appeal to “historical evidence,” for what is at issue between a Marxist and a non-Marxist view of history is the question of precisely what counts as evidence and what does not, how data are to be constituted as evidence, and what implications for the comprehension of the present social reality are to be drawn from the evidence thus constituted. (p. 284) If for Marxist and non-Marxist views of history we substitute a materialist and a literary study of the Shakespearean text, White’s point is directly transferable to the argument I am making here. Of course we can produce evidence to study Shakespeare as a commodity of the printing house rather than as a literary text; the question is whether we should. In de Grazia and Stallybrass’s essay the strongly implicit claim that we should is based on logical and historical priority. Shakespeare would not be available for literary study but for the development of print technology. In this sense, the potential status of Shakespeare as a literary text depends on book history, to which it stands in the relation of effect to cause, or superstructure to base. The trouble with this argument is that it is too powerful to be controlled. If the history of the book is preferable to literary study as a more authentically materialist discipline, it remains less authentically materialist than, say, cultural anthropology (as literary study depends on book history, so the invention of printing is an event in the evolution of culture). Nor is there any clear rationale for stopping here. Since cultural anthropology itself derives from and depends on a material basis in evolutionary biology, it follows that we should, having abandoned Shakespeare for Geertz,

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now abandon Geertz for Darwin. Perhaps this regression terminates logically in neutrinos and the fundamental interactions of matter in trying to account for the origin of the universe. The point is that once authentic materialism is established as the primary factor regulating the pursuit of knowledge, any kind of work in “the human sciences” is bound to seem more human than scientific, belated in the face of the “simple but profound insight” that all the monuments we build to our own unaging intellects are made up out of atoms and subatomic particles of interchangeable energy and matter. *

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For an astute analysis (and reproduction) of this problem in “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” consider Holderness, Loughrey, and Murphy’s argument in the piece I mentioned earlier. “ ‘What’s the Matter?’ Shakespeare and Textual Theory” is structured by a narrative in which the promise of an authentic materialism is repeatedly betrayed by a shrinking but nonetheless persistent idealism. The narrative begins with the New Bibliography, whose advocates “found no difficulty in reconciling a confidence in the reality of matter with an assurance of its eventual transcendence” in the ability to determine authorial intention (97). It then moves to a de Grazia essay predating her joint Shakespeare Quarterly venture with Stallybrass (“The Essential Shakespeare”), which, though intended as a critique of New Bibliography, ultimately depends (according to Holderness, Loughrey, and Murphy) on a “ ‘Materialism” [that] means much the same as it meant for Bowers . . . an essentially positivist [approach] vulnerable to continual unconscious collapses back into . . . idealism” (98). In the same way, “the imputed ‘materialism’ of [the Oxford edition’s] editorial policy is precisely the same as that of New Bibliography: a materialist methodology devoted towards an idealist end, that of stripping the Platonic ‘veil of print’ from a text to reveal the eternal form of the underlying manuscript” (99–100).1 This narrative reaches its climax in a sustained consideration of “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text.” By attributing to this essay an “importance” that “cannot be overestimated” (100), Holderness, Loughrey, and Murphy reiterate the very terms by which de Grazia and Stallybrass announce their own radical breakthrough (the “uncertainty” produced by the multiplying Lear texts “cannot be overestimated”)2; but then, as it turns out, no such matter, for as with the earlier episodes in this depressing history, revisionary claims are seen to be recuperated back into the object of critique: “That ‘specific history’ of an early

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modern text” in which de Grazia and Stallybrass claim to be interested “is subsumed into an extremely general history of early modern cultural process,” with the result that “the textual surface which first ‘obstinately block[ed]’ and limited the parameters of interpretation suddenly becomes an open window on to the industrial and commercial processes of the early modern printing trade,” pointing “outwards towards context and relationship, towards the ‘diversity of labors’ that constituted the productive process” (102). As a consequence, “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text” remains mired in the same anti-materialist desire for transcendence as was the New Bibliography from which Holderness, Loughrey and Murphy began: there appears to be an underlying complicity between New Bibliography and the poststructuralist wing of “New Textualism” . . . both regard any individual text . . . as a signpost pointing towards something greater and more complete than itself. . . . New Bibliographical materialists, interested in textual surface but committed to spiritual depth, and poststructuralist bibliographical materialism, unable to focus on textual surface as anything other than a transparent window on to the underlying depths of history, encounter one another as strange but compatible bedfellows. (107–8) But then what is to be done? From Holderness, Loughrey and Murphy’s perspective, still attempting to achieve the authentic materialism denied us even in “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” the “need for some recuperative action” (116) takes the form of a perspective which would necessarily facilitate a thorough decomposition of those strange compilations of separate texts, the modern editions, that pass under such generic titles as “King Lear” or “Hamlet” into the various discrete and to some degree incommensurable textualizations produced by historical contingency, and indiscriminately merged in most modern editorial practices. We need, in short, a general recovery of such textualizations, as they existed before their colonization by the modern edition; and once recovered we need . . . to look at rather than through them, if we are to distinguish and discriminate each text’s particular capability for the production of meaning. (117) These final sentences of “ ‘What’s the Matter?’ ” push nearly all the buttons currently available to us—perspectivism, deconstruction,

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textuality, historical contingency, pre- and postcoloniality; but the buttons are not connected to anything. The “decomposition” of current editorial constructs sounds like an interesting program, but what exactly does it entail? Earlier, Holderness, Loughrey, and Murphy had warmed to the prospect of “a theoretical move that could potentially return texts to history and free them from the ideological constructions of a canonical reproduction” (110–1); but since history is inevitably shaped by ideological constructions, the idea of a return to history that simultaneously escapes these constructions is a contradiction. It is impossible to imagine (or maybe possible only to imagine) just what kind of editorial practice this theoretical move would authorize. The odd word “textualizations” performs energetically, but only in the empty space of a bare and indeed invisible stage. The word presumably denotes some kind of product (if meant to describe a process, the singular “textualization” would make better sense), but since any book or text that might actually be produced will perforce have entered into the process of canonical reproduction, these neologistic “textualizations” seem designed to create a magically new (and, contradictorily, transcendent) category of existence. From the other side of this problem: whatever they are, these “textualizations,” how will we succeed in “looking at” rather than “through” them? This distinction reproduces an earlier claim that the proper purpose of “materialist bibliography” is to “read” the visual surface of an early text, “rather than read through it” (102); but like “textualizations,” the distinction serves to summon up a theoretical or nominal category that cannot correspond to any practice. The problem is that “reading” and “reading through” are the same thing. Texts are meaningful only as they “point outwards towards context and relationship”; a sign is legible only “as a signpost pointing towards something greater and more complete than itself.” Reading that does not contextualize is simply not reading in any recognizable sense of the term. For this reason, the latter distinction between “looking at” and “looking through” might seem to make more sense, but what would these purely decontextualized objects look like? Darkness visible? the gleams of a light that never shone on sea or land? Such textualizations would not mean but be. Holderness, Loughrey, and Murphy have succeeded in raising materialism to the level of transcendence itself. In their own “underlying complicity” with traditional aesthetics, the authors of “ ‘What’s the Matter?’ ” turn out not to be (like David Copperfield) the heroes of their own story, just the latest victims in an ongoing saga that might be called Materialism Lost. Inevitably so. By making a big deal of the fact that de Grazia and Stallybrass’s method

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shares with New Bibliography the assumption that “the meaning and value of a text always lie outside it” (107), Holderness, Loughrey, and Murphy ignore the more consequential fact that every interpretive method—literary study, the sociology of literature, or any other imaginable form of cultural studies—proceeds from the same assumption. To say that de Grazia and Stallybrass’s book history compromises its own materialism is simply to say that it is an interpretive method. Judged by the deserts of a fully achieved materialism, none of us shall escape whipping. II: Making Love to Our Employment Holderness, Loughrey, and Murphy conclude that we ought to be working harder to attain authentic materialism; but everything I have been arguing here suggests rather that we ought to cease pursuing this ignis fatuus in favor of a more practical goal. If we return to “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text” from this angle, de Grazia and Stallybrass’s advocacy of book history can make a different kind of sense. By abandoning literary study, they tell us in their final words, we might take our minds off the solitary genius immanent in the text and removed from the means of mechanical and theatrical reproduction. This genius is, after all, an impoverished, ghostly thing compared to the complex social practices that shaped, and still shape, the absorbent surface of the Shakespearean text. Perhaps it is these practices that should be the objects not only of our labors but also of our desires. (283) In its contempt for immanence and ghostly genius, this peroration affirms the values of materialist ontology and methodology, but its deeper motivations are signaled in the shift at the very end—from methodology to hope, from the objects we can legitimately expect to know to others that we should “desire” to attain. This transfer of interest from knowledge to desire is what I have been recommending since the beginning of this book, and it should help to give a clearer sense of the values motivating “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text” and, more generally, of the materialist critical practices currently dominating Shakespeare studies. “The Materiality” is centered on a distinction between the elite and the popular, the values conferred on the achievements of gifted

