To “give oneself,” or “the way that reading continually refers to origins across history going from pupil to master… always calling anew for a reading that is both erudite and modern. Hence the commentaries of commentaries.”
—Levinas (BV 80, xiii)1
Near the very the end of As You Like It, Rosalind says to the Duke, “To you I give myself, for I am yours,” and then turns to Orlando and says, “To you I give myself, for I am yours” (5.4.115-116). Rosalind’s repetitive utterance anticipates a Levinasian insistence of Rosalind giving of her self (“I give myself”) to an other (“I am yours”), while this utterance also suggests a potential fracturing of the Self for Others. If this fragment from Shakespeare’s comedy indeed echoes a Levinasian refrain, then how much of Shakespeare’s particularity can we allow ourselves to experience? As this example illustrates, an irony often haunts Levinasian (and literary) criticism. While espousing the radical significance of the other, we wind up saying the same things incessantly. To proclaim difference, alterity, and otherness, we thematize Levinas, consigning his performative writings to an iterative sameness. Is it possible—or even desirable—to escape this irony of much Levinasian and Shakespearean scholarship?
In this essay, I argue that in the above lines Rosalind performs an act of ethical criticism that troubles the melancholic philosopher Jaques’s famous, but ostensibly static, Seven Ages of Man speech [“Full of wise saws and modern instances” (2.7.156)]. As Levinas argues of art’s apparently mythic autonomy in “Reality and Its Shadow,” a critic should resituate art’s frozenness, its evasion of responsibility, within ethical and social contexts. I suggest that Shakespeare’s comedy enacts a responsible critic’s (Rosalind’s) ethical “saying” (dire) that defrosts the static “said” (dit) of Jaques’s classification system of human ages, demonstrating how Levinasian and Shakespearean critics can reframe their readings to convey more ethical urgency.
It will, however, take more than a multivalent reading of the stages of life in AYLI to respond adequately to the ironic challenge of repetition posed by Levinasian criticism and to acknowledge the human importance and responsibilities within the comedy’s own artistic forms and contexts. There is an eclectic and long lineage to the intertextual, social, and sacred history of listing the ages of humans (or classifying the stages of human development) for ethical and educational purposes. While seeking to pin down precise allusions in the Seven Ages speech with calculating bibliographic precision,2 critics have neglected the potential of Jewish analogues to reveal nuances in Shakespearean play and performance; simultaneously, while seeking to open up theoretically innovative and refreshing readings of Rosalind and the overall play, critics tend to neglect both Levinas and rabbinic theoretical readings of biblical sources.
Past criticism, such as J. W. Draper’s brief piece on Jaques’s Seven Ages, took for granted that “the idea of dividing human life into periods, somewhat as Jaques does in As You Like It, had long been common, and was rather obviously derived from Classical, Hebrew, and Medieval thought.”3 However, modern scholarship has largely ignored Hebrew thought in Shakespearean theory on AYLI.4 This essay suggests that one remedy to this critical oversight is to attune ourselves to the background voices and gestures in AYLI by affirming contemporary theory’s challenges to old critical presuppositions, while also acknowledging Levinas’s intense responsibility to others, but by way of including Hebrew, and specifically, rabbinic thought on the distinct ages of life.
I contend that attention to Jewish thought can recover significant ethical considerations in Shakespeare’s works beyond questions of representation, as in (to invoke the most cited example) The Merchant of Venice.5 This essay explores ways in which ethical criticism can go beyond mere rote repetitions of Levinasian themes—while, ironically, returning to them yet again—by harkening to the faces that speak in AYLI and to the sayings on the ethical education of the individual in Pirkei Avot. To do so, I focus particularly on what can arguably be called Lithuanian6 explications of the Mishnah by the Vilna Gaon and Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin, the latter a powerful influence on Levinas’s interpretation of Jewish thought.7 In interviews, Levinas tells us that Lithuania is “the country of the famous Gaon of Vilna of the eighteenth century, the last great Talmudist of genius”; “Lithuanian Judaism is this predilection for a certain sobriety … as opposed to a certain intoxication of spirit on a popular level … Lithuanian Judaism is a certain intellectual discipline” (RB 24, 93). In attending rigorously to a Lithuanian Judaism as espoused by Levinas, I perform an act of reading that traces and juxtaposes multiple layers of repetition within educational transmissions and commentaries—those involved in Pirkei Avot’s sayings, in Levinas’s attention to prayers, and in Shakespeare’s comic ending—and in so doing, I uncover distinct components of ethical humanism. I therefore assert that the particularity of Shakespeare and the distinctness of kedushah, or the Jewish notion of holiness or separateness, will not be subsumed into a thematic economy, but instead, will remain distinct from the sameness that Levinas locates in much of Western philosophical thought. In other words, I suggest that we need to question the extent to which the rigors of responsible education on ethical humanism necessarily entail a devotion to the same lines, verses, figures, and even sayings.8 The fear of God and education would then not simply tolerate, but would actually welcome strange texts and faces: even Jaques’s.
Within the rabbinic traditions that Levinas addresses, the most conspicuous instance of an Ages of Man speech appears in a mishnah from the fifth chapter of Pirkei Avot, a collection of ethical sayings.9 Even if Levinas outwardly gives priority to Scripture when he claims that we “learn the humanity of the fear of God through the Torah” (BV 97), he also “think[s] that across all literature the face speaks” (EI 117). In his own foreword to Beyond the Verse, Levinas orients his readers to rabbinic commentary by relating Shakespeare to the spiritual life of the ethical exegete: “in the very anthropology of the human … the eminent role played by so-called national literatures, Shakespeare … Pushkin. Signifying beyond their plain meaning, they invite the exegesis … that is spiritual life” (BV xi). To perform this kind of criticism, ethical exegesis reverberates with experiential burdens: exegetes must somehow feel responsible for the difficult ethical charge of the text itself—whether that discourse is a speech by Jaques, a reply by Rosalind, or an ethical utterance by a Rabbi. As critics, we should practice a Levinasian performance of blowing on the coals of texts (a favorite and, as I will show, intentional Levinasian turn of a talmudic phrase) to encounter the heat and light of those texts, even if this requires the risk of getting burned or hurt, inviting the stranger to share the fire.10
By the essay’s end, I show how Shakespeare’s comedy actually returns us to a trope in literary commentary: the memento mori of an artwork. However, instead of repeating a Latin motto that proclaims “remember that you [the Self] will die,” ethical exegetes might adjust the saying ever so slightly to repeat otherwise, to “remember that the other will die.” With this transformation, the ethics of reading Shakespeare, Levinas, and rabbinic discourses together returns us to the critical irony that began the chapter, but with, I argue, a compelling comedic commitment to the other’s life of staging beyond tragedy, of Rosalind’s farewell address, which charges us with the pleasures related to the “love you bear to men” (5.4.210) and the “love you bear to women” (5.4.212).
Thawing out frozen art by blowing on the coals of ethical sayings: The temporal movements in the spaces between Stages, or the obligations of ethical criticism to attend to the voices of “sacred history”
Although Jaques asserts that the world’s a stage and “all the men and women merely players” (2.7.141), his concept of the Seven Ages remains basically restricted to a male world. With Rosalind and other performers, though, Shakespeare asks us to ponder other worlds, other stages that gesture to multiple others. Read with the other in mind, Jaques’s Seven Ages articulates what Levinas might call an egoistic sameness, an androcentric version of “one man in his time play[ing] many parts” (2.7.143): the infant, the schoolboy, the lover, the soldier, the justice, the pantaloon, the second childishness. The infant’s actions, “mewling and puking” (2.7.145), are wailings and vomit coming from the Self, not oriented to helping anyone else. While the infant at least has the presence of a nurse, the “whining” (2.7.146) schoolboy who creeps unwillingly to his educational institution has no human companion. The male lover is full of desire, but his fiery [“furnace” (2.7.149)] sighs and ballads to a part of his mistress’s body speak to carnal yearning, not to what Levinas calls metaphysical desire, or even to erotic desire between two lovers, since we have no idea what his mistress desires here.11 Once a soldier, Jaques’s “one man” utters oaths, seeks honor and reputation, and quickly quarrels, all for the sake of his own (same) fame. Similarly, in his role of the justice, he has a fat stomach, verbalizing commonplace sayings and “wise saws” (2.7.157), but there is no description at all of other agents or consequences: no concept of victims, jurors, acts of justice, or instances of adjudication. One feels the Self’s egocentric continuation in Jaques’s final comment: “And so he plays his part” (2.7.158). The penultimate age reveals the restrictions on the Self’s physical body, growing lean with age and wearing baggy trousers. Even his “big manly voice” (2.7.162) turning back to childish treble exclusively restricts this age to the Self’s voice, not his voice turned to others of any kind. And what of the last scene in this “one man’s” world? It is famously “sans” teeth, eyes, taste, and “everything”: there are no others (not even a nurse as there was in the infant’s age) in this self-same egological system. Given Elizabethan culture, we might assume that the infant’s nurse is a woman, and we can claim that the lover’s mistress is a woman, but apart from these two instances of humans existing in the “one man’s” seven ages—both instances of support for the self or the object of the self’s desire—this is a self-enclosed system. We do not know why the school exists or what is taught; we do not know the national impetus or ideological imperatives of the soldier’s army; we do not sense actual justice; we are not taught to respect the old man’s voice; we end in “oblivion” (2.7.166), an existence without any existents.12
But this is not the end of Shakespeare’s ages. In AYLI, we can imagine, in opposition to this egotistical sameness, the ages of the nurse, the ages of the mistress: there are others and there are other ages, stages, and worlds.13 In fact, the moment Jaques finishes his melancholic pronouncements (who exactly is he really addressing? Himself?), Shakespeare appears. I mean this in at least two senses. Of less importance is the historical (probably apocryphal) anecdote that Shakespeare himself played Adam, so when Orlando now enters bearing Adam, the playwright himself has come to challenge Jaques’s “one man” world. The veneration bestowed to this elder, in fact, addresses the need to feed (“let him feed” (2.7.168) says Duke Senior), immediately the feeble other who, in this case, needs to be carried like Anchises by the younger generation (as Aeneas did for his father). Orlando immediately expresses gratitude—“I thank you most for him” (2.7.169)—and Duke Senior welcomes these others, these strangers, and refuses to ask troubling personal questions prior to his act of hospitality. He does before he understands, as Levinas might say, borrowing from the language of the Bible describing the Jewish response at Sinai.14
Even if critics dispute whether Shakespeare played the role of Adam, of more importance is Shakespeare’s appearance in the moral sense. In Levinas’s sense of the greatness here before us, Shakespeare appears by making a claim on us as we witness the performance of a self giving of himself (Orlando) and his food (Duke Senior) to a helpless Other (Adam), named after the first “one man,” Adam. However, Shakespeare’s brilliance here undermines the notion that Adam is the first Self. Here, Adam is the Other, disrupting the static categories in Jaques’s one man show. Even before Rosalind finds ways to respond to Jaques’s philosophy of education and maturation, Shakespeare manages to intimate the start of performing the silent roles of nurse and mistress (in Jaques’s Self’s one man staging) in the silent, poignant appearance of the Other Adam. Our own responsibility for the tired, burdensome Other beckons from across Shakespeare’s stage.
