IT SHOULD BE A SONG

Confusion is not readily admitted in the insulated world of academic discourse. This is, after all, the realm of observation, of inquiry and exploration, where those best and brightest among us go to find answers. In the face of lofty literary criticism (and its match in the social sciences), one would be forgiven for thinking there is little left to say: concrete lenses with dictionaries of their own terms and theories—new historicism, Marxism, feminism, cultural materialism, psychoanalysis—seem to relieve us from the burden of ever admitting “I don’t know.” But it is precisely this approach, often well-intentioned, that arms us against each other at the expense of literature’s integrity. The works of Shakespeare in particular seem to defy distillation into black-and-white terms. These are not plays “about” anything, the very characters protest, to be treated as evidence for something else. They are poetry, art; William Carlos Williams’ “open scissors” that ask of the reader a little less practicality and a little more pain. But the plays’ undeniable affect—and, in many cases, affliction—understandably urges us towards a certain emotional distance. We may grasp at a vessel to fit our feelings in, a net to catch “the message”; but no attempt to limit the emotionality of the plays will benefit our understanding. It is the plays’ wondrous complexity that mirrors the curves and contours of a very real world through which we simply cannot “lens” our way. I write in defense of a selfish reading of the plays, of wresting back audience ownership and dissolving barriers between art and self. In letting down our defenses and reassessing our roles as readers—called upon not as experts, but as a willing audience—we are reminded that these are magnificent works produced for our entertainment. Our role is to sit back, let go, and leave the theater a little less certain. 

Understanding the work of an author so concerned with the concept of selfhood necessarily raises the question of agency. Must we give ours up in order to understand the characters’? One possibility points to the theater itself. Here it is worth remembering that these are plays meant to be performed, and while “What one ‘discovers’ about historical plays from current performance is always… imposed and invented by the present, particularly if an uncritical naivety about what ‘works’ in the theatre now is brought to bear on what might have been performed and expressed 400 years ago” (Escolme 220), Early Modern theater tradition offers insight into a highly intentional framework of perspective. Emily Bartels writes that Shakespeare’s stage is effectively divided into two realms of experience. The first, known as the locus, is where the action takes place: situated in the center of the stage, the actors become real people encountering real situations. The action of the locus, devoid of any sort of trickery (but often also of contemplation), drives the play forward. The second, referred to as the platea, is where “outsider” characters watch the action unfold and point to the deeper truths and flaws the locus characters often cannot see for themselves. Platea characters, such as King Lear’s Fool and the Duke of Venice, are more abstract creations. Positioned around the edge of the stage, they often don’t seem to follow the same rules, interacting with the audience in ways the locus characters are unable to (175). The platea space serves as a crucial point of connection between the audience and the locus characters, and it is tempting to understand the audience itself as belonging to the platea, rather than the locus. Outside the main action, we too think highly of ourselves and make sport of interpreting, disrupting, and exposing whatever we please. But it is precisely this lack of self-awareness that reveals we are not of that realm “above” the characters. The all-seeing platea figures are, simply put, an impossibility: they are criticism personified, not “real” in the sense that they are not representational; but we are nothing if not real. The bell tolls for thee—and when “they” point to the locus, they point to us. How, then, are we to understand the characters in relation to ourselves? “Their stories show us that, in Shakespeare at least, agency and autonomy do not go hand in hand, that self-determination takes place through and not despite popular forms and pressures, and that the self's dependence on those forms and pressures is a site of both possibility and crisis” (Bartels 175). Here, confusion seems to be the intent. Perhaps we will narrow the investigation, looking beyond the social structures the characters find themselves in and towards the minds of the characters themselves.

What could they be thinking? Concerns like these are growing fashionable in the realm of Early Modern literature, in hopes that by studying period conceptions of mind and body, we might come closer to understanding the characters themselves. Much work has been done with psychoanalysis in relation to Shakespeare’s multifaceted characters. Researcher Trevor Douglas describes his approach, dubbed “soft” psychoanalysis, as a way to combine the implications raised by the scientific study of the mind and its workings with the nuances and ambiguity of literature, though limited by a reliance on exclusive, field-specific terms and theories (88). However, Emily Bartels seems to counter attempts like these to understand the characters as persons of independent action and motivation: “Given a world in which thoughts are subjects to… a multi-layered network of social and political prescripts, what… can it be, to perform or possess identity, to speak and ask as I?” (Bartels 171). Shakespeare’s characters seem unable to answer for themselves. King Lear’s “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” (1.4.236) is ubiquitous in scholarly explorations of fictional psychology, and the fluidity of the Early Modern self foils categorization, as even a concept as simple as “emotion” was still making its way uphill towards our clean, modern definition in the author’s time. Worse still, we cannot base any helpful conclusions on what we do not know: “In looking within, beyond the ‘seems,’ to find explanations for what is without, psychoanalytic interpretation anachronistically assumes the presence (and the loss)... of some prior, stabilized identity. But it is precisely that kind of identity that seems unimaginable in the early modern period” (Bartels 172). Thus, studying the mindsets and presumed emotions of literary characters from a time period far removed from our modern understanding often leads us to a dead end. But if we cannot quite know how they think, we may yet know how they feel. After all, “Psycho-physical temperament is one element in a complex matrix of selfhood in early modern drama, whereby notions of indulgence and restraint, reason and passion, free will and given temperament, ‘self ’ and society are debated and held in tension” (Escolme 8-9). On, then, to materiality.