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individuals and those conferred on communal productions. De Grazia and Stallybrass take their stand unambiguously with the demotic and the collective. They deplore the “ ‘hypnotic fascination with the isolated author’ ” that has “led us to ignore the degree to which the production of a literary work ‘is a social and institutional event’ rather than an individual creation” (274, quoting Jerome McGann). Versions of this claim are brought forward throughout “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” frequently with the aid of current critical authorities—Michael Bristol, Scott McMillin, and Paul Werstine, for example, summoned (all on a single page) as witnesses to support the idea that an author-based literary study upholds a series of other hierarchies—genius/scribe, mind/hand, master slave. This politics [is] perceptible in the bias that “gives the privilege of genius to authors and holds those responsible for the material conditions of literature—actors, for example, but also scribes, stationers, and paper manufacturers . . . —as more or less contemptible.” (277, quoting McMillin) These hierarchical binaries originate, de Grazia and Stallybrass imply, in the development of Renaissance drama itself. Five years earlier, Stallybrass published a book with Allon White in which the historical implications are made explicit: “The symbolic domain of ‘authorship’ as it emerged in the late sixteenth century was produced over against the popular, as embodied in the festive scene of the fair and the carnival and as embodied in the popular drama” (p. 61). In his chapter on “Staging Exclusion,” Richard Helgerson relies on and considerably amplifies Stallybrass and White’s claim: an earlier “players’ theater,” characterized by “a union of high and low,” was, in Helgerson’s view, reshaped into a “newly emerging authors’ theater” that “asserted difference” (p. 244). In effecting this transformation, Shakespeare is said to play a central part: having “helped to establish the new genre of the national history play,” Shakespeare “then gave that genre a singularity of focus that contributed at once to . . . the cultural division of class from class, and to the emergence of the playwright—Shakespeare himself—as both gentleman and poet” (p. 245). Along with many others, Stallybrass and Helgerson have shaped “the currently dominant historical narrative of authors supplanting collaborators,” in which Shakespeare is represented “as a high-handed misappropriator of communal funds who strove to detach himself from his audience as well as his coworkers.” I am quoting from Jeffrey Knapp,

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who accumulates a mass of evidence to suggest that this standard view is fundamentally mistaken: coauthorship in fact increases after the 1590s (Knapp suggests that current critics have been misled by “their own utopian vision of collaborative labor”), and Shakespeare, far from identifying himself with an exclusive elite, played to a diverse room, “a multiform author, who makes himself ‘all things to all men’ ” in accordance with an already established tradition. “Before it became a staple of Romantic criticism,” Knapp comments, “the notion of a ‘myriadminded’ playwright was a Renaissance ideal.”3 In “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” the historical focus shifts from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century, in which a story about the origin and establishment of Renaissance drama is reinforced with a story about the origin and establishment of literary study. The values are the same: literary study is associated with elitism and privileged individuals, and the withdrawal of interest from literary study—taking “our minds off the solitary genius immanent in the text” and focusing rather on the “social practices that shaped and still shape the absorbent surface of the Shakespearean text”—is a way to affirm plebeian and communal values. Such stories have achieved a common currency among materialist critics. They are not restricted to Shakespeareans, and the history of the book is just one among a variety of critical modes—the historicism, politics, cultural studies, et al. catalogued earlier on—represented as preferable to literary study in supplying “the objects not only of our labors but also of our desires.” Catherine Belsey, for instance, in Desire, published a year after “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” narrates a sequence by which “popular fiction,” at first the “least privileged mode of writing” and “in a sense feminine,” is “commandeered” by Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne (“in a patriarchal culture men rapidly appropriate whatever women invent”), until “at the end of the eighteenth century Romanticism began to idealize fiction as ‘art’. ‘Literature’, as a repository of moral truth, rapidly came into being, along with Grand Opera and Family Values.” Belsey acknowledges “the suspicion which now quite rightly attaches to the literary canon, its narrowness, its exclusions,” but her argument does not conclude (as do some versions of this story) with a call for jettisoning the artifacts of this idealized tradition but rather for abandoning the interpretive protocols associated with the Romantic production of “Literature”: we should read . . . everything. [But what] matters, I increasingly believe, is that we read . . . otherwise: not, that is to say, looking for

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the organic unity of the work; not looking for the author behind the text; and not, above all, in order to evaluate, to assess merit on a scale from one to ten, to allocate a judgment that issues in little more than self-congratulation at our own discernment. (pp. 10–13) This account of the origin of literary study has become a “dominant historical narrative” equivalent to the one Knapp described for Renaissance drama, and it deserves a similarly skeptical scrutiny. That a systematic literary study “came into being” with the Romantics is beyond dispute, but not so the particular values attributed to the Romantics in this enterprise. I think that Belsey is fundamentally mistaken in her representation of Romantic interests, and that similar misrepresentations have become a widespread and decisive feature of current critical work; and although a detailed development of this claim will have to wait for the last two chapters, a synoptic preview is in order here. With “the organic unity of the work,” Belsey alludes to the idea of “organic form” and thus installs Coleridge in his familiar position as fons et origo of Shakespearean criticism. But is it right then to suggest, as Belsey does immediately thereafter, that Coleridge was “looking for the author behind the text”? He was certainly committed to an idealized concept of authorship, in which Shakespeare’s “intentions as a poet for all ages” trump any historically verifiable intentions of “Shakespeare himself ” (Raysor, Shakespearean Criticism, 1. p. 42). But this idealized author is not the object of Coleridge’s quest, not the phenomenon to be “looked for behind the text.” Authorship so conceived is rather a heuristic device, the kind of creative force that might be imagined to produce something with which a powerful interpretive interest might be engaged. In this sense, as serving to describe and confer value on the text itself, authorship may seem simply to transfer attention back onto formal coherence or “organic unity” as the achievement of (rather than window upon) authorial genius. But as I argued earlier in connection with Loesberg’s representation of Coleridge as a formalist, Coleridge was concerned primarily not with textual properties as such, but with “inward illusion” (that willing suspension of disbelief which constitutes poetic faith): “while he followed Schlegel in attributing ‘organic form’ to Shakespeare’s plays . . . he internalized the sense of unity as a mental experience in the viewer or the reader” (Foakes, “Hamlet” versus “Lear”, p. 136 and see pp. 125–37). It is on this “mental experience” which Coleridgean literary study is founded, the intense interest and strenuous imaginative activity with which readers engage with textual energy—in short, on the beholder’s share.