In 1948, Samuel Chew already pointed out the ways Jaques’s speech not only participates in a tradition depicting the Ages of Human existence, but also fails to include the theme of companionship.15 There is no need to repeat the multiple sources and motifs Chew lists, but I would add radical responsibility to the Other in the Self’s education and ethical maturation to his theme of companionship. After Chew, Seronsy (in 1953) argues that most previous research on Shakespeare’s sources for Jaques’s Seven Ages lacked “the consistent presentation of man in a ridiculous and pitiful condition,” and that Thomas Lodge’s novel, A Margarite of America, does present such a pitiful condition. While critics might dislodge Seronsy’s claims about Lodge as the source, what matters for my argument is Seronsy’s attention to “attitude … towards man’s condition.”16 Jaques’s Ages present, what I am claiming is but “one man’s” attitude to “one man’s condition,” and should not be thematized to a static “said” that includes all ages, all attitudes, all others.
My approach here emphasizes the insular stasis of Jaques’s Ages. By retraining our focus, I help us avoid the tendency that compulsively focusing on the ur-source of Jaques’s ages has to distort and omit ethical relations to others.17 Instead, we need to reorient our focus to consider how the play performs the disruption of the Self’s totalizing order by the advent of the Other. This higher register of exegesis cannot be accommodated by positioning Jaques opposite Shakespeare. Indeed, the significance of moral action to the other (as done by Orlando and Duke Senior, and as I will argue, Rosalind) affirms comments by Hazlitt two centuries ago (from 1817): perhaps the most purely contemplative character in Shakespeare is Jaques who “thinks and does nothing.”18 Perhaps Hazlitt’s observation can be read as a slant gloss (anachronistically) on Levinas’s critique of much Western philosophical thought: Pure self-contemplation without the disruption of the Other can lead to thinking about thinking without doing anything for others.19
Staying attuned to ethical valences here, I would argue that Jaques’s one-man view embodies the Self’s self-perpetuation, which does more than simply suggest the exclusion of the self’s will.20 More importantly, this view excludes the Other and refuses to acknowledge the other’s demands; it suggests both the hostility of the Self to the incursions by the other, and the violence inflicted on the Self by the traumatic encounter with the Other. This ethical interpretation explains why the Self, in Jaques’s scheme, does not marry and does not have any children. The old man’s second childhood, must, of necessity, be his own second childhood, because the Self has refused the risk of having children or even of having a lasting relationship with an Other on almost any significant level. Others would burden him with their weight, with their mouths to feed—as, in fact, Shakespeare’s Adam silently informs us in the next lines!21 This antisocial emphasis parallels my emphasis on the Self’s exclusionary function in Jaques’s one man thematization, but instead of claiming that Jaques’s ethos is “deficient in the sympathies shared by his ‘co-mates and brothers’,” I would argue that what is needed is not reciprocal sympathies based on human sameness, but precisely the alterity that Levinas returns to incessantly.22 If ethics follows from shared sameness, then we are back to symmetrical, reciprocal selfsame morality that time and again leads to violence against others.
Rabbinic Exegesis and ethical interruptions: “Treat the children of the poor with care, since from them shall Torah come”—tractate Nedarim 81a
“It is, therefore, not surprising if we find Shakespeare imbued, not only with the spirit of the Rabbis—for this would be due to the influence of the Bible itself, but with the very expression and phraseology of Rabbinic thought.”
—The Rev Professor Hermann Gollancz23
Before moving into an exploration of Rosalind’s powerful rejoinders to Jaques, I would like to interrupt my own reading of AYLI (and its concomitant critical voices) and present a few voices in the rabbinic tradition that also address the stages of development and maturation. These pedagogical voices reverberate with eclectic types of reading through repetition and transmission of texts and commentaries, but also of generations. As we will see, in these educational transmissions, the limned stages are interconnected, inseparable from the ages of a person and generations of people. The educational import in these repetitions stress interpersonal obligations, and the texts I explicate provide approaches for learning about the self and the other both formally and methodologically. Additionally, the rabbinic voices require collaborative efforts and multiple types of iteration involving many selves and many others. The most crucial of these is Pirkei Avot, the most famous compilation of rabbinic ethical sayings, one that Levinas not only read,24 but also one that Levinas knew inspired voluminous exegetical commentary in rabbinic hermeneutics, ethics, and philosophical thought. I will restrict my focus to one strand within the complex entwining strands of Lithuanian Jewish thinkers, namely the works of the Vilna Gaon and Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin.
Here is the mishnah:25
He used to say: At the age of five, for Bible; at ten, for Mishnah; at thirteen, for Mitzvot; at fifteen, for Talmud; at eighteen for the marriage canopy; at twenty, for pursuit; at thirty, for vigor; at forty, for understanding; at fifty, for counsel; at sixty, to be an elder; at seventy, for grey hair; at eighty, for might; at ninety, to bend over; at one hundred, as if he had already died and passed away and disappeared from the world. —Pirkei Avot, 5:25
In order to read this text rigorously, we must situate it within the ocean of biblical, talmudic, and rabbinic traditions.26 Although most of the ages and stages clearly refer to educational periods, descriptions of bodily transformations are also included. In fact, nearly all commentators note that the first few stages are intended not for the Self as child, but for the parents.27 It is the parents’ obligation to make sure that proper ethical, textual education, and hermeneutic understanding do not occur too soon. It is the parents’ obligation, in fact, to care for, to nurse (Jaques’s first age) the child.28 There is no ironic or sardonic tone toward a puking or wailing child; there is no ironic or bitter hostility from the child, no stated unwillingness to learn (Jaques’s second age). The Hebrew word for “Bible” here (at age five) is mikrah, which also means reading. The child obligates the parent before the child’s own Self-responsibility. In rabbinic tradition, reading and learning the alphabet must be guided by the parent even before the child enters an educational institution.29 The alphabet and the reading, though, are of a religious text.
From a different perspective, this approach means, unlike the Self-enclosed sameness of Jaques’s stages, the developing Self in the Mishnah is always already preceded by others. Perhaps this notion is untranslatable. To help us hear the attitude here, the imperative here, I need to unsay what is said. The Hebrew language states ben chamesh le’mikra. A 5-year-old le mikra; at five the child is ready for reading the Bible; at five the child begins reading the Bible; or, more literally, a 5-year-old “to” Bible. Who leads the child “to” the Bible? The unstated agency here is the parent. In English I might say, “at five one should be taught, one should be introduced to” in the passive voice to underscore the point; this focus might help us understand why rabbinic commentary consistently places the burden on the parent-Self to hearken to the educational needs and desires of the specific child-Other.30 Even before any ethical knowing, the child has already been introduced to reading and learning by a person who gives of the Self to the child. In a sense, Jaques’s nurse, here as parent, takes on a role of active agency in the educational maturation of the child. The parent or nurse does not exist to clean up the child’s puke only (though this burden exists as well).31
Five years later, at age ten, the child should now begin learning Mishnah. In this formulation of Jewish education, the child never stops learning the Bible. The educational stages temporally seep into each other so the preceding stage continues throughout the later stages. The meanings of scripture are ongoing, moving in depth, width, and ethical height as one matures. This humbling, never-ending educational challenge not only instills in the child a sense of infinite obligation to, at this point, a textual other; it also involves interpersonal obligations. After all, a child cannot learn the language, texts, or traditions alone: the teacher (a parent or the parent’s surrogate, an authority in school) instructs the child.32 The psychological development of the child remains crucial. Unlike the complicated logical disputation found in talmudic discourse (which the child is usually incapable of comprehending and appreciating), the less complicated and more straightforward Mishnah is fertile ground for a 10-year-old’s abilities. Embedded in our mishnah is an educational psychology of not challenging a student beyond that individual’s attention span or capabilities. One must understand the needs and abilities of children as they develop, with an emphasis on stages of learning at increments of five years.33 Indeed, with the year fifteen mentioned as the starting point for talmudic learning, there is a pattern of five year intervals in early education. One must be immersed in at least five years of intensive study in one academic field before moving on to the next level.
As it turns out, the speaker’s focus on intervals of five-year training periods is actually a rabbinic hermeneutic commentary on verses in the Bible (Numbers 8:24; 4:3-47). In fact, this is the Vilna Gaon’s first gloss on this mishnah. The Gra’s commentary to Pirkei Avot in general might seem odd to some, because, for the most part, all he seems to do is list, with extreme concision, biblical or talmudic references. In reality, the Gra, I argue, is inviting us to perform what comes close to a Levinasian reading of these ancient texts.34 By blowing on the coals of the Gra’s references, while juxtaposing those to the coals of the rabbinic sayings in Pirkei Avot, readers come to realize that the Gra is arguing, piece by intricate piece, for the intertwining strands of texts and commentaries among the Written Law and the Oral Law. By connecting each thematizable maxim in Avot to biblical phrases and verses, the Gra illustrate the lapidary intertextual hermeneutic processes at work in the very performance of what are ostensibly static mottos. Instead of reading the biblical verse or the line in Avot as a separate, thematically digestible, whole unto itself, the Gra’s terse listing invites readers to turn learning mikra and Talmud over and over again. What might appear to be a static listing initially, turns into a powerful performative address to readers that demands the utmost rigor, application, insight, and imaginative creativity.
The Gra’s first comment on this mishnah names the talmudic tractate Chullin (24a),35 which suggests that the five-year period (from 25 to 30) is a period of training and learning. The speaker of our mishnah is not arbitrarily decreeing five-year periods (for the initial stages); rather, with sheer listing of numbers, the speaker performs (and demands that we perform) hermeneutic practices that enact that which is the content to be learned: the learning of the Bible, of Mishnah, and Talmud. The Gra’s brilliance then, in this instance, is to continue that performative practice in his own notes on our mishnah. He unsays the said (in Levinasian terms), while blowing on the coals of rabbinic saying to teach us (his readers/students) by way of practicing and performing that which he discusses and interprets. Without critical rigor, though, we would misread his notes as bibliographic minutiae. Even more, rather than begin his commentary on the first (st)age of the 5-year-old, the Gra simply lists the mishnah’s phrasing of the 10-year—and the 15-year-old, and then begins his commentary with the mention of tractacte Chullin, as fifteen is the year of Talmud study.