It is a great help that all of Shakespeare’s plays feature dramatic outpourings of emotion, and the audience experiences firsthand the characters’ honest reactions to the difficult situations they find themselves in. Less helpful is the conception that the playwright’s contemporaries did not understand the same differentiation between body, mind, and health as we do. Modern readers are able to step back because we “tend not to imagine the emotions… as part of the fabric of the body. In this way the early modern placement differs importantly from modern ontologies, which tend to distinguish sharply between psychology and physiology, between the mental and the physical” (Paster 5). However, Galenic naturalism—borrowed from the Ancient Greek world and well-respected in the Early Modern period—posited the mind and body as inseparable, where the idea of “self” simply did not exist apart from the body and its varied functions. Together with humoral theory, naturalism characterized the “passions” within a sort of physiological and emotional flux: “For the early moderns, emotions flood the body not metaphorically but literally, as the humors course through the bloodstream carrying choler, melancholy, blood, and phlegm to the parts and as the animal spirits move like lightning from brain to muscle, from muscle to brain” (Paster 14). These “liquid forces of nature” followed the patterns of the natural world, and were themselves seen as likewise uncontrollable and inevitable as a storm, drought, flood, or forest fire. Understanding emotions as consequences of nature proposes “...a thoroughly embodied and ‘radically labile’ form of selfhood in which the emotions are experienced as powerfully physical forces, literally sinking the spirits, clouding the brain, cooling the blood, and even breaking the heart when felt in the extreme” (Sullivan 132). However, it has been argued that exclusive focus on humoral theory—perhaps overly reliant on Greek medical theories already on their way out—and Galenic understanding of emotion simply makes individuality a non-issue, a tremendous problem for understanding Shakespeare’s characters as self-ruling persons. Still, if emotions and the nature of a static “self” were understood differently in this period, it seems they may have been granted a similar reception. Perceived emotional excess was, and is, a topic of contention—how much is too much, on stage and in real human experience? In a humoral understanding of the world, emotional excess could be life-threatening. Grief or melancholy, understood to be a consequence of a black bile imbalance, was always approached with a special caution since excessive grief could lead to insanity. Other heavy emotions were approached in the same way, such that a perfect balance had to be struck to mediate between personal expression and potential risk to health. The crisis of identity that so many of Shakespeare’s characters face, this constant flux of uncertainty, certainly affected their sense of self; in some cases, effecting its erasure.

Very well, “they” do not know who they are. But surely we do. We are rational beings, capable of stepping back and assessing with calm mind the actions and emotional outbursts of others. But it remains to contend with affect, the price we pay when we absorb another’s story as our own: “Though the emphasis on reading rather than play-going might seem to move us in a more private and solitary direction… reading is itself a very communal and compassionate act, with readers joining their own passions with those evoked within the literary text” (Sullivan 133). Emily Bartels adds, “That intimacy further tightens the bond between them and us, making us complicit in their maneuvers and making us examine, understand, and evaluate ourselves in their terms” (Bartels 176). But risk always follows intimacy, and we often pay dearly. The Tragedy of King Lear perhaps shows this best of any play. Lear’s final scene, in which the king grieves over Cordelia’s body—a daughter whose goodness and honesty should, in our minds, have insulated her from the horrors enacted by those around her—is the final straw that pushes the play over the edge of absolutely reprehensible destruction. An absurdly tragic work, Lear points to the limitations of our removal and challenges the fanciful artistic notion that “...grief over loss is somehow a pain to be enjoyed” (Escolme 171). There is nothing beautiful here. Still, in the absence of a neat moral message, it has been suggested that Lear is evidence that the playwright was keenly aware of a “universal emotional experience” in his audience that ultimately held them fast to his artful depictions of humanity’s lowest reaches (Meek 280). Small consolation, perhaps, but at least we suffer together. Still, it is precisely this uncompromising emotional experience that drags us from the platea to the locus; from the realm of the judge to that of the judged.

After all this time spent trying to inhabit the platea, to occupy foreign hearts and minds, it serves us best to return to reality. But our sense of “reality” need not exclude fiction: “...the emotional experiences of others can only be interpreted if they are converted into words and gestures… the distinction between fictional representation and the expression of ‘real’ emotion insofar as it is described in contemporary or historical records is not absolute” (Meek 281). In touching us, in producing real effects in the persons who engage, fiction itself is “real.” In fact, what we feel is the only real part of the play—and the only thing we need not extract: “Shakespeare's tragedies are, above all else, plays of passions and suffering that we eventually recognize as our own, whatever their social, political, or religious contingencies may have been in the Renaissance” (Kirsch 154). These painfully, irresistibly real works are the antithesis of the fairy tale, and this sort of masterful trickery on the part of the poet—shifting the ground beneath our feet, rattling our brains, and dragging us through much more than we thought we agreed to—is how we grow through being “sure” of ever less. How little control we have. It remains only to turn inward, to turn from absolutes; to freely admit of there being no black-and-white. My little observation is this: an emotionally permissive reading of Shakespeare, one that treats the plays with the phenomenology of a poem, grants the freedom of confusion. We “feel,” therefore we “are”—but who we are, what we are, is never quite certain. “Be” though we may, we all but scarcely know ourselves.

The poem is this:

a nuance of sound

delicately operating

upon a cataract of sense.

Vague. What a stupid

image. Who operates?

and who is operated

on? How can a nuance

operate on anything?

it is all in

the sound. A song. 

seldom a song. It should

be a song—made of

particulars, wasps,

a gentian—something immediate, open

scissors, a lady’s eyes—the particulars

of a song waking

upon a bed of sound.

—William Carlos Williams, “The Poet and His Poems”