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We may explain the misrepresentation of Coleridge in materialist accounts of literary study by introducing a new character into the story: Edmond Malone. In part as a consequence of de Grazia’s hugely inf luential Shakespeare Verbatim, which appeared two years before “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” an increased attention has been paid to Malone as a figure who, by turning commentary away from “improvement” and installing “the reproduction of authenticity” as the aim, established the author, or the authority of an original discourse, as the objective control for commentary. Almost single handedly in de Grazia’s view, Malone’s work systematized the goals and recovery methods we have come to accept (and more recently to question) as the norms for bibliographical and historical scholarship: he professionalized the study of Shakespeare. But much more is involved in de Grazia’s analysis of Malone than this description might suggest. As Stallybrass puts it, Shakespeare Verbatim is the place where the “implications of Malone’s edition for later criticism are fully worked out” (“Love,” 79), and its way of working them out entails locating Shakespeare, prior to Malone’s entry on the scene, in an organic realm of anecdotal folklore and legend. “Rather than individuating Shakespeare by amassing particulars corroborated by facts residing in documents, the anecdotes,” de Grazia claims, “set him in relation to the community.” From this “traditional context,” “before it was idealized by Romanticism,” Malone then “abstracted” Shakespeare, “enclosing him” “in his own experience, consciousness, and creativity” and in the “facts and documents” of “an historically remote past.” With this “decisive shift from individuation predicated on corporate political solidarity to individuation predicated on personal artistic complexity and growth,” Malone produces Shakespeare as “an exemplary instance of the autonomous self.”4 De Grazia’s characterization of the values underwriting Malone’s editorial work has not received universal acceptance (Postlewait, “Criteria for Evidence,” p. 63). But whether her analysis is reliable or not, the larger problem is in the tendency of materialist criticism to make this construction of Malone into the template for the supposed idealization of authorship in the Romantic invention of literary study. “Malone has constructed the text that Coleridge reads,” as Peter Stallybrass puts it. “Coleridge’s responses are responses to Malone’s Shakespeare,” he adds (“Love,” 73–4); but the quite substantial evidence available to us suggests that Coleridge never laid a hand or an eye on the physical objects we identify as Malone’s editions and that, to the extent that these editions and the procedures associated with them attracted Coleridge’s

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attention at all, he accorded them little regard if not, indeed, derisive contempt.5 The attempt to collapse Coleridge into Malone ignores the fundamental differences in their overall goals. Coleridge’s work is centered not in the technical skills of retrieving historical and authorial determinants but in the imaginative realization of textual energy; it does not lead (necessarily) to professionalism but, as Howard Felperin argues, potentially away from it: “the ‘idealist’ or ‘essentialist’ appropriation of Shakespeare” in the nineteenth century is “more than singly motivated,” not just a “conservative recuperation” but the “liberation” of Shakespeare “from the proprietorship of an aristocratic and literary elite and the first realization of the democratic potential of his work” (“Bardolatry,” p. 129; and see Felperin’s Uses of the Canon, pp. 1–15). Hence for a late Coleridgean like Bradley, “the habit of reading with an eager mind” makes “many an unscholarly lover of Shakespeare a far better critic than many a Shakespearean scholar,” because “the prime requisite” for good criticism is to have “a vivid and intent imagination” (Shakespearean Tragedy, pp. xiii–xiv). From this angle, de Grazia and Stallybrass might look as though they have things backward. Once we understand its origins in the beholder’s share, literary study may be viewed as an inherently democratic discipline, and it is rather de Grazia and Stallybrass who serve the interests of the elite. Although they identify themselves as inclusive and egalitarian, conferring value on the honest labor of printshop workers, the consequence of pursuing their project is to restrict Shakespeare to a privileged group, exclusively academic and exclusionary even within the precincts of the academy, empowered by the specialized and technical knowledge required for the study of book history. But reversing the polarities of the materialist story in this way merely reproduces its oversimplifications. Bradley’s “vivid and intent imagination” is not an inherited but an acquired faculty, a “habit,” and the skills and knowledge required to sustain this habit are themselves highly technical and specialized. Hence the complaints about the late Coleridgean eff lorescence called the New Criticism, that its ironies and ambiguities and fallacies constitute the mystifying jargon of a clerisy. (The people making these complaints usually ignore the way in which New Critical practices served to “liberate” texts “from the proprietorship of an aristocratic and literary elite” of old historicists, but that’s the other side of the story.) Bradley himself recognized (or ref lected) the problem. “But this will hardly suffice,” he says, after conferring primary status upon the imagination, as though twigging to the fact that he has just

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sawed off the branch on which, as the Oxford Professor of Poetry, he is perched. “It is necessary also,” he immediately adds, “to compare, to analyse, to dissect,” as long as the dissection is not a murderous displacement of the imagination by “ ‘cold reason’ ” (p. xiv). We might now conclude that the decision whether or not to persevere in literary studies needs to account more fully for the overdetermined history through which the discipline has developed and for the contradictory ways by which its political consequences may be identified and assessed. This conclusion is one I heartily endorse, but the claim I wish to make here is based not on the complexity of the narratives with which we justify disciplinary practice, but on their irrelevance—or at least their irrelevance as justification. This is Stanley Fish’s point at the end of Professional Correctness: It is usually said that justification, in order to be valid, must not borrow its terms from the activity being justified. Only a justification that did not presuppose the value of the activity under scrutiny would be legitimate; otherwise one would be trading on a value while pretending to establish it. This picture of justification will work, however, only if there is a normative structure in relation to which any and all practices can be assessed; but if . . . there is no such structure and each practice is answerable to the norms implicit in its own history and conventions, then justification can only proceed within that history and in relation to those conventions. (p. 112) Fish’s argument is the same one I took earlier from Hayden White about evidence. Since there is no “value-neutral” realm, what Fish here calls a “normative structure” or what White elsewhere refers to as “apodictically certain theoretical grounds on which one can legitimately claim an authority . . . as being more ‘realistic’ ” (p. xii), the explanatory narratives by means of which we purport to establish the foundation for a critical practice are rather, like evidence, derived from or produced by the practice they purport to found. Distinguishing between “the Kantians and the dialecticians”—in other words, between the literary and materialist approaches I have been discussing here—Richard Rorty tells us that “the issue between” them “is, I think, about as serious as the issue between normal and deviant sexual practices.” It “is not unserious in the sense of unimportant,” he adds, but “it is not a serious issue in the sense of a debatable one, on which there is much to be said on both sides. It is not an issue which we all ought to pitch in and try to resolve” (“Philosophy,” pp. 106–7). Rorty gets at once to the heart of my claim and to the reason why the claim generates so

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much resistance. For if it’s all de gustibus, Shylock had it right: Some men there are love not a gaping pig; Some that are mad if they behold a cat; And others, when the bagpipe sings i’ th’ nose, Cannot contain their urine; for affection, [Mistress] of passion, sways it to the mood Of what it likes or loathes. (4.1.47–52) And if Shylock had it right, we might seem bound to inhabit a world of exploitative brutality. But there is no necessary link between Shylock’s antihumanism and his acquisitive selfishness. If there were, materialist critics would all be aggressively exploitative and humanists generously charitable creatures—assertions for which there is no good evidence. According to Louis Menand, describing the circumstances in which people choose between contradictory practices and their consequences, we can’t say where the instinct to prefer one outcome to another arises from; but we can say that, as associated beings, we feel a strong incentive to justify our choices in moral language. If there did not always exist a “higher” principle to trump the one we have just found it expedient to abandon, it is hard to know how societies would function. (“Jane Austen,” 15) Like Rorty, Menand recognizes that we cannot account for our instinctive preferences beyond what we find to be “expedient.” It is clearly expedient—necessary, in fact—to have rules by which to “justify our choices”; without rules to confer differential status on its members or value distinctions on the repertoire of practices available to them, societies would not function. But it is not so easy to explain why academic discourse seems to require that these rules transcend expedience. What underlies Belsey’s claim, for instance, that her preferred critical practice is based on something “more than self-congratulation at our own discernment”? Such assertions fail to deliver on their promise to situate us in a “higher” or “more realistic” perspective, closer to apodictic certainty. Reading against the grain (Belsey’s “reading otherwise”) can be justified as superior to “the Romantic idealization of fiction as art”; but since the justification is bound to derive from the practice it purports to justify (as in the tendentious version of literary history by which Belsey tries to claim a status for “reading otherwise” that is not merely tendentious), it will be no less self-congratulatory than the practice it seeks to displace. As Fish puts it, “when the request

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for justification comes, you respond from the middle, respond with the phrases and platitudes of disciplinary self-congratulation” (Professional Correctness, p. 113). Self-congratulation is where we all stand, the untranscendable ground from which self-justification cannot be elevated. “To love oneself,” as Oscar Wilde says, “is the beginning of a life-long romance” (p. 298). But if the appeal to a higher authority does not amount to anything on its own terms, it does not have to, because these are not the terms that matter. This, I take it, is Menand’s point in locating the basis for such an appeal in our identities as “associated beings.” As “real Shakespeareans”— dues-paying members of groups like the International Shakespeare Association or the Shakespeare Association of America; beings, that is, associated in International or American Shakespeare—we have an interest in justifying our critical preferences because of the discursive conventions that govern our behavior. Such justifications may not transcend self-interest, even though transcendence is just what they claim, but they have something better—namely, cash value. They are what we have been trained to do, are supposed to be doing and rewarded for having done; they are such stuff as careers are made on. The felt need to play by the rules of the ISA and the SAA should not be taken lightly. Membership in these organizations does not define the whole of our identity, but it is the sign of a larger affiliation, citizenship in the liberal democracies that have, over the centuries, nourished the growth of these associations within the academic community and the society of which it is part. Given the historical depth and entrenched complexity of the institutions that underwrite and sustain our felt need for justification, there is no reason to believe that it will disappear overnight. We will continue to feel obliged to proliferate arguments proving that materialism is methodologically and politically superior to literary study, like the ones in “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” and other arguments, like the one I sketched out earlier and subsequently abandoned, to demonstrate that traditional literary study is methodologically and politically superior to materialism. But in Rorty’s sense of the term, we do not need to take such arguments seriously. They have no practical consequences, because they are themselves the consequences of our practice. They do not shape belief, belief shapes them. They do not determine but are rather determined by our desires. All of which puts us in the same boat with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, as Hamlet describes them to Horatio, explaining why he has sent them to it with neither compunction nor shriving time allowed: “Why, man, they did make love to this employment” (5.2.27).