The Gra performs the mishnah’s educational system. He waits until the year fifteen has been named, with the preceding periods of five years (five and ten) so that he can refer to the Talmud’s reading of preceding texts in the tradition. He is enacting the very methodology of teaching, reading, and encountering the demands of sacred text! When one engages in Talmud, one necessarily must recall (and translate anew) mikra. The Talmud as teacher and the mishnah as teacher and the Bible as teacher are infinitely intertwined in the educational role(s) of an Other that demands infinite acknowledgment and responsibility from the Self who is always the student, who is always called upon to turn over the text yet again.36 The Gra seeks, I argue, to teach us that every number here is linked to textual traditions, to reading mikra responsibly.37 Time can be separated into sacred times by learning precise demarcations of responsibilities in one’s different stages of life. Devoting one’s early periods of life to learning, prepare oneself to accomplish mitzvoth later, and to enact and perform ethical obligations and attitudes later in life.
The stages in the mishnah after fifteen focuses on the Self’s obligations. It is not good for one to be alone, but if married too early (before eighteen), one would be unable to devote time to proper studying, emotionally and psychologically immature, and unable to find financial support.38 With marriage, the Self becomes personally obligated to the will, desires, demands, and needs of an Other.39 When twenty, the Self should “pursue”: perhaps the study of Torah and Mitzvot, perhaps a career (to gain financial independence that would enable one to give food, clothing, shelter, and charity to others), or perhaps to become the “pursued” since, as noted, at twenty the Heavenly Court’s punishments for violations now become the onus of the individuated Self.40 The Self is now fully responsible to self-teach (“pursue”) anything that needs to be learned.41 Personal responsibility to one Other (one’s spouse) and to God and to commandments prepare one for obligations of service to one’s country militarily, where one is prepared to die for others. A different service to an Other occurs at thirty, “for strength.” The Gra here refers us to Numbers chapter 4 which instructs the Levites to begin working in the Temple at age thirty (recall that the Levites began training at twenty-five). Devotion to a special space of kedushah (“sacredness”) begins at thirty; the jobs performed by the Levites in the Temple cannot begin to be performed when one is twenty, since that may be an age of physical strength to help others in battle, but is insufficient an age in proper dedication to the Divine Other’s special place on earth.
The Gra continues at each point to connect what at first appears to be a fixed maxim to an ongoing living tradition of interpretations that relentlessly links multiple Jewish discourses together. Each age connects to a precise biblical intertext. I will here interrupt a sequential reading of the Gra to move us to his startling last comment. The mishnah’s tone, unlike Jaques’s tone in his system, appears to entertain a positive, constructive attitude, to provide character traits, to educate with rigor for the purpose of enacting mitzvoth and caring (giving wise counsel) to others—all pursuits that enable one to act ethically toward oneself, to God, and to human Others. We should focus on generations and pedagogical transmissions, not on growth and degeneration as a solitary path. Why then, should this mishnah end with such a depressing twist—at 100 years, it is as if one has already died and passed from the word. How different in tone and content is this from Jaques’s refrain of “sans” everything? How is this phrase encouraging of any responsibility?
Most commentaries stress the physical, psychological, and emotion truth of the usual facts. Rashi, for example, presents the standard interpretation: when one is 100, eyesight is gone, physical beauty is gone, intellectual abilities have become immensely restricted, and, in point of historical fact, a person basically becomes a fool.42 This accuracy in life, though, reflects what Levinas might call living in existence without an existent. What kind of ethical time is this? Are we not forced to fall back to a Jaques-like attitude of affirming that all chances are gone? Perhaps, especially if read alone, apart for the sea of contexts in rabbinic thought, one might even feel the need to fall back on the cultural cliché of “life is short, so make the best of it while you can.” Some commentators even resort to the interpretation that the century-old individual has no Self value and hardly any social value.43 Is this the love of wisdom Levinas finds so acutely in rabbinic thought?44
But, this is not the way the Gra ends his commentary. His rigorous devotion to the Divine word, to the prophetic word in fact, resounds. Moreover, he astoundingly moves us into what Levinas might call messianic time. His only marks on the last mishnaic phrase are as follows: “Like written in Isaiah 65 [verse 20]: ‘for the youth of one hundred years, etc.,’ for blessing [le’berachah].”45 The immediate context of that verse is a statement from God describing an age of peace, a messianic time: “From there, there will never again be brought a young child or an old man who will not fill his days; for the youth of one hundred years will die and a sinner at the age of one hundred years will be cursed.” In messianic time, the prophecy declares, people will fully live out their lives. If someone were to die at the early age of 100, others will say that “the youth” has died. Indeed, if he will have died at the youthful age of 100 others will realize that this person received a curse from God as a result of that person’s sins.46 Rashi, based on Midrash Rabbah (26:2), understands the verse differently. The messianic era in Isaiah’s verse here refers to a return to prediluvian periods of life, when people lived for hundreds of years. During such a period of life, one would not be culpable for onshim (“punishment”) until that individual is one hundred. The na’ar (“youth”) of Isaiah means the youth who does not yet (in future time) receive punishment for violations of commandments. The Gra, I would argue, causes us to return to the starting periods of our mishnah, when a na’ar is not yet liable for punishments. Moreover, by sheer terseness of allusion, the Gra infuses our entire mishnah’s temporal periods of educational, psychological, emotional, biological, and moral development with messianic meaning and messianic time. When we finish the Gra’s commentary, we have returned again to the start, but differently, for we have now encountered in our reading and learning criticism that infuses messianic time in what otherwise might be static stages.47
Indeed, the words of this one prophetic verse echo with the words of our mishnah. The 60-year-old for ziknah, for old age in messianic times, will be a zakein, an old person who will always fill his days. In rabbinic Hebrew, ziknah can mean “old age,” but it also denotes wisdom, for the word can be broken down into zeh kanah, which a rabbinic saying renders zeh she-kanah Chachmah (tractate Kiddushin 32b), meaning “this is a person who has acquired wisdom.” The person at sixty has acquired wisdom.48 With the Gra, we have entered the dimension of a second childhood (as Jaques might say), but with a radically different infusion of time, responsibility, and value. Rather than ending on a positive note that would ring with a form of religious apologetics (one can imagine such a reading: the physical body is gone at 100, but the individual who lives to such a ripe old age now lives on spiritually), the Gra enacts, performs, and concretizes continuously the next mishnah’s saying: “Ben Bag Bag says: Turn it [Torah] over and turn it over again, for everything is in it. See with it, grow old and grey with it, and do not move from it, for there is no better portion than it” (Pirkei Avot 5:26). Never stop studying Torah. An impossible, infinite responsibility should infuse each moment of one’s life. To always learn from the Other who teaches. This is how a Self achieves middah tovah (“better portion”), which can also mean in rabbinic parlance, good character, good ethos, good ethics.
Here is where the Lithuanian tradition embedded in Levinas’s thinking and writing comes to the fore, and, I claim, illustrates how Levinas wishes to situate himself and his writings in a Lithuanian Jewish tradition of exegesis.49 Rav Chaim Volozhin continues to address the infinite time and responsibility that the Gra’s commentary acknowledged (or perhaps better, witnessed). However long the Self exists, the Self is still responsible to be educated by the infinite Other. Indeed, Levinas knows this Rav Chaim on Avot, for Rav Chaim comments on this mishan in the Nefesh HaChaim that Levinas often invokes with such reverence:
The [Rabbinic Sages] say in Avot 2:15 “all their [Rabbis’] words are like smoldering embers,” that even though there is only the glimmer of flame, if you make an effort to turn it over and blow on it, the ember will flare up and a flame will spread until it is all afire and you can benefit from its light and warmth. However, only by being in proximity to it, not directly grasping it, for once it’s on fire, one must be careful not to be burned. This same metaphor was applied to all the sages’ sayings. Even when their sayings seem concise and literal, they’re actually similar to a smashing hammer blow, since the more one turns them inside out and expounds on them with rigor, the more a person’s eyes will be enlightened from the fire of their immense light; the person will find within them profundities. As the sages say [Avot 2:26] “Turn it inside out and turn it inside out again, for everything is in it.”50
In the essay “On the Jewish Reading of Scriptures,” Levinas, while arguing for a new meaning of transcendence in the words of the talmudic sage Abaye, writes himself into the Lithuanian tradition in which I have been merely tracing but one trajectory. Levinas claims that “the statement commented upon exceeds what it originally wants to say; that what is capable of saying goes beyond what it wants to say; that it contains more than it contains; that perhaps an inexhaustible surplus of meaning remains … in all this materiality of the saying which is potentially signifying all the time. Exegesis would come to free, in these signs, a bewitching significance that smoulders beneath the characters or coils up in all this literature of letters” (BV 109). Lest one think Levinas’s figure of “smouldering” is a passing trope, he provides us with a footnote that, in fact, summarizes the entire approach (and Lithuanian tradition) of my own essay:
The word of the “rabbinical scholars,” the word setting out or commenting on the Torah, can be compared to the “glowing coals,” to use a phrase from the Pirqe Aboth in the Tractate of Principles of the Babylonian Talmud. A remarkable Talmudist, a disciple of the Gaon of Vilna (one of the last great masters of rabbinical Judaism, on the eve of the nineteenth century, the Jewish age “of Enlightenments”), Rabbi Hayyim Volozhiner, interpreted this remark approximately as follows: the coals light up by being blown on, the glow of the flame that thus comes alive depends on the interpreter’s length of breath. (BV 210)
Levinas’s comments on the Vilna Gaon’s student’s (Rav Chaim’s) words, in turn, comment on Abaye’s significant teaching on transcendence. Just who is this Abaye in the Talmud? Instead of repeating Levinas in his essay on a passage in tractate Makkot (which does not provide biographical information on Abaye), I would rather return to none other than the nurse in Jaques’s first stage of infancy. Recall that Jaques does not tell us what the nurse says; all we know is that the nurse has arms that hold the mewling and puking infant. Who is this nurse? What does she teach? She has no voice in Jaques’s stages, but, in fact, the role of this instructional and nurturing Nurse in the Talmud, in particular and with the greatest emphasis, the Nurse of Abaye, is the woman who not only is always called “mother” by Abaye, and is always quoted as teaching Abaye sayings that he then teaches to others,51 but this specific Nurse is the actual Nurse who taught Abaye our very mishnah (Avot 5:25) under discussion!