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III: Negative Desire When a version of the preceding discussion was accepted for publication, the journal’s editor invited de Grazia and Stallybrass to respond. The exchange that followed is on the record, and I just want to glance at two pieces of it here, both of them centrally concerned with the question of desire. De Grazia and Stallybrass took exception to my argument for the priority of desire to knowledge. As de Grazia puts it, referring to the idea that we make love to our employment: “materially minded critics” like her and Stallybrass “see the lover-critic, but where is the beloved text?” The “problem with literary study,” she adds, is that “it assumes the identity of the literary object” (“Love,” 70). Stallybrass reiterates the objection. “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text” represents “an attempt to understand just what it is that we are loving.” “Kissing in the dark,” he cautions, “is all very well, but sometimes you really do want to know whether you’re kissing your pillow or your lover” (“Love,” 72). In this dispute, which goes back beyond Bradley vs. Milton to the Franciscans vs. the Dominicans, no one is trying to describe interpretive activity in phenomenological terms; the question is not what we are really doing but how we conceptualize what we are doing. (“This is a logical sequence,” as Frye puts it, just after his description of literary interpretation quoted earlier on. “I have no idea what the psychological sequence is, or whether there is a sequence.”) But if we agree on the question, we disagree on the answers. De Grazia and Stallybrass deny the foundational assumption of my argument, reversing the priority I had given to desire over knowledge. It’s knowledge first, they say, not desire. My response to their denial was to reaffirm my major premise: “it is desire rather than knowledge of objects as in themselves they really are—not what we ‘really want to know’ but what we ‘really want to know’—that is the crucial factor in motivating and sustaining a practice” (“All,” 333). If the exchange had gone on, de Grazia and Stallybrass would no doubt wish to deny my denial of their denial, and like the ritualized exchanges between performers and spectators at productions of pantomime—“Oh yes it is!” “Oh no it isn’t!”—the process would continue until one side or the other ran out of steam. A lot of critical debate proceeds this way. This might seem scandalous, but panto has been around for a long time, during which it has satisfied the desires of countless performers and spectators, so we might hesitate before dismissing it out of hand. The point, in any case, remains that debate at the level of first

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principles does not seem to get us anywhere (as Rorty says, it is not the kind of issue “we all ought to pitch in and try to resolve”), so we might as well move on. (In declining to continue the debate, I am reaffirming my conviction that rational argument is not the decisive factor, which is, of course, a way of continuing the debate; but as Mrs. Simon Eyre says in The Shoemakers’ Holiday, “let that pass.”) De Grazia and Stallybrass not only dispute my argument for the general priority of desire but disclaim the particular desire I attributed to them. Any suggestion that they are “urging the renunciation of literary study,” according to de Grazia, “is wrong” (“Love,” 71). “Let us reiterate,” Stallybrass maintains: “we are not concerned to ‘renounce the study of literature’ ” (“Love,” 78). These disclaimers, though, sort oddly with what they explicitly say: that locating “the value of Shakespeare” in “the inner regions of the text” is the most important “single obstacle” to “rethink[ing] Shakespeare” as “collaborative writing” (279–80); and that, in the rhetorically privileged final words of the piece, we should “take our minds off the solitary genius immanent in the text” and focus rather on its “absorbent surface” as “the object” of “our desire” (283). In the face of exhortations like these, de Grazia and Stallybrass’s assurances that they have no designs against literary studies are not immediately reassuring, but they should not be dismissed out of hand. Their point, I take it, is not to oppose literary study as such, but rather the privilege accorded by literary study to “solitary genius” over “complex social practices” (283). If “This politics” (277) is what we are asked to renounce, however, it is a commodity whose materiality is hard to grasp. As Levin sees it, in fact, there is no politics in “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” and its absence is central to the distinction on which “The Old and the New Materialising of Shakespeare” is predicated: where the old materialism “often serves as a synonym for Marxism,” from which it derives overtly “progressive or revolutionary” goals, the “new materialists have no discernible political purpose” to direct their work (pp. 87, 101). As an alternative to Levin’s view, it might be argued that politics in “The Materiality” functions “at the level of the episteme.” This is John Guillory’s phrase, describing the widespread conviction in materialist work “that epistemological positions have a necessary relation to political positions” (“Sokal,” 475), specifically “that an antirealist epistemology (alternatively expressed as antifoundationalism or relativism) is a requisite for any progressive politics and, conversely, that realism, foundationalism, or universalism underlie—at the level of the episteme, as it were—all that is regressive in our society” (476). Guillory attributes this

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belief to disaffected humanists, who compensate for their diminished power within the university by making wildly exaggerated claims for their impact on the outside world. Construing this as “a losing strategy in the conf lict of the faculties,” serving only “to marginalize literary and cultural studies even more extremely,” Guillory concludes that we ought to “dissolve once and for all the supposedly necessary link between epistemology and politics” (501, 506, 501). If this conclusion is persuasive (and it is shared by some of the strongest critics on the current scene, including Richard Rorty, Jonathan Dollimore, and Stanley Fish6), then de Grazia and Stallybrass have no basis for identifying the methods of literary study with an elitist individualism, or for identifying the methods of material bibliography with a demotic collective, still less for claiming that the transfer of interest from one set of methods to the other will have predictably desirable or undesirable effects—or any effects at all—for the disposition of power in the world. Such claims, like those for deconstruction as dismantling phallogocentrism or dethroning Enlightenment individualism, are grand but empty gestures. Politics “at the level of the episteme” is not an alternative to the absence of “discernible political purpose,” it’s the same thing. If abandoning literary study has no consequence beyond the realization of its own negative agenda, this does not mean it’s necessarily the wrong thing to do. According to William B. Warner and Clifford Siskin, the cessation of a practice—“Stopping Cultural Studies” is their example—can be “a crucial intervention on its own.” In answer to the question “what should we start doing?” they propose two answers. The first is just to stop. Why put the burden of prophecy on everyone who advocates change? Many important changes might never have happened—and many more opportunities have certainly been lost in just this fashion—if arguments for stopping had to be matched by arguments for what to do next. Knowing what needs to be stopped and when can be a hard enough task. (p. 104) This argument would be even stronger if Warner and Siskin could identify at least one of the many important changes that came about as the unanticipated consequence of stopping an established practice. The example they provide, Wordsworth’s “timely injunction to stop poetic diction,” in fact works against their argument because, as they acknowledge, Wordsworth was not content just to stop poetic diction.