In a long passage in tractate Ketuboth (50a), the gemarah discusses the early education of the youth, in turn, clearly paralleling (with slight but significant deviations) Mishnah 5:25 in Avot. After commenting on the obligation of a father to use kindness, gentleness, and persuasion to teach his son until the boy reaches 12 years of age,52 and after explaining the years allotted for teaching Mikra and then the years allotted for teaching Mishnah (which all reads like intertextual glosses on our mishnah), the text states: “For Abaye said, ‘My mother [or simply ‘mother’—here meaning his Nurse] told me that a 6-year-old for Mikrah, a 10-year-old for Mishnah, a boy in his thirteenth year is ready for fasting a full day, and a girl in her twelfth year.”53 Rather than getting caught up in the differences between the Nurse’s precise comments and our mishnah’s sayings, let us note what we are witnessing: Abaye’s Nurse is the individual who taught him our mishnah. Abaye’s Nurse is the Other, the Teacher, who helps develop the ethical, legal, emotional, wise, and good character of Levinas’s Abaye—the very Abaye whom Levinas credits with infusing a new meaning of transcendence into ancient words. If only Jaques had allowed his Nurse to speak!
Now that I have, however heretically or anachronistically, placed Abaye’s Nurse within our living Lithuanism tradition of Jewish thought, I can return us to Rav Chaim’s last comments on Avot 5:26, knowing that Levinas himself has turned over Rav Chaim’s words on the Other’s transcendent teachings. The Gemarah in tractate Eruvin (54a-b) has a lengthy aggadic passage in the form of a series of sayings and teachings on learning Torah and reviewing (yet again) the words of Torah. At one point, the Gemarah quotes the line “her breasts will satisfy you at all times” (from Proverbs 5:19), and then asks, “Why are the words of Torah compared to a breast? This teaches us that just as with a breast each time an infant handles it, the infant finds milk in it, so too are the words of Torah: each time a person studies Torah words, he finds flavor in them” (Eruvin 54b). Rav Chaim (in Ruach Chaim on Avot 5:26) refers us to this talmudic discourse and declares, “the Talmud’s point is that a person can always find more profound meaning and great clarity in Torah learning whenever the person reviews the words.” This would ostensibly be the plain meaning of Ben Bag Bag’s saying to turn it over again and again. Rav Chaim, though, continues: this “simile can be understand on a more profound level. The breast is flesh, yet the baby extracts milk from it. In a similar way, one can learn one topic of Torah Law and apply it to a totally different area … There are many laws, such as the laws of sacrifice and ritual purity, which have no ostensible relevance today. Nevertheless, it is important to study these topics since one can learn a principle or logical calculation that can be applied to relevant laws.” (Ruach Chaim 5:26).54 Who would have thought that a Levinasian, Lithuanian mode of Jewish thought and ethics could help us understand the signs of transcendence in Shakespeare’s figures of Jaques, Adam, Orlando, the nurse, and, most importantly, Rosalind in Shakespeare?
Rosalind’s reply, or why “il me semble parfois que toute la philosphie n’est qu’une méditation de Shakespeare”—Levinas (TO 72)55
Shakespeare, though, is not Jaques. Shakespeare, I argue, does in fact position many players as respondents to Jaques. When Shakespeare (so to speak) plays Adam, performing an ethical interruption of Jaques’s melancholic sequence, he encourages us to view Duke Senior and the old Adam as teachers to the young Orlando. Both teach the laws of hospitality to the stranger, with Duke Senior even teaching someone who initially entered with hostility, ready to act violently toward others. Recall that in 2.7.88 Orlando enters with his sword drawn and threatens people, saying “He dies that touches any of this fruit / Till I and my affairs are answered” (2.7.99-100), perhaps expressing a pinnacle (or nadir) of the Self’s egoistic demands to others—the Self and its affairs must be served first, else all others will be killed. Upon entering the group with the burden of Adam, the weight of responsibility, Orlando encounters someone (Duke Senior) who gives food, comfort, and companionship without hesitation and without asking personal questions, even calling the stranger, Adam, a “venerable burden” (2.7.168) and offering physical assistance at the act’s end.
But it is Rosalind, I claim, that, at least in AYLI, plays the most important role of teacher for Orlando, for Shakespeare, and for us, the audience members who witness her multiple roles, positions, and teachings.56 Rosalind may be a companion to others, a role Jaques does not include in his stages for his one man’s world, but she does not first position herself in this role. While mourning for her exiled father, she tells Celia, “Unless you could teach me to forget a banished father you must not learn me how to remember any extraordinary pleasure” (1.2.3-6, emphasis added). Celia does not replace Rosalind’s father, but she does become Rosalind’s teacher, teaching her to exist in relationships with others, and for others.57 In this sense, Shakespeare dramatizes how Rosalind learns to be a teacher from Celia. In addition, her donning of male costume has historically shaken the audience’s inflexible notions of gender, sexuality, and performance. The obligation a daughter has to a father, that family relationship, when the father is not there, must turn into an infinite obligation for others as well, for new relationships that address new obligations. Once we witness AYLI as a complicated constellation of educational relationships between humans, where the Self must learn from the Other to move from self-contained personal tragedy to a more divine comedy of being for the Other, we can in fact better understand the dramatic change Orlando undergoes, from hating his brother, to suffering (literally) for his brother (who tried to kill him), and saving his brother’s life. In turn, his brother undergoes a religious conversion. The plot machinations matter less here than the realization that the irruption in the Self of the Other as Teacher transforms the Self out of narcissism. Orlando, I argue, has learned in the course of the play from his teacher Ganymede / Rosalind to acknowledge that his very existence depends on the infinite responsibility he has toward even those who would harm him. Just as Celia is the same-sex teacher of Rosalind at the start, Shakespeare confronts us with the fact that Orlando learns from Rosalind only when Rosalind becomes Ganymede. In Shakespeare’s time, a male actor played Rosalind, a woman who played a man (Ganymede) who played a woman (Orlando’s beloved). Is it any wonder that Shakespeare needed the comic form to enact the complex, transformative ethical relationships in education, especially when the mode is one teaching the wisdom of love? Not tragic, but comic forms better enable an audience to experience the destabilizing, yet activating human relationships that educate. For ethics in Levinas’s sense of the terms, I should probably add the word “passively” to my sense of activating. What’s activated, paradoxically, is the Self’s sudden passivity to the Other, not the active overpowering of or violence to the Other.
To illustrate with a famous historical anecdote, Anna Seward’s 1786 letter clearly expresses, when Sarah Siddons played Rosalind on stage, that Seward was disturbed with Rosalind’s male costume, since it produced an effect in Seward that made Rosalind/Siddons appear “neither male nor female.”58 But we can disagree with Seward, and understand that this effect could indeed signal a brilliant performance. Siddons was teaching the audience of her day something unsettling, something other than their self-same knowledge and comfort. Indeed, it may very well be that the famous lines “All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players” (2.7.139-140)—the very lines that begin Jaques’s speech—express the educational and transformative discomfort in our witnessing the fact of human players playing roles.59
Rosalind, no matter the clothing, remains the most influential educator in AYLI. For example, over a century ago, in 1905, S. A. Brooke realized that Rosalind’s intellect unmasks conventions, understands Jaques, and “lays him bare to himself.”60 Moreover, Mark Van Doren in 1939 reversed his readers’ expectations and claimed that Rosalind, “not Jaques, is the philosopher of the play. Hers is the only mind that never rests.”61 By the time we enter the 1970’s, we see Shakespeareans comparing Jaques to Rosalind in terms of the former’s Seven Ages speech. Hugh M. Richmond, for example, argues that Rosalind’s reversal of sex roles underscores her awareness of the “arbitrariness of the human lot, which the play commemorates so schematically in Jaques’s speech about the ages of man.”62 For all her lines and agency, Rosalind willingly has her very identity challenged throughout the play. Harold Bloom even moves Rosalind to a greater height than any other Shakespearean wit since she expresses “wit and energy” instead of just her will. For Harold Bloom, Rosalind’s humor, spirited and playful, challenges Jaques’s melancholic and depressing language. Jaques is simply “hopeless against her; when he avers ‘why ‘tis good to be sad and say nothing,’ she replies: ‘why, then, ‘tis good to be a post,’ and weeps away his boasts of melancholy experience.”63
But there is more to Rosalind than Bloom’s paean to her wit. She is not, to turn over Jaques’s lines yet again, a woman who is “merely” a player; rather, Rosalind embodies the Shakespearean teacher of the wisdom of love: she is the ethical exegete commenting critically on Jaques’s Ages. Given more lines than any other female figure, Rosalind spends most of the play teaching, with humor, kindness, and wit, until she realizes that playful gestures of teaching on Shakespeare’s stage must end, and the playful seriousness of teaching the wisdom of love (as is signified in her epilogue) must now be taken up (or, better, turned over) by each person in the audience.
In fact, if Jaques infuses this Shakespearean comedy with tragedy (MacFarland, it will be remembered, declares that Jaques’s Ages speech is “reclaimed from tragedy”)—then Rosalind, I would argue, infuses comedy into tragic forms. Indeed, according to Germaine Greer, “AYLI is the precursor of King Lear in a number of respects: the Forest of Arden is a harsh place and people who dwell there must make shift to survive.”64 The comic interruptions accompanying Rosalind’s wit (which disrupt potential tragedies) embody a staging of language that Shakespeareans have already noted in this play, but not necessarily in terms of ethical relations. For Susanne L. Wofford, since staged language is issued through a “proxy” and Rosalind’s “proxy” is Ganymede, performative speech acts on stage do not have the same agency as those same acts would have in real life. The staged wedding between Rosalind’s proxy (Ganymede) and Orlando is theatrical, but while staged, it may be participating in a “cultural debate about the power of father and of the state to control the language that gives such actions a social reality.” According to Wofford, this play’s cultural work (which emerges, in part, from performative speech acts) reinforces patriarchy. In fact, Wofford argues that Rosalind loses her tongue (which signifies power) once she removes her Ganyemede guise and become only female: “the only way to control such a woman is ‘to take her without her tongue’ [4.1.163-164].”65
Before taking another look at the wedding(s) in AYLI (with weddings, artificial or not, clearly emphasizing the obligation-filled relations of individuals to each other), we should note that Juliet Dusinberre argues that Rosalind’s witty and wise performance derives from a location of female power and control. Spanning an eclectic range of roles—“regality and rebelliousness, sovereignty and subversion”—Rosalind’s performances, in this reading, are crafted and controlled, especially when one remembers that Queen Elizabeth I’s “omnipotence [is] reflected in Shakespeare’s Rosalind.”66 With attention to the details in Rosalind’s epilogue, Dusinberre shows how Rosalind actually confirms Jaques’s concept of life-as-performance: “Rosalind’s epilogue highlights the ‘artificiality’ of the work of art … The player in the end evades the play by recognizing that the forest is in fact a sea of faces … But that movement out of the drama into the theatre reminds the audience that they too are actors on a stage from which there is no exit.”67 In other words, whereas Jaques tells his speech, Rosalind shows and emphasizes her and her audience’s performativity.