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“Feeling the burden of prophecy, he did try to follow up with ‘a more exact notion of the style in which it was my wish and intention to write’ ” (pp. 104–5). Warner and Siskin salvage their argument by claiming that, beyond stopping poetic diction, Wordsworth didn’t really know what he wanted to do. His positive agenda “was anything but ‘exact’ in detail or even in its connection to ‘style’: ‘I have at all times endeavored,’ he wrote mysteriously, ‘to look steadily at my subject’ ” (p. 105). Whether Wordsworth is really so uncertain about his future program or not, the general point, the idea of a mismatch between strong arguments for stopping and weak ones for what to do next, remains interesting nonetheless. It coincides with Raymond Williams’s analysis of a “Structure of Feeling,” in which an emergent ideology has not yet achieved the kind of clarity that allows for conceptual or descriptive precision. “It is a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate and defined exchange” (p. 131). John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, as Frank Whigham describes it, “the shaping of the social self in the abrasive zone between emergent and residual social formations” (181), looks to be a good example of what Williams had in mind. In representing the residues of patriarchal and aristocratic power, the play is relentlessly lucid, “strip[ping] to the skin the soothing discourse of reciprocity” that disguises “Ferdinand’s savage gestures” (182); but no emergent alternative is visible except as inchoate implication. Marital domesticity, we might call it now, a private space where gendered hierarchy has become so confused as to be virtually inoperative; but such explicit terms would be available only to audiences looking back on the play from a position far in the future. Whigham describes The Duchess “as a disruptive symbolic act, the reverse of Burkean Prayer—as an Imprecation” (182); but while the intensity of Webster’s enraged critique is extraordinary, its negative energy is nonetheless directed toward the objects of positive desire. Stopping the Elizabethan World Picture (if that’s a way of describing Webster’s play) is, no less than stopping poetic diction or cultural studies, a way of starting something else. There are other instances, however, where constructive possibilities are neither available nor even imaginable. In Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire describes “this life” as “a hospital where each patient is possessed with the desire to change beds”—to get closer to the stove, or the window, or to escape the room altogether, for Lisbon or Rotterdam or even “further yet, to the extreme edge of the Baltic; still further from life, if possible; let’s install ourselves

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at the pole,” until, “finally, my soul explodes and wisely cries to me: ‘No matter where! no matter where! as long as it’s out of this world!’ ” (pp. 217–18, my translation). Desire here is uncontaminated by any hope beyond escaping from its own self-deluding restlessness—from life itself. This is the “spirit of denial” embodied in Goethe’s Mephistopheles: What use these cycles of creation! Or snatching off the creatures to negation! ‘It is gone by!’—and we can draw the inference: If it had not been, it would make no difference: The wheel revolves the same, no more, no less, I should prefer eternal emptiness. (p. 288) The same pure negativity animates (or de-animates) Marlowe’s Mephistopheles, reducing even the triumphant prospect of snatching souls off to perdition to a savorless banality. In this feeling of weary futility, moreover, there does not seem to be much difference between Marlowe’s Mephistopheles and his blood brother Doctor Faustus (Goethe’s Faust is another matter). All Marlowe’s heroes and villains, as Stephen Greenblatt describes them, seem finally unable to “desire anything for itself ”; despite their “noisy demonstrations of single-minded appetite,” they are beset with “the suspicion that all objects of desire are fictions, theatrical illusions shaped by human subjects” (Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 218). We come back, then, to the suggestion I made at the beginning—a similarity between Faustus’s restless volatility and the f luctuating excitement and disappointment cycling through current work. I want to insist again on the looseness of the analogy. Materialism is not inherently or necessarily motivated by the spirit of denial. Materialists propose a “radical change” in which “Shakespeare studies will never be the same,” but their exhilaration at the prospect of stopping a practice to which they are averse is, at least potentially, based on the desire to start something else, however vaguely or overambitiously described. In its most recent incarnation, moreover, the history of the book (as we now designate the project announced by de Grazia and Stallybrass’s prescient essay), textual materialism stands behind some of the most compelling critical performances on the current scene.7 These projects have been unable to capture the long-term interest of any but a small minority of Shakespeareans (and for the reasons I suggested earlier, the general approach of materialist book history is bound to remain sequestered

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within a specialized subculture of the disciplinary whole); but the prospect of a continually refreshed search engine, like the Rortian idea of keeping the conversation going, is by no means dispiriting. The risk, though, is that stopping may become, instead of the prologue to an omen coming on, the be-all-and-end-all expression of a purely negative desire. There is a precedent for such a development in the history of biblical interpretation out of which Shakespeare studies (and all literary study) may be said to emerge. In his magisterial Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, Hans Frei describes the Enlightenment origins of modern biblical interpretation in the confrontation between the tradition of “figural reading,” whose “chief use” was “for unifying the canon” across “differing cultural levels and conditions,” and a newly materialist historicism focused on the “specific historical circumstances” determining original inscription (p. 7). “On the one hand, there has been the question of the origin and, in some respects, the reliability of biblical writings. On the other there has been inquiry into the proper ways of learning what abiding meanings or values these writings might have” (p. 17). In The Great Code, Northrop Frye represents the field as fractured in the same way. There have always been two directions in Biblical scholarship, the critical and the traditional . . . The critical approach establishes the text and studies the historical and cultural background; the traditional interprets it in according with what a consensus of theological and ecclesiastical authorities have declared the meaning to be. (p. 11) But where the normative response to this situation in Frei is an evenhanded mediation, “plotting a chart for the narrows between these two shoals” (p. 17), from Frye’s perspective, the “analytical and historical approach” has “dominated Biblical criticism for over a century” (p. 11)—and with unambiguously impoverishing results. By restricting interpretive activity to speculation about “some hypothetical embryonic stage of textual development,” and by treating the Bible’s “mythological and metaphorical aspects” as “elements that could be, and therefore should be removed,” the historical approach has preempted efforts to understand “why the books of the Bible exist as they now do in their present form,” and how scripture has managed to engage the passionate interest of so many readers over the centuries (“History,” pp. 17–18). “Textual scholarship,” Frye argues, “has never really developed the ‘higher’ criticism that made such a noise in the nineteenth century.

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Instead of emerging from lower criticism, or textual study, most of it dug itself into a still lower, or sub-basement, criticism in which disintegrating the text became an end in itself ” (p. 11). For my purposes, the most interesting aspect of Frye’s analysis is his suggestion for a way out of the problem. Building on his conviction that “literary criticism is the ‘higher’ criticism, the criticism that is supposed to start after a certain amount of work has been done on establishing the text,” Frye claims that the way to propel the enterprise of biblical criticism forward is to correct “the deficiencies of Biblical scholars as literary critics”—that is, “accept the whole Bible as an imaginative unity of myth and metaphor, and see what comes out of that hypothesis” (“History,” p. 17, 18). The prospect Frye holds out for us, that literary criticism might liberate biblical criticism from its doldrums, looks like a version of Matthew Arnold’s prediction that poetry would replace religion. “The future of poetry is immense,” Arnold declared in the first words of “The Study of Poetry”; in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialised itself in the fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious poetry. (p. 161) Arnold’s expectation that poetry would fill the vacuum left by an exhausted religion was pretty clearly unjustified. The redemptive possibilities Frye imagined for literary criticism in 1983 are not, to judge from the kind of materialist critique discussed in this chapter, likely to fare any better. Bill Brown reinforces the unlikelihood. Invited by the editors of the PMLA to introduce a “cluster” of essays in a 2010 issue of the journal devoted to “Textual Materialism,” Brown represents a materialist “book history” as focused on the same “specific historical circumstances” and “embryonic stages of textual development” described by Frei and Frye: it “draws attention to those determinants (from questions of layout to questions of law) that worked to stabilize the semantic experience for a specific readership in a specific time and place.”

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Brown, to be sure, acknowledges that “the literary work” can “be said to ‘transcend’ the object (Genette)”—that, for example, although the “experience of Great Expectations is a different experience” in its different material forms, “we’re still generally willing to say that each experience is the experience of Great Expectations. Across those very different mediations, the novel in some sense remains the same.” The consequence of this situation, Brown concludes, “is simply to suppose that the experience of texts . . . amounts to a dialectical drama of opacity and transparency, physical support and cognitive transport, representation as object and as act” (24–6). But unlike most dialectical dramas, such as the mediating course Frei describes in response to a bifurcated interpretive tradition, Brown’s representation is notably lopsided. Opacity and physical support clearly dominate transparency and cognitive transport, just as the “lower” criticism does in Frye. Textual Materialism is interested chief ly in the “specific readership” and “specific time and place,” for and out of which this or that book has been produced—the peculiar contingencies from we are bound to feel estranged. Textual Materialism is interested less in those elements of continuity that have allowed “the literary work” to engage audiences over time and to continue to engage us here and now. The inverted commas in “ ‘transcend’ the object” work to contain literary power within the space of what “might be said” with conviction only by other people (l’enfer, c’est le discours des autres). The idea of transcendence has long been in general circulation, regrettably or not, so attributing it to Gérard Genette seems gratuitous; but the citation has a pointed effect: identified with the formalist excesses of an outworn buried narratology, the literary is further stripped of any residual legitimacy and cachet (who wants yesterday’s papers?). By now a considerable irony should be evident. Instead of elevating biblical criticism into a purposeful activity, literary criticism during the last thirty years or so has descended into the “futile procedure” Frye supposed it might redeem (“History,” p. 18). As “disintegrating the text became an end in itself,” moreover, the hypothetical risk identified earlier seems to be realized: materialism as pure negativity, propelled by nothing beyond the desire to reiterate its own disaffection from literary power, n’importe où hors du littéraire. This extraordinary motivation, so I want to argue in the following two chapters, has managed to install itself in some of the most inf luential centers of Shakespearean critical practice at the present time.