The artifice of the play comes to the fore often in this work of art, but perhaps especially so when Rosalind performs the fictional marriage ceremony in the guise of Ganymede. This scene, I contend, should be juxtaposed to the repeated line Rosalind utters at the play’s end, and with which I began this essay: “To you I give myself—for I am yours.”68 The marriages, lines, roles, genders, and gestures intertwine vertiginously. This influx of staging forms challenges the ostensibly self-contained roles and stages in Jaques’s Seven Ages.69
The playful performance of a near-marriage in 3.3 (between Touchstone and Audrey) echoes the marriage performance between the disguised Rosalind and Orlando (in which Celia dons the priest’s role). Though Rosalind might be teaching Orlando the ways of good companionship in a good marriage, we cannot underestimate the sexual desire and physical attraction that Orlando expresses toward Ganymede / Rosalind. Orlando might not be alone here. Dusinberre explores whether Jaques might be sexually attracted to Ganymede/ Rosalind. Indeed, as critics have argued, when Jaques spreads his cloak and offers it to Ganymede/ Rosalind, “some reviewers [see] a homosexual advance to the boy, Ganymede, others that Jaques had made a pass at the woman he perceived beneath the boy’s clothes.”70 Of course, the homoerotic dimension throughout AYLI most famously came to the fore in the Cheek by Jowl production, and Joe Dixon’s performance (as Jaques) did much more than simply suggest that he prefers male society.
Shakespeare, in other words, does not just present us with characters donning costumes and roles and thus challenging the static periods of Jaques’s speech. The genius that Levinas understands in Shakespeare comes through, I argue, in the ways each character performs for us the singular complexity of that individual’s ethical valences, convictions, and conflicts, in terms of just how one self should (not just “does” or ontologically “is,” but “should”) relate to each Other, justly, with a truthful staging of the suffering one’s Self undergoes for each Other. Rather than dismiss Jaques at the end of the play as simply not fitting into the comic genre’s ending, we can respond to the truth of his turmoil and realize that the individuals in the play have an ethical responsibility to suffer on Jaques’s behalf as well. Though writing about Proust, Levinas might as well be addressing the conventions of marriage and sexual desire in AYLI when he writes that Proust is “the analyst of a world of preciosity and artificiality, a world frozen in history, caught up in conventions more concrete that reality itself; a world that (remarkably) offers its inhabitants, by its very abstractions, those dramatic and profound situations that, in a Shakespeare or a Dostoyevsky, probed the humanity of man” (PN 99-100). This probing of the human takes place in the performances of both Jaques and Rosalind. We need the mix of tragic and comic forms to feel addressed, perhaps even commanded, by the play’s probing of the human—with all the conventions and artificiality of both the staging in forest and city.
From this perspective, I would argue that while Rosalind as Orlando’s teacher might be seen as successful (hence, a more comic form might fit the ending here), Rosalind as Jaques’s teacher might be seen as one of failure (hence, a more tragic form might fit the narrative structure here). Rosalind as teacher sees the potential in Orlando, but perhaps she sees (along with many members of the audience) that Jaques is beyond education. Levinas recalls reading in a book (by a rabbinic scholar) “that the slightest question put by a novice pupil to his schoolmaster constitutes an ineluctable articulation of the Revelation which was heard at Sinai” (BV 134). Being too much involved in her own Self’s desires for Orlando might stop Rosalind, this play’s master teacher, from hearing any kind of revelatory cry from Jaques. Is it not Jaques who counsels Touchstone, saying “Get you to church, and have a good priest that can tell you what marriage is” (3.3.77-79)? Jaques could have played a fictional role at this performative moment (enacting a role in his culture’s ritual form of marriage), but instead tries to teach. True. When we juxtapose Jaques directly with Rosalind, we find him to be the near epitome of the Self-willed loner. However, perhaps Shakespeare is suggesting that the melancholy soul ends the play seeking exile partly because each of the other characters has not suffered enough on Jaques’s behalf. Even in the middle of the play, we can hear the cry of Jaques that sounds with the potential for evil violence, but with the potential to be taught otherwise as well. When Jaques enters with Orlando in 3.2 (with Celia and Rosalind/Ganymede there on stage as well), Jaques says “I thank you for your company but, good faith, I had as lief have been myself alone” (3.2.246-47). To be myself alone—is there a better speech act to perform a near perfect Shakespearean historical or tragic personification of wicked villainy? From the ethical trajectory I have been tracing throughout this essay, this line, moreover, explains why Shakespeare, for Levinas, probes the human so brilliantly. We cannot have a performance of a divine comedy without a specific, grounded figure expressing (in multiple forms) the potential for violence and harm in the ontological obsession with the Self’s solitary existence (to desire to be myself alone). Without a good teacher, the Self is doomed to remain self-enclosed, self-perpetuating; each stage of life is self-contained. In this reading, Rosalind and audience members alike have not accepted the infinite responsibility that expresses ethical imperatives. Shakespeare is indeed probing our very humanity in ways still untold.71
The theatre of desire that playfully clothes some, but leaves others unattended in their needs, brings us precisely to the lines with which I began this essay. Rosalind’s refrain has a powerful stage history. Indeed, depending on the actor or the actress playing the role, we encounter a different dimension of meaning in the refrain. When Seward describes Siddons’s delivery of the same line (“To you I give myself—for I am yours”) to the Duke and Orlando, she notes the markedly different tone used in each line. Seward transcribes the lines in the letter, but italicizes the words “you” and “yours” in the lines spoken to Orlando to characterize the alteration in the actress’s tone: “The marked difference of her look and voice in repeating that line, and particularly the last word of it, was inimitably striking. The tender joy of filial love was in the first; the whole soul of enamoured transport in the second.”72 Two different kinds of love, of relationships, of giving oneself to another, come across in the utterance of the same logos.
Wofford, though, claims that the refrain underscores patriarchal possession and operates tautologically: “if I am yours, then there is no sense in which I am actually ‘giving’ you something you did not already possess.”73 This is a failed speech act on stage because it enacts no real change. Rosalind was possessed by the men before she gave herself to them. Outside the Globe Theatre, this statement works to reinforce patriarchy. However, there appears to be a questionable presupposition here. Why must a Subject who is an “I,” a Self who is whole, be the only one who can properly perform, with real agency, a speech act that has real meaning? Ethically, in terms of the infinite responsibility that demands of the Self a passivity before the other in the ethical relationship, the Self is traumatized, shattered of illusions of wholeness, yet must utter and perform real speech acts for the Other. Wofford may be moving closer to this position near the end of her analysis when she claims that the repeated marriage performatives in Acts 4 and 5 suggest a “disruptive cultural statement: that all performatives are staged, pronounced by multiple and troped selves.”74 This way of describing the disruption, though, leaves out that humanness that Levinas claims Shakespeare probes, the real human ethical demands and ramifications that burden a real human Self.
When Michael Hattaway focuses on gender and nuptial in AYLI, he claims, when “it is realized that, in giving herself in marriage to Orlando, Rosalind loses the mastery she possessed in the forest … a feeling may arise that Shakespeare is not indicating how women might create autonomy for themselves but is dramatizing the power of patriarchy and masculine persuasiveness.”75 But he does not leave the issue with that proclamation. Instead, Hattaway suggests that Shakespeare purposely included the following lines in Rosalind’s Epilogue: “I charge you, O women for the love you bear to women … that between you and the women the play may please” (9-10). Rosalind knows that her audience will react differently to the play, and, for Hattaway, each audience member should, as Rosalind “charges,” perceive in Rosalind’s actions whatever pleases them better. Rosalind’s act of giving herself away can be perceived as “usurping the patriarchal role.” Depending on how each audience member “likes it” (as you like it), Rosalind’s refrain contains the potential to be read as submissive, as agency-filled, or as a combination of both.76
William Scott continues Wofford’s attention to performative forms in AYLI, stressing “vows” in the play. For example, in the pretend/ real marriage between Orlando and Ganymede/Rosalind in 4.1, Rosalind teaches Orlando to say “I take thee, Rosalind” rather than utter “I will,” which operates more along the lines of an uncertain promise in future tense. For Scott, “as both a performative speech act and a theatricalization of desire, the marriage is both true and fictional as once.”77 The form of the marriage is not a joke since it anticipates the later nuptials. Here, Rosalind uses the word “if” to qualify the condition of her vow, granting permission to use deception in the performance. Wofford had argued that Rosalind’s declaration in Act 5 is tautological because the woman was the possession of the males to begin with. But, Scott rejoins, that while Rosalind the woman might have been theirs, Ganymede “did not belong to them and still has the power of free action.” For Scott, Rosalind intentionally factures the integrity of the speech act to retain this ability. In this reading then, Rosalind uses non-whole speech acts to “accomplish her purposes.”78 I would add that just as Celia opens Rosalind up to the teaching possibility of enlarging the responsibility of family relations to others beyond biology, so too, Rosalind as Ganymede opens herself and Orlando to the possibility of enlarging new family obligations beyond blood lines. Ganymede teaches him (her?) to love Orlando, but tragically, I argue, Rosalind does not address the infinite ethical responsibility required to teach Jaques (and others in their responses to Jaques) how to move from the exile in the abandoned cave (where he goes at the play’s end) to a form of desire and love that could transcend his selfsame tragic adventure. For all of the intellect and wit of Rosalind, for all of her teaching, Shakespeare, with the figure of Jaques who has desires but who leaves alone, unattended, reveals both the transcendence and the missed opportunity of achieving that transcendence in ethical relationships. The mix of tragic and comic forms marks a proximity to Levinas’s claim about the desire for the Good, for the ethical adventure of “divine comedy.”79 In “God and Philosophy” Levinas writes, the “negativity of the in of the Infinite—otherwise than being, divine comedy—hollows out a desire which cannot be filled … withdraws from its satisfaction in the measure that it approaches the desirable … It is a desire that is beyond satisfaction” (BPW 139). The negativity of the “in” of the Infinite, the divine comedy of metaphysical desire otherwise than being addresses what might be the human part of what “Shakespeare … probed [in] the humanity of man” (PN 100).
Shakespeare stages particular humans who seek particular others in specific historical situations, yet he also presents to us a constant engagement with a human metaphysical and physical desire for a messianic time, for a transcendence beyond being. AYLI stages educational demands involved in each Self’s acts of “substitution” (of saving the brother who seeks to kill the Self before self-interest, of fleeing a tyrannical father for the sake of the goodness of the Other). If we blow on the coals of the sayings of the Mishnah, if we turn over the words, gestures, staging, and desires in Shakespeare’s divine comedy, we come in proximity to the transcendence that enflames the time of ethical relationship. We risk getting burned, getting rejected, losing family. But we also open ourselves to the possible giving of warm fire and of the heat between bodies. The risks and incompleteness of each performance suggests a precarious kind of humanity, almost a necessary fallibility. That is, perhaps, Rosalind’s imperfections, her performative framing of self and other relationships between audience and play, and between audience and character, bespeak an educational challenge: to instill, or reawaken, an ethical obligation in the audience.
I have returned to the saying of Levinas yet again, but the comic adventures of this essay do not exactly bring us home again. Among the images that Samuel Chew lists as preceding Shakespeare’s day that depicted the Ages of Human Life are two Memento Mori artworks. The 1540 Memento Mori by Jörg Breu the Younger depicts human life from infancy to old age, and it includes an image of the Last Judgment. The Memento Mori print by Hans Schaufelein depicts a circular image of the ages that includes the theme of companionship (which Jaques, recall, leaves out).80 Perhaps Levinas’s antipathy to art comments on the “memento mori” of artworks. The Latin motto, and we are often told, all art, performs and proclaims “remember that you [meaning the Self] will die.” Ethical exegetes, whether those embracing Shakespeare or a Lithuanian tradition of meta-commentary or the divine comedy of each, might adjust (or unsay) this thematic Said by saying with a slight variation in the repetition, “remember that the other will die.” As Levinas writes, “Henceforth we must return to what was strongest in rabbinical exegesis. This exegesis made the text speak.… [It] takes the text to be a source of teaching” (DF 220). What a different kind of academic “source” research! Writing ethical criticism, educating with Nurses and Ganymedes, “consists in saving the text from being turned into a mere book—that is to say, just a thing—and in once more allowing it to resonate with the great and living voice of teaching” (DF 220). An ethics of reading (mikra and Shakespeare) and ethical reading require demanding education and complexity of hermeneutic intrigue; but, simultaneously, simply utter again and again: the ethical time and infinite obligations of human relationships. When reading within Levinas’s Lithuanian mode of living for the other, it “is as if the verse were saying over and over: ‘Interpret me’” (RB 240).What divine comedy indeed.
Notes
1 I stage my commentary on Levinas and Shakespeare as a continual giving of oneself in proximity to, or confrontation with, pedagogical transmission and renewed readings. Levinas himself uses the phrase “to give oneself” in the context of educational dissemination: “Transmission thus involves a teaching which is already outlined in the very receptivity for learning it. Receptivity is prolonged: true learning consists in receiving the lesson so deeply that it becomes a necessity to give oneself to the other” (BV 79-80, emphasis added). Levinas also prefaces the second quoted passage (on reading and commentaries) with a hermeneutic claim on lessons: “But the contribution of each person and period is confronted with the lessons from everyone else, and from the whole of the past” (BV xiii).
2 See the opening of Marjorie Garber’s Coming of Age in Shakespeare (New York and London: Methuen, 1981).
3 J. W. Draper, “Jacques’ ‘Seven Ages’ and Bartholomaeus Anglicus,” Modern Language Notes 54 (1939): 273, emphasis added. See also the brilliant introduction to the world(s) of Shakespeare in David Bevington’s aptly titled Shakespeare: The Seven Ages of Human Experience. Bevington’s book is a recent example of a sustained study that uses the seven ages as the organizing principle for its chapters. Unless I have missed a reference, though, I cannot find any acknowledgement of a clear precursor to another modern book, John Evans’s The Progress of Human Life: Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man, which uses the seven ages as the organizing principle for its chapters. Religious and Biblical references fill Evans’s pages. See David Bevington, Shakespeare: The Seven Ages of Human Experience, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005); and John Evans, Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man: Or, the Progress of Human Life (1818), rept. (Lexington, KY: ULAN Press, 2014).
4 While recent works by Jonathan Gil Harris and Neema Parvini address a range of contemporary theories, neither adequately recognize the potential significance of Levinasian criticism. See Jonathan Gil Harris, Shakespeare and Literary Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Neema Parvini, Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory: New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012). One of the best recent works on AYLI relies on the work of Stanley Cavell to explore much of the comedy, but the author does not allude to Levinas, the Talmud, or any form of Rabbinics: see Derek Gottlieb’s Skepticism and Belonging in Shakespeare’s Comedy (Routledge, 2016). Contrast the dearth of Rabbinics in contemporary Shakespeare criticism with the excellent Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity by Jeffrey S. Shoulson (New York: Columbia Univeristy Press, 2001).
5 The richest work to date on Shakespeare and Jewish representation remains James Shapiro’s Shakespeare and the Jews, but for all that is addressed in that work, there is no engagement with Levinas in particular, with Rabbinic hermeneutics in general, or, in fact, with any exposition of As You Like It. I’m left wondering if Jewish thought in relation to Shakespeare need be doomed to tragic thoughts only. This is really the only challenge I would pose to the otherwise wonderful (and needed) piece by Steven Shankman on “The Saying, the Said, and the Betrayal of Mercy in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.” Indeed, I am persuaded by Shankman’s ethical criticism here, but I think we can pick up where Shankman left off, and explore the ways Shakespeare and Levinas, taken together, also take us to modes of thought other than representations of anti-semitism or what Jewish identity is (which are by no means settled issues or fully explored locations of conflict). See James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); and Steven Shankman, “The Saying, the Said, and the Betrayal of Mercy in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice,” Other Others: Levinas, Literature, and Transcultural Studies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 93-106. Of note in this context is the superb Shylock is Shakespeare by Kenneth Gross (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); however, the reception history of Shylock is precisely what I do not want to address in this essay.
6 This is a contestable claim since several Levinasians might disagree with my characterization here. On this topic, see Oona Ajzenstat, Driven Back to the Text: The Premodern Sources of Levinas’ Postmodernism (Duquesne, 2001), Michael Fagenblat, A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas’s Philosophy of Judaism (Stanford, 2010), Judith Friedlander, Vilna on the Seine: Jewish Intellectuals in France Since 1968 (Yale, 1990), and Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics (Cornell, 2005). My selection of Rabbinic figures in this essay attests to at least one potential Luthianian strain in Levinasian thought.
7 Pirkei Avot is variously called Ethics of the Fathers, Ethics of the Sages, Sayings of the Fathers, or Chapters of the Fathers. In Talmudic discourse, it is known simply as Avot. It is unique in all Talmudic discourses since there is no accompanying Gemarah commenting on it. Instead of being a series of legal disputations, or halakhic discourses, Avot is conspicously a work of mussar, ethics, moral comportment, self-development, character traits, principle values, and common sayings. A “perek” is a chapter, and a single mishnah is one section or pargraph in a chapter.
8 Is it any wonder that Levinas himself quotes from Pirkei Avot in the essay “Antihumanism and Education,” found in DF?
9 As many critics have noted, Levinas holds Rabbi Haayim of Volozhin in high esteem, referring often to the latter’s Nefesh HaChayim (Soul of Life). However, as Levinas himself was well aware, Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin also commented extensively on the sayings in Pirkei Avot, and his trenchant engagement with those ancient Rabbinic ethical sayings reads precisely like what Levinas seeks of ethical criticism (especially from the critic of artworks). Indeed, many of Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin’s comments on Pirkei Avot were published in a slim volume called Ruach Chayim.
10 This Levinasian emphasis actually emanates from a saying in Pirkei Avot. In the tenth mishnah of the second chapter, Rabbi Eliezer says to “warm yourself beside the fire of the Sages; but beware of their glowing coals lest you be burned … all their words are like coals of fire.” This serious enterprise requires ongoing discipline, but seriousness need not be confined to tragedy (as if the greatness of Shakespeare for Levinas were only to be found in tragedies), or moralism (as if Levinas provides us with a moral theory to apply), or sayings detached from the specific moments of people performing what is actually said, or even to Scripture.
11 David Scott Kastan and Nancy Vickers present the best examples here of critics who sharply seek to find the source for every phrase. They show how a general sense of a Petrarchan lover is an insufficient source for Shakespeare (or for Shakespeareans?). According to them, Maurice Sceve and the influential “tradition of the blazon anatomique” is a more complete and conclusive (re)source. The influence of Kastan and Vickers can be seen in David Ormerod’s “Orlando, Jaques, and Maurice Sceve,” which continues the critical source hunting of the Shakespearean scholar, scouring Sceve’s works to continue Kastan and Vicker’s enterprise (only now, in terms of amorous dizains). See David Scott Kastan and Nancy J. Vickers, “Shakespeare, Sceve and a Woeful Ballad,” Notes and Queries 27 (1980): 165-166; and David Ormerod, “Orlando, Jaques, and Maurice Sceve,” Notes and Queries 36 (1989): 325-327.
12 Except perhaps for the decaying self, but that is only if the conjunction “and” in “and mere oblivion” links the aged second childhood with oblivion; the “and” might also suggest the part of the sequence, as in “and then there’s nothing.”
13 David Bevington offers a brief but fascinating description of “a sixteenth-century German woodcut that shows seven female figures proceeding from child to mature woman to ageing dowager” (4). He also mentions an 1827 poem by Agnes Strickland called “Seven Ages of Woman.” But Bevington does not seek to push the point further, content to comment that Shakespeare “seems to have confronted the problem of understanding the profound differences in gender that separate men and women” (5). While Bevington insightfully claims that “Jaques’ speech, to be fully understood, must be read in the context of a scene in which human charity and forgiveness do much to atone for Jaques’ witty indictment of the existential meaninglessness of human existence” (6), he accepts the Seven Ages of Man speech as “a blueprint for Shakespeare’s dramatic portraiture of the crazy, funny, sad life of mortals on this earth” (6). Instead of interpreting the Seven Ages as a “blueprint,” I highlight the relevance of Jewish ethical thought to suggest that we revise Bevington’s template regarding the difference between Shakespeare’s portrayals of Tanakh and the New Testament. See, for instance, the moment when Bevington discusses Hamlet’s dilemma as one of knowing “the moral basis of what action he should take. Two great systems of thought and theology bear down on him: revenge, which contains its own consistent ethic of an eye for an eye, and the Christian ideology to which he was born” (138). In this model, the rich Jewish tradition of interpreting the biblical “an eye for an eye” becomes simply “revenge,” or only the implied opposite of “the Christian ideology.” This approach does not do sufficient justice to any great thought or theology. Levinas’ writings on ethics do not, I would claim, endorse this kind of critical “moral basis.” See Bevington, Shakespeare: The Seven Ages of Human Experience. For a marvelous reading of forgiveness in Shakespeare (but one that does not address AYLI, Levinas, or Rabbinics) see Sarah Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Cornell, 2011).