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PA RT

T WO

What’s Wrong with Literature?

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Introduction: What’s Wrong with Literature?

“What’s going on? How’d it get so wrong?” Blue Rodeo. “What Is This Love That I Leave Behind?” In its October 22, 2007 issue, The New Yorker ran a piece by Adam Gopnik, commenting on a series of “compact editions” of celebrated nineteenth-century novels (Anna Karenina, Moby-Dick, Vanity Fair, et al.), produced by the British publisher Orion. Orion’s publicity touts the “passionate romance, thrilling adventure, arresting characters and unforgettable scenes and situations” available in “the great classics,” but acknowledges that “finding time to read them can be a problem” (66). Gopnik does not treat the project with scorn. Moby-Dick, he tells us, is “not defaced”; it is, by conventional contemporary standards of good editing and critical judgment, improved. The compact edition adheres to . . . the contemporary aesthetic of the realist psychological novel[:] cut out the self-indulgent stuff and present a clean story, inhabited by plausible characters—the “taut, spare, driving” narrative beloved of Sunday reviewers. (66, 68) All in all, “The Orionites should be proud of their work; their abridgments are skillfully done” (66). But Gopnik has his qualms, and they derive precisely from the categorical distinctions between “contemporary standards of good editing and critical judgment” and the values associated with what he unabashedly refers to as “masterpieces,” “classics,” and “art.” These latter depend for their power on the eccentric digressions and idiosyncratic excesses that invite us into a ref lective response—precisely what the Orion abridgments eliminate. “Thackeray without his little jokes and warm asides becomes another, duller writer—too constantly on message.”

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Gopnik invites us to laugh, or grimace, at the imagined response of an Orion-type editor to a draft of Moby-Dick: “myself I find the whaling stuff fascinating, but I fear your reader wants to move along with the story—and frankly the tensile strength of the narrative is being undercut by a lot of stray material that takes us way off line” (68). Whatever the value of a stripped-down, bare-bones, and fast-moving narrative, this is not, as Gopnik sees it, a defining feature of art. For my purposes, the most interesting moment in Gopnik’s discussion comes in the form of a parenthetic reference to the Hamlet text controversy: “(There are those who think that the late long First Folio Hamlet is a messy author’s expansion of the short, stern, early quarto, but they are a minority)” (70). Only Shakespeareans will know in any detail what Gopnik is talking about here. A few of his readers may have vague memories of a piece Ron Rosenbaum wrote for The New Yorker five years earlier, “Shakespeare in Rewrite: The Battle Over How to Read Hamlet,” which is likely the source of Gopnik’s own knowledge (he is a staff writer for the magazine); but the reference is bound to go over the heads of almost all Gopnik’s readers. Presumably, this is why he puts the point between parentheses as a tossed-off aside. He is trying to reassure his readers that their ignorance is not really disabling. All they need to know is the point of the reference—that artistic masterpieces demand a more patient and thoughtful response than do the entertainments of contemporary popular culture. And this is the kind of response, Gopnik’s parenthesis implies, that professional Shakespeareans are prepared to offer to the object of their disciplinary interest. Gopnik concedes that some Shakespeareans take the “short, stern, early quarto” as a first draft rather than as an abridgement of Q2 and F1, but only “a minority”; most, in his representation, are aligned with the values of depth and expansive richness he identifies with artistic masterpieces. Gopnik evidently means his aside as a compliment to Shakespeareans; and at a time when the traditions of anti-intellectualism and prof-bashing seem to have reached new heights, who would not feel grateful for the gesture? But this would be the wrong response, because Gopnik himself is wrong—not, I think, in the values he invests in aesthetic interest, but in his assumption that Shakespeareans largely share the investment. More Shakespeareans than Gopnik thinks have come out on record in support of Q1 Hamlet, and still others in support of other “short, stern, early” quartos. Moreover, it’s not just the numbers: the Shakespeareans writing in support of the early quartos are in many cases the industry leaders, positioned institutionally to define best critical practices, and the values sustaining these

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practices have had a significant impact on Shakespearean commentary far beyond the textual issues narrowly defined. My title, “What’s Wrong with Literature?”, along with the musical questions Blue Rodeo asks in the head note to this Introduction, are meant to highlight a strong general tendency—perhaps a dominating factor—in current Shakespearean commentary not just to abandon but explicitly to repudiate aesthetic interest as a fundamental motivation for the way we go about our business. The abandonment is problematic, but the explicit repudiation, so I will be arguing in the following two chapters, has had and continues to have unambiguously damaging consequences for our work.

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CH A P T E R

T H R E E

New Theatricalism and the Repudiation of Literary Interest

I: What’s Going On? A few years ago, a friend of mine—call him Tom—asked me to read his M.A. thesis, a hypertext version of The Taming of A Shrew. A Shrew is not The Shrew, the play printed in Shakespeare editions. Its plot and themes are similar, and its language is too close to Shakespeare for coincidence; but there are differences as well—in the characters’ names, setting (Greece, not Italy), length (about 40% shorter), order and emphasis of scenes, and in the framing action (Christopher Sly’s story disappears halfway through Shakespeare but is resolved at the end of A Shrew). Nearly all discussion of A Shrew seeks to determine its relation to The Shrew—source? first draft? “bad quarto” (that is, reported or pirated text)? spin-off? touring version? In his thesis, though, Tom refused to consider A Shrew in terms of Shakespeare’s play. He was determined, rather (he declared at the beginning), to look at A Shrew “in its own right.” Tom’s agenda had been anticipated almost verbatim in Kathleen O. Irace’s book on Reforming the “Bad” Quartos (1994). According to Irace, the “intrinsic interest and value” not just of A Shrew but of all the “bad quartos” make them legitimate candidates for “evaluating as theatrical scripts in their own right” (pp. 11, 12). Irace’s own agenda had been anticipated by Steven Urkowitz in 1988, who argued that the “bad” quartos “should be studied for what they are, in and of themselves, rather than solely as pernicious desecrations of Shakespeare’s iconic originals” (p. 204). Stephen Miller, writing four years after Irace,

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argues to the same effect: “the ‘bad quarto theory,’ ” he claims, has diverted “attention away from much of what is most interesting about A Shrew and ultimately from the play itself ” (p. 262). And according to John Jowett, summing up attitudes toward the “bad” quartos as they “were emerging in the 1990s,” each “text was opened up for study and potential or actual performance without prejudice as a version in its own right” (“Editing Shakespeare,” p. 9). I take “the play itself ” in Miller and “in and of themselves” in Urkowitz to be versions of Tom’s and Irace’s (and subsequently Jowett’s) signature phrase, “in its [or their] own right”; and by now it may be clear why such formulas (and we will meet more of them in the following pages) engage my interest. If in language there is difference without positive terms, then texts do not exist “in their own right,” sustained by “intrinsic interest and value,” but are rather perched on top of subtexts, posterior to pretexts, in the midst of contexts. In Sir Thomas Browne’s quaintly Anglican inf lection of the antifoundationalist creed, “God . . . onely is, all others have an existence with dependency and are something but by a distinction” (p. 34). What then does looking at The Taming of A Shrew “in its own right” add up to? For Tom it meant interesting characters, resonantly suggestive language organizable into image patterns that reinforced the play’s themes, lively dramatic structure, and a critical intelligence that served to “interrogate the patriarchy.” In other words, A Shrew engaged Tom’s interest with the same qualities Shakespeareans have found in The Shrew. Miller and Irace, too, negotiate their discussions of A Shrew with the familiar topoi of Shakespearean commentary. Where Tom sees gender relations, Miller keys on class—the interactions among characters “from different social ranks,” as juxtaposed by “parallels” between and within its plots: theme again, and plot structure (p. 256). “Plot Structure” is the first of the three categories by which Irace identifies the bad quartos’ “intrinsic interest.” The other two, “Characterization” and “Staging,” harmonize similarly within the dominant Shakespearean register. (“Staging” may seem like a special case, focusing on performance features, but the discussions there—e g., are the French prisoners killed on stage in Q Henry V?—are also recognizably standard counters in the nonperformance-centered commentary on the play.) In all these respects, Tom, Irace, and Miller had been anticipated by Urkowitz’s catalog of the values exhibited by the “bad” quartos: “patterns of imagery, poetic devices (particularly repetitions), meaningful uses of stage action, dramatic characterization, development of themes, and the rest—the entire repertory of theatrical art” (p. 204). The “bad”