14 Indeed, for Levinas, to welcome entails going beyond pedagogical reception: “To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression … It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught. The relation to the Other, or Conversation, is a non-allergic relation, an ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a teaching” (TI 51, emphasis added). If we acknowledge, address, and welcome role-playing, transmission of education, and performance in Shakespeare, we can intensify what “to be taught” and “an ethical relation” might mean beyond exclusively linguistic conversation.
15 Samuel C. Chew, “This Strange Eventful History,” Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies (1948): 165.
16 Cecil C. Seronsy, “The Seven Ages of Man Again,” Shakespeare Quarterly 4 (1953): 364, 365.
17 In 1976, Bradford revisits the notion that Shakespeare’s source lies in the Ptolemaic system (with the seven planetary spheres corresponding to stages of human existence). Bradford claims that Shakespeare distorts the Ptolemaic scheme by altering the arrangement of ages to fit Jaques’s nihilistic view of existence: Jaques’s “distortions begin with the fourth age …” (174). For Bradford, Shakespeare omits the solar age, which is the most productive age, and supplants it with Mars, the solider’s age. True to the Self’s self-interestedness, it makes sense that the soldier’s age signifies the most violence done to others, but even in a productive age, if focused only on the Self’s accomplishments, does not address the ethical obligations to Others, and the trauma experienced by the Self when encountering an Other. In other words, Bradford’s claim that Shakespeare disrupts the Ptolemaic order to stress Jaques’s position that “human life is without meaning, purpose, or value” (175), might be accurate, and his stress that Shakespeare’s own view is not Jaques’ might also be accurate, but the critic’s drive to find the source blocks the moral adventure that AYLI performs from addressing us. See Alan Taylor Bradford, “Jacques’ Distortion of the Seven-Ages Paradigm,” Shakespeare Quarterly 27 (1976): 171-176.
18 Qtd in A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: As You Like It, ed. Richard Knowles (New York: Modern Language Association, 1977), 583.
19 In 1981, Allen turns back to the notion that “there is no single source, but a multitude of … analogues” (332), but instead of exploring a potential Rabbinic “analogue,” the Shakespearean critic situates Jaques’s Seven Ages in a Renaissance controversy: astrological determinism versus Neoplatonic freedom. For Allen, Jaques’s position affirms pessimistic astrological determinism; humans are helpless, fettered by fate. This historical positioning of Jaques within a philosophical debate in the Renaissance allows Allen to argue against Bradford’s claim that Jaques’s speech functions to affirm nihilism, since “no Elizabethan would have understood the speech in these terms” (342). Rather, Jaques’s expressed system exudes “the familiar pessimistic determinism of the radical astrological viewpoint which the Neoplatonists had fought with such ardor” (345). See Michael J. B. Allen, “Jacques Against the Seven Ages of the Proclan Man.” Modern Language Quarterly 42 (1981): 331-346.
20 See previous note. Allen explains Neoplatonic freedom in terms of intellectual freedom and free will.
21 Of note here is Edgecombe’s “Lucretius and the ‘Seven Ages of Man’” because it changes the critical focus from an orientation on the “seven-act division of human life … [to the contents of each act, which suggests] the older and separate topos of human development and regression.” It turns out that Lucretius also “draws a line of succession and return between the juveline and the senile.” Even the language of Lucretius’s “Omnia deficient” translates cleary into Jaques’s “sans everything.” Observing linguistic parallels, rather than only noting parallel sequences, leads Edecombe to the similarity between the infant and the second childhood, in particular, “the disabilities of age.” While compelling, this account leaves out any performed ethical responsibilites, which heightens the moral valence of AYLI for the ethical critic, and undescores the Self’s self-perpetuation, the self-sameness that leads to a lack of actual children (other than the Self) mentioned in the Ages. See Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, “Lucretius and the ‘Seven Ages of Man,’” Shakespeare Newsletter 48 (1998): 47.
22 Rather than seeking to find the precise sources for each words and phrase, MacFarland reads Jaques’s Seven Ages as “reclaimed from tragedy,” not comedy. He notes that Jaques’s structures depict the “vanity of human life in terms of social roles … rather than in terms of individual agonies.” Indeed, MacFarland nicely points out that Jaques’s “generalities of his cynical seven ages speech do not relate to the actuality around him.” For example, Adam “is not ‘sans everything,’ but full of ‘pure love.’” In his speech, therefore, Jaques misunderstands “human community and mutual concern.” See Thomas MacFarland, “For Other than for Dancing Measures: The Complications of As You Like It,” in Modern Critical Interpretations: William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988), 33-35.
23 From a 1916 sermon delivered at the Bayswater Synagogue commemorating the Tercentenary passing of Shakespeare. My essay commemorates the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, but it also honors the sermon delivered one hundred years ago, a speech that refers to Shakespeare “as a teacher of ethics, as a moral philosopher” (4) and one that explicitly cites Avot, but remarkably never alludes to the pedagogical Mishnah quoted below. Instead, the sermon juxtaposes the Seven Ages in AYLI to a Midrash on Koheleth, which also refers to “ages through which man passes” (5).
24 He refers to various mishanyot from Avot throughout his writings.
25 The history of this specific mishnah presents an analogue to the history of manuscript variations in Shakespeare scholarship. Although at the time of Levinas’s writings, all editions of Avot would have published this mishnah, and would have placed it toward the end of the fifth chapter, nearly everything about it, from who utters the words, to its publication status, to its precise placement in the tractate, is subject to discussion in rabbinic thought. Some Rabbinic authorities claim that the speaker in this mishnah is Shmuel HaKatan (see Tosefot Yom Tov and Midrash Shmuel). If true, then this mishnah might not belong, historically, in this entire tractate; rather, a later Rabbinic redactor might have added it to the collection of sayings. Some editions, though, position a mishnah found in chapter 4 at this point, since the speaker there is Shmuel HaKatan, who was famous for proclaiming a Biblical saying from Proverbs (24:17-18), a Levinasian point in fact: “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles.” Of importance here is the intertextual and ethical import of this saying. The mishnah quotes what Rabbis were famous for saying, and here, this Rabbi was famous not for innovating a saying, but for speaking words from the Bible; precisely because he always spoke this verse, it became his saying! Other Rabbinic authorities claim that the speaker of our mishnah is Rabbi Yehudah ben Tema, so logically this mishnah should follow the immediately preceding mishnayot (in chapter five) since those were sayings from Rabbi Yehudah ben Tema as well. There are still other editions that do not appear to have contained this mishnah at all. For example, Maimonides, probably one of the most famous and influential Jewish exegetes and philosophers, wrote a commentary on Avot that has become so much a part of Jewish tradition that it is published in nearly every edition of the Talmud; yet Maimonides has no comment to make on this specific mishnah since he did not seem to have this mishnah in his verion of the tractate. Even in contemporary versions and translations, the exact number and placement of this mishnah in the fifth perek remains unclear. It is 5:25 in some publication, 5:21 in others. See Tosefot Yom Tov, Mishnayout Tiferet Yisrael (New York: Pardes, 1953); Midrash Shmuel (New York: Keter, 1944); Moses Maimonides, Commentary on Avot, in Talmud Bavli (Vilna, Poland: Rom, 1928). Of less significance to the claims in my essay is the fact that the specific Mishnah quoted here appears in its immediate context as one in an extended sequence of maxims that adhere to a numerical logic.
26 This is not the occasion to develop the importance culturally of this mishnah, but just to note the thick description needed to address the integral role this mishnah plays in Jewish thought. I should add that this mishnah was turned into poetry by Solomon ben Isaac Levi in his “Leiv Abot” (“The Heart of the Fathers”), published in the sixteenth century. The famous Abraham Ibn Ezra also wrote a poem based on this mishnah: “Mortal man should always remember his origin.” Indeed, this poem has been repeatedly published (and referenced by Abarbanel and others). The poem has even become part of several Sephardic communities’ liturgy.
27 Meiri, for example, claims that this mishnah actually gives parents an education program to teach their children at the right psychological and educational periods. For the Meiri, this mishnah is what might be called a stimulus package, coaching the parents to receive proper education in proper periods. The education of the child starts before the child; it begins with the education of the parent. See Meiri, Beit Habechirah (New York: Waxman, Chochmat Yisrael, 1944).
28 Recall the opening scene of AYLI in which Orlando tells Oliver, “My father charged you in his will to give me good education” (1.1.62-64).
29 Many Rabbinic sources point to the age of three or four as the time to start educating the child in reading (and hence, cultural) practices. (See Vayikra Rabbah on Leviticus 19:23-25.) Rashi, whom Levinas often invokes as an exemplary commentator, claims that parents should teach their children the alphabet when the children turn four, so that when five, the children could learn the Biblical texts. It is paramount to emphasize again that this means the responsibilties of the children are placed on the parents. The Midrash Tanchuma, Kedoshim 14 (and the Yalkut Shimoni) adds that when the Bible says “in the fourth year all its fruit shall be holy” this means that in the fourth year of life, the child is to be consecrated to the Torah by his father. For a policy of educators (for admission age to school) see tractate Ketubot 50a. See Midrash Tanchuma (New York: Sefer, 1946); and Yalkut Shimoni (New York: Horeb, 1926).
30 See tractate Sukkah 42a, which states that a father should begin teaching his son Bible as soon as the son starts speaking.
31 As the Talmud puts it in Kiddushin 29a, “A father is obligated to have his son circumcised, to redeem him (if a first born), to have him taught Torah, to get him married, and to have him taught a vocation.” In fact, the Gemara goes on to say that if a father does not teach his child a vocation, it is as if the father has taught the child to engage in banditry! Before our mishnah lists its stages of prerequisites (one cannot just encounter Talmud), there is already a pre-text for us to understand, a pre-discourse replete with obligations on the parent to prepare for the young child’s prerequisites.
32 The overlapping stages ensure that at the end of five years devoted to studying the Mishnah, the child has also devoted ten years to the Bible. This time has been devoted not only to the child’s study of the Written Law, but, perhaps more importantly, to the child’s growing intimacy with the Oral Torah.
33 With a sensitivity to bodily transformation as well, the speaker now states what we currently take for granted in Jewish cultures: at the age of 13, a boy suddenly becomes commanded, obligated to observe all the commandments. In Jewish traditon, a girl matures earlier and her age of obligation begins at 12. However, only a supportive educational background will ground the teenager in ways that help the person embrace all the responsibilities now incumbent on the maturing Self. Notice how even at this point, the Self’s infinite obligations from outside (from an ethical height) the Self is still not ready for any engagement with the Talmud, the set of texts that Levinas spent so many years addressing.
34 See Vilna Gaon, in Sefer Mesechet Avot biur Moran HaGaon Hachasid HaAmiti Rabbeinu Eliyahu Mi’vilna U’Peirush Ruach Chayim Hei’HaGaon Hachasid Rebbeinu Chayim Mi’Volozhin (Jerusalem, 1903). In this essay, I am inviting readers to perform a similar kind of Levinasian confrontation with Shakespeare.
35 That’s it. What kind of commentary is this? One that invites research and innovation. If we look at Chullin 24a we will find a gemarah that, in turn, names the Biblical verse from Numbers chapter 8: “from 25 years old and upward.” However, the gemarah points out in dialectic manner, another biblical verse says “from 30 years old and upward.” These verses concern the Levites who are to serve in the Tabernacle (and the Beit HaMikdash). The answer to this apparent contradiction is that the five year period (from 25 to 30) is a period of training and learning. In addition, the Gra adds that if by five years, the student cannot properly be trained in the specific field of study, then the student will not succeed in that specific field. The inference being that one will have to shift vocations.
36 The Gra’s gloss on the age of thirteen enacts halakhic (“legal”) thinking. At thirteen, a boy is ready to accept upon himself, not just the yoke of commandments, but the accompanying punishments that are part of the commandments. The Gra writes that the word ish (“man”) [not the word katan (“minor”)] is written by onshim (“punishments”) and by other Mitzvot. Here the Gra tersely references the entire narrative from Genesis of the brothers Shimon and Levi and their enactment of punishment (by sword) on Shechem for the rape of their sister Dinah. The two sons of Yaakov in this verse are called ish in the phrase “each man his sword” (Genesis 34:25). The Midrash on this verse (Midrash Rabbah 53:11) states that the brothers were thirteen, so they are called men. As importantly, the Gra does not mention what other commentaries say, names this age is a tradition given by God to Moshe at Mount Sinai. [See, for example, the Teshuvat HaRosh (at the start of section 16). Rashi adds that physically the child is now presenting signs of puberty.] It is not that the Gra might disagree with this approach; rather, that is not the hermeneutic and education mode of his commentary. See Teshuvat HaRosh, She’eilot U’Teshuvot HaRosh (Venice, 1586).
37 Hence, the single word onshim takes us back to Numbers 5:6 which restricts liability for transgressing commandments to “men and women,” logically removing minors from such punishments. Since, by way of midrash and mathematical calculation (and tractate Megillah 17a), the Gra holds that Levi was thirteen at the time “each man to his sword” (Genesis 34:25), punishments by means of an earthly court do not fall on someone who is not yet thirteen. I mention “earthly court” punishments, because heavenly punishment does not fall until one is twenty years old. For additional commentary on the calculations involved here, see Tosefot Yom Tov. The word onesh (“punishment”) is well chosen by the Gra for that is precisely the focus on the blessing that a Father is obligated to recite when his son turns thirteen. The father says “Blessed are You, O Lord … who has freed me from the punishment of this one.” The father performs this blessing aloud to declare that as of this moment, whatever punishments the child deserves (due to violations of commandments) are forevermore the child’s to receive. By implication, prior to thirteen, the Self of the Father incurred all the punishments for the child’s transgressions. The father has suffered for the Other. The maturation of the child involves the son now accepting all obligations and concomitant punishments. See Tosefot Yom Tov, Mishnayot Tiferet Yisrael (New York: Pardes, 1953).
38 See tractate Kiddushin 29b.
39 The Gra has no gloss on eighteen, but Rashi connects the number eighteen and marriage to the number of times Adam’s name appears before Eve. The first time is to name the human; the other eighteen times is a Biblical hint to the role of marriage when a person turns eighteen. See Mikraot Gedolot (London: Horeb, 1948). See also Tosefot Yom Tov, Mishnayot Tiferet Yisrael.
40 See Numbers 14:29, Rashi and Tosefot Yom Tov (for the derivation of God punishing only those over twenty years old).
41 The Gra, always seeking to turn the Torah over again, tersely refers us to Number 1:3: “from twenty years old and up, everyone who goes out to the legion.” In other words, for the Gra, service to the nation’s military must wait until the individual twenty, with years of Torah study underway, with at least a full year of enjoyment with a spouse.
42 A slightly more positive approach comes from the Meiri. He suggests that if one’s intelligence is intact in some meaningful way, though the body has deteriorated, one can still, even at 100, pray to God. A similar positive reading is provided by the Midrash Shmuel—basically, the mishnah’s statement of 100 is a wake up call to repent of one’s sin. Though better to repent while one’s body and mind desire and are capable of sin, still it is never too late to repent (as the saying goes). Once one dies, repentance is no longer possible. See Meiri, Beit Habechirah.
43 See Abarbanel, for example. That Jewish thought in Rabbinic teaching does not always embrace such a negative attitude (or value) can be seen in (mishnah) tractate Kinnim 3:6, which explicitly declares that the individual of great Torah wisdom grows wiser with age. That mishnah, though not describing the ordinary person, clearly provides a much more explicitly welcoming embrace of continual growth in learning (but one based on greatness in wisdom in past stages of personal history). See Abarbanel, Nachalat Avot (New York: Silverman, 1953).
44 Education, especially of children, is clearly a primary value in this mishnah, and active pursuit of sacred responsibilities is marked off in this curriculum of sorts. Disputations, legal hermeneutics, begin at a very early age. Ethical comportment to others and to a heightened sense of textual traditions are also of primary value here. Each stage states a potential that one should use diligently.
45 Is the Gra’s last word “for blessing” ironic? Why move to a verse in the prophetic book of Isaiah?
46 This is the way the classic commentator the Radak explains the verse. See Mikraot Gedolot.
47 Levinas’s comment on the activity of learning Torah (and the continued transmission of commentaries)—“The Torah not only reproduces what was taught yesterday, it is read according to tomorrow; it does not stop at the representations of what yesterday and today goes by the name of present” (In The Time of Nations 66)—can, in fact, indicate a “tomorrow” that includes what will be welcomed well beyond the next 24 hours … A futural pedagogical transmission of welcoming other teachings infuses Torah education.
48 Rashi explains the acronym on Kiddushin 32b. See also Nedarim 41a (on acquiring wisdom). For critics who enjoy textual variants, they might want to note that some manuscripts of our mishnah (in Avot) actually state ben shishim le’chachmah (“a 60-year-old for wisdom”). See Mikraot Gedolot.
49 The Gra’s prize pupil was none other than Rav Chaim Volozhin, the author of Nefesh HaChayim, the book Levinas wrote about (and even wrote the preface for the French edition). We also have the slim volume of commentary on Avot by Rav Chaim Volozhin called Ruach Chaim. Amazingly, as we read this running commentary, we will find no explicit exegesis directly on our mishnah (5:25); but this omission is not a textual variant issue, for the start of Rav Chaim’s next commentary (on 5:26), proves that he had our edition: “The previous mishnah [5:25] taught above that a five-year-old begins mikra and a fifteen-year-old begins Talmud. [Ben Bag Bag] says here [5:26] that once one begins studying Talmud, there is no shiur, no “limit” [to learning and obligation] kol yemei chayav (“all the days of one’s life”).
50 Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin, Nefesh HaChaim (Vilna, 1824), 3:1.
51 See tractate Kiddushin 31b, in which the gemarah explains that whenever Abaye says “my mother says,” he refers to his Nurse (marbintay) because his Nurse raised him, educated him, helped him mature to become the wise and learned person he is when he speaks.
52 I am relying on Rashi’s explanation of the gemarah.
53 The next lines supply additional words Abaye’s Nurse taught him on other matters.
54 Indeed, for scholars of Levinas, his entire piece on Loving Torah more than God should be read in part, as an interpretation (or blowing on the coals) of Rav Chaim’s last comments on this mishnah, which discuss Torah study compared to God’s affairs. Rav Chaim’s comments, in turn, are entwined with the Gra’s comments on Avot 5:26 as well.
55 As has often been quoted, Levinas says that it “seems to me that the whole of philosophy is only a meditation of Shakespeare” (TO 72).
56 For a Derrida-inspired reading of hospitality, theatricality, and education in AYLI see the excellent essay by James Kuzner, “As You Like It and The Theater of Hospitality,” in Shakespeare and Hospitality: Ethics, Politics, and Exchange, ed. Julia Reinhard Lupton, David Goldstein (Routledge, 2016).
57 See the line spoken by the same-sex teacher Celia: “Rosalind lacks then the love / Which teacheth thee that thou and I are one” (1.3.92-93, emphasis added). Rosalind continues to learn from Celia, how to address banishment, for example (by being there for another), but she will need to learn that in fact, however close Rosalind and Celia are, and however much the attraction of one for the other may be, the two selves are, in fact, not “one.”
58 Anna Seward, “Mrs. Siddons in Comedy,” in Eyewitness of Shakespeare: First Hand Accounts of Performances 1580-1890, ed. Gamini Salgado (New York: Barnes & Noble Books. 1975), 163.
59 In the famous all-male production of AYLI by Cheek by Jowl, these lines were actually transferred to the very start of the play’s performance. For a summary of the reception to Cheek by Jowl’s production, see Sean McEvoy, Shakespeare: The
Basics, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2012), 78-82.
60 Qtd in Knowles, New Variorum Edition, 577.
61 Ibid., New Variorum Edition, 578.
62 Ibid., New Variorum Edition, 581.
63 Bloom, Modern Critical Interpretations, 3.
64 Germain Greer, Shakespeare: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 115.
65 Susanne L. Wofford, “‘To You I Give Myself, for I Am Yours’: Erotic Performance and Theatrical Performatives in As You Like It,” in Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts, ed. Russ McDonald (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 149, 160.
66 Juliet Dusinberre, “Introduction,” As You Like It, ed. Juliet Dusinberre (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2006), 141, 140.
67 Dusinberre, “Introduction,” 142.
68 Surprisingly, Calvo’s essay on pronouns in AYLI, which presents an overview of various approaches to the complications of pronouns in the play, does not address Rosalind’s repeated lines. See Clara Valvo, “Pronouns of Address and Social Negotiation in As You Like It,” Language and Literature 1.1 (1992): 5-27.
69 As Germain Greer explains, Jaques “provides us with a series of little character sketches, all self-contained, each stage apparently deriving nothing from the age before.” Greer, A Very Short Introduction, 52.
70 Dusinberre, “Introduction,” 109.
71 Levinas asks if “religious inspiration ultimately aim[s] to bring about the very possibility of Society, the possibility for a man to see the face of an Other” (DF 