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quartos, it seems, turn out to exhibit just what the Folio and the “good” Shakespearean quarto texts exhibit in such exemplary abundance. How can we explain the fact that Tom, Irace, Miller, and Urkowitz, having banished Shakespeare from their discussion, then proceed to let him sneak in through the back door in the form of the literary interests and aesthetic values for which Shakespeare is the avatar? One way to make sense of this apparently self-contradictory situation is to look ahead to the Romantic claims about Shakespeare we’ll be considering in detail in Part Three of this book. Although no one these days would indulge in such grandly sweeping pronouncements as Coleridge’s, that “very nature” is ‘shakespearianized” (Engell, p. 27), or Emerson’s, that “literature, philosophy, and thought, are Shakspearized” (p. 335), these assertions still have explanatory power. Even now, when it comes to literary interest, Shakespeare wrote the book; the 1623 Folio, if it did not corner the market, at least constitutes the default value. Given their residual investment in aesthetic interest, Tom, Irace, and Miller may have had no choice but to hang their discussions on the hook of Shakespeare. Of Shakespeare we may say what Danny DeVito says about money in David Mamet’s Heist: everybody likes Shakespeare; that’s why they call it Shakespeare. Not everybody; these days—so I argue here—liking Shakespeare seems to belong to an increasingly inconsequential constituency among academic Shakespeareans. Consider Scott McMillin’s 2001 edition of Othello for the Cambridge Early Quartos series. McMillin starts with the claim that Q1 Othello proceeds “from the acted version of the play, not by way of a ‘bad’ quarto but by way of a prompt book legitimately prepared once the actors have memorized their roles” (pp. 7–8). On this basis, McMillin takes “this earliest published version of Othello as a book in its own right.” That phrase again, and an alternate version of it appears in the summary statement at the end of McMillin’s Introduction: The question this volume asks readers to consider is not the question usually asked in studies of the Othello texts (how is F related to Q1?), but what might be considered the prior question once it is asked: what is the Q1 text itself, and how is it related to the persons who may have produced it? (p. 46) Like those other phrases in Tom, Irace, Miller, Urkowitz, and Jowett, McMillin’s “Q1 text itself ” does not make sense, or at least not the sense it purports to make. McMillin no sooner invokes the intrinsic

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identity and value of “the Q1 text itself ” but that he defines it extrinsically, in terms of “how it is related to the persons who may have produced it.” He is not really interested in an essentially decontextualized phenomenon (this would entail worshipping Sir Thomas Browne’s deity), but rather in a newly or differently contextualized phenomenon. Disconnecting the first Quarto of Othello from the Folio version allows McMillin to reconnect it to something else, a preferred alternative misleadingly referred to as “the Q1 text itself.” Early on in his Introduction, McMillin goes some way toward explaining the basis for his transfer of interest. Acknowledging that the “160 lines included in F but not in Q1 are rich in metaphor and verbal energy,” and that “no one doubts that they are Shakespearian,” he then reviews the various textual hypotheses “proceeding from this observation.” Q1 might be “a theatrical version abridged for stage,” or it might be “a first draft which Shakespeare then enlarged.” The latter has been the hypothesis of choice because, as “a ref lection of the author’s original manuscript of the play, his ‘foul papers,’ ” it provides “exactly what one would like to have for a back-up text.” McMillin himself, however, wants to go in a different direction from most editors: “the evidence they dealt with in advancing the foul-paper hypothesis is often the same evidence which leads to a different conclusion, that Q1 Othello comes from a theatre-script on which Shakespeare may have never left a mark in his own hand.” (pp. 2–3). In rejecting the “usual question” about Q1’s relation to F, McMillin is clearly disclaiming an interest in authorial intention. His reasons for this disclaimer are not specified, but his opposition to “the bias that ‘gives the privilege of genius to authors’ ” at the expense of “ ‘actors, . . . scribes, stationers, and paper manufacturers’ ” is on record, cited by de Grazia and Stallybrass as we have seen, and he is presumably taking for granted the materially minded analysis discussed in chapter 2. In any case, the question remains what values he associates with his preferred alternative. Once Q1 is emptied of its at least directly authorial marks, whom should we identify as those other “persons who may have produced” it? The print house workers are likely candidates, and in fact McMillin devotes a lot of his Introduction to speculations about the textual traces of scribal and compositorial actions; but his most intense and sustained scrutiny is reserved for the actors, who emerge as the determining agents in the making of the text as McMillin claims it has come down to us. By this point, a fairly clear picture is emerging. At the center of McMillin’s argument is the claim that we should regard Q1 Othello “in

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a fresh light” in order to see it not “as the first thoughts of a playwright who would deliver his second thoughts in time for F, but as a performable and lively playhouse script which can be staged as it stands, and probably was” (p. 14). Performable liveliness, a playhouse production “as it stands” (in its own right), rather than an authorial production: Q1 Othello embodies theatrical rather than literary value. At first glance, McMillin seems to be going round the same circles described earlier— banishing Shakespeare but then recuperating what Shakespeare represents in the form of theatrical power. Not that theatrical power is identical to literary power; reading texts and watching plays are distinct activities. Both of them, however, can be and frequently have been accommodated within the same capacious framework of aesthetic interest. In fact, McMillin’s performable liveliness sounds a lot like enargia, the Longinian sublime—the effect where not only the literary and the theatrical but the aesthetic and the rhetorical traditions seem to coincide. But McMillin does not confuse his argument with inconsistent residues of aesthetic interest. His passing reference to the 160 Shakespearean lines absent from Q1 Othello, “rich in metaphor and verbal energy,” reads like a sop to convention. Notably excluded from this laconic description is the powerful impact of these 160 lines for, precisely, performable liveliness. The omitted passages include Desdemona’s prayer on bended knee, to Iago of all persons, to tell her “what I must do to win my lord again” (4.2.149), a speech during which, as John Jones sees it, “the play’s fierce and . . . unrelenting concentration on Othello” is “brief ly but very powerfully removed” (p. 262). They also include Desdemona’s heartbreaking rendition of the willow song, as she prepares the bed where we know she will be murdered, and Emilia’s thrilling speech about the double standard, which moves us, to quote Jones again, “into a large central area of human ordinariness . . . unknown to Othello” (p. 260)—a turning point in the process through which Emilia emerges as the magnet of audience feeling. These passages are crucial in establishing the women’s parts in Othello, and in Othello women’s parts (I mean the pun) are at the center of the action. When Lodovico at the end instructs us to “look on the tragic loading of this bed” (5.2.363), we see not just Othello (though nineteenth-century productions often doctored the text to isolate him in this final tableau), but Desdemona and Emilia’s bodies as well. These speeches are indeed “rich in metaphor and verbal energy,” but if we dismiss them as just pretty language, without consequences for the play’s theatrical impact, what meaning can be left for the concept of

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performable liveliness? McMillin addresses this issue indirectly, arguing that in regard to the 160 lines present in F but not in Q1, it seems that the shorter text was cut down from the longer. The distribution of these lines has not been noticed before. . . . Act 4 has the largest number of omitted lines, nearly 50 per cent of the total. . . . Forty-five of the omitted lines are from Desdemona’s part, 36 from Emilia’s—again, about 50 per cent of the total. Coghill noticed Emilia’s larger role in F and thought Shakespeare was building up her character, but the implication of his view would have to be that Shakespeare added lines to the later scenes of a play that already ran upwards of 3,000 lines. It seems more likely that the play was cut towards the end because it was running too long. Perhaps the performance sagged because the boy-actors were not at their best here, or perhaps the performance sagged in the later scenes when the boys were at their best. Othello is a long play. (p. 9, McMillin’s emphases) This discussion is remarkable for its lack of interest in Othello’s specificity—the play’s substantial investment in issues of gender, sex, and marriage. That “50 per cent of the total” cuts are from the women’s roles gets absorbed into the fact that that “50 per cent of the total” cuts are from Act 4; all that matters is location (“distribution”). Hence the asymmetry of the argument against Neville Coghill. Where Coghill claimed that Shakespeare “was building up [Emilia’s] character,” McMillin claims that the cuts reduce the length of the play. Character is as inconsequential as theme; what really counts is the duration of the action and an uninterrupted through line (hence the reiterated “performance sagged” at the end). We now seem finally to have a working definition of the conditions necessary for performable liveliness: a short (or at least not-too-long) play with a fast and steadily moving plot. The implications of this definition are not developed into a systematic argument but don’t have to be. Similar claims have proliferated to such an extent these days that they may be taken for granted. Conspicuous in the background here is the Lear revision case—that Shakespeare’s own F cuts helped shore up a sagging action in Q, and that these abridgments constitute differences so significant that Q and F Lear should be considered separate plays. “The language of speed seems to govern all such arguments,” William Carroll remarks about the theatrical advantages claimed for F’s deleting the mock trial in 3.6; “the scene becomes ‘not only shorter but sharper,

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more urgent and rapid’ ”; the “plot is ‘streamline[d]’ and the ‘narrative momentum’ increased,” producing an intensified “ ‘rhythmic and narrative excitement” ’ as compared with Q. Where the mock trial caused “ ‘the pace to slow down,’ ” making it “ ‘very difficult for actors to sustain dramatic momentum,’ ” the F cuts are “ ‘designed to sustain the rapid sequence.’ ” Carroll himself is unconvinced. “What is not effectively shown is why this acceleration and streamlining are really virtues. Indeed, the very metaphors used by these scholars—positives like ‘streamline’ and ‘accelerate’ rather than, for example, ‘abort’ or ‘truncate’—beg the question” (230–1). As Richard Knowles suggests in his 1997 summary of the situation, similar objections have contributed to something of a retreat from the enthusiastic conviction about Lear revisions that prevailed in the 1980s. Even as it recedes, however, the argument leaves its impression on and even changes the shape of our work. Shakespearean criticism continues to welcome arguments for theatrical abridgement, whether authorized by Shakespeare or not. Hence McMillin can support his emphasis on the “distribution” of the Q1 Othello cuts with a 1997 essay on “The Revision of Scripts,” in which Eric Rasmussen demonstrates that the F cuts in Hamlet and Lear are similarly concentrated in Act 4. As perhaps the most striking examples of the current hospitality to stage cuts, consider the companion volumes to McMillin’s Othello in the Cambridge Early Quarto series. Andrew Gurr’s Henry V, published the year before McMillin’s Othello, anticipates the situation described there in every significant respect. As Gurr sees it, “the copy that formed the basis for the quarto text is almost certainly” based on “the play as first staged in Shakespeare’s presence, not the . . . text as Shakespeare delivered it to the players” (pp. 10–11). But this is not to say that Q Henry V is a bad quarto—surreptitiously stolen by rogue actors; rather, it was “recorded by dictation” taken in-house from “[a]t least two, possibly more, of the company’s players” and is thus “undoubtedly an authoritative players’ text” (p. 9). As another legitimating factor, Gurr remarks on the “purposive” competence of this abridgment, designed as a way not only of “shortening the text but of altering its speed.” The “scenes before the battle [of Agincourt] are trimmed” among other “changes that marked the speeding-up of time” (p. 24). This acceleration and streamlining, moreover, are part of a strategy for transforming the play as a whole. “The changes made for the staged version had a radical effect” on the “secret play inside the official play” (p. 10); working “to emphasise the king’s heroism at the cost of the play’s ‘secret’ other”

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(p. 11), they eliminate the ironic skepticism that commentators since Hazlitt have emphasized in the F version. How to explain and evaluate this major revision? The question is thrust on us by Gary Taylor’s Oxford edition, which, some twenty years before Gurr’s, proceeds from much the same description of the two versions—Q “remove[s] almost every difficulty in the way of an unambiguously patriotic interpretation of Henry and his war” (p. 12)—but comes to a very different conclusion. Taylor supports his negative evaluation of Q with Anne Barton’s argument about the “little touch of Harry in the night” episode: the disguised king motif in this scene was a standard topos at the time, but where convention called for “a romantic gesture” in which “king and unsuspecting subject meet time after time and discover unanimity of opinion and mutual respect” (quoted by Taylor, p. 41), F plays against type, dramatizing an action that issues in recrimination and distrust. In Taylor’s view, Q “has clearly been adapted and debased to make it conform to the very expectations about Henry,” which F “goes out of [its] way to disappoint” (p. 43, p. 42). As an attempt to explain why the Q adapters proceeded in this manner, Taylor suggests that, faced with “the apparent modesty of [F’s] early success,” a consequence of “its having disappointed . . . the complacent expectations of its first audience,” they eliminated material that departed “from the kind of play which theatrical convention and the national mood would have led audiences of 1599 to expect” (p. 12). Where Gurr sees “a shorter, brisker, simpler play” (p. ix), Taylor sees a “debased” and “complacent” one, not just cut but dumbed down to satisfy popular taste. The same qualities have been reversed in polarity, turned into the “positives” Carroll described in the revisionist evaluation of F Lear. Gurr obviously knows Taylor’s argument but never engages it directly. Confronted with claims about aesthetic impoverishment, a Q Henry V systematically diminished from F in its power to sustain a complex interpretive interest, Gurr asserts legitimate provenance: the text is produced by authority of the actors’ company itself. Despite “undoubtedly” and “almost certainly,” Gurr’s claim that Q represents a theatrical abridgment of F produced by in-house dictation remains fundamentally conjectural. Richard Dutton amasses textual and contextual evidence to produce a story with a diametrically opposed trajectory, in which F is produced from the earlier Q version, and his speculation seems no less plausible than Gurr’s. (To be sure, Dutton then arrives at a position identical to Gurr’s, that Q is “a robustly playable text,” the conclusion sandwiched between claims

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that—wait for them—Q “was almost certainly performed in its own right,” “deserves more attention in its own right,” and “was originally composed in its own right” [pp. 140, 135, 144]). Taylor’s story about a reaction to initial unpopularity is itself, of course, no less speculative than Gurr’s and Dutton’s. The evidence we have to determine how the text came into being is inferred from the effects we understand the text to produce. But even if it were possible to confirm Gurr’s claim that Q is not a “bad quarto,” it might still be a bad text in Taylor’s terms. To assert theatrical origin is not to identify theatrical value. We are back to McMillin, where a claim for “performable liveliness” is nowhere substantiated with evidence or argument—or where the evidence produced in support of the claim reduces the concept of theatrical value to nothing more than an unimpeded and fast-moving action. In an edition published in the Cambridge Early Quarto Series two years before Gurr’s Henry V, Kathleen Irace claims that Q1 Hamlet’s “revisers and adapters” were “full members of Shakespeare’s company,” and that the copy they produced was “reconstructed from memories of performance” (p. 20). It’s the same story: an “authoritative players’ text” (or so it is speculated) is cut by almost half in order to accelerate the action and keep it on track. An “adapter telescoped details” in order “to quicken the pace late in the play” (p. 9). When “to be or not to be” is relocated earlier in the action from its puzzling position in the middle of Q2 and F, Irace detects “a deliberate theatrical alteration designed to speed the action” (p. 11), producing “a more single-minded hero along with a less complex plot” (p. 15). It’s not just the protagonist whose rough edges are smoothed over. Q’s changes “reinforce the view of the king as a simple, conventional villain”; the Polonius character “may also have been deliberately altered” to appear “more foolish than his counterpart in the longer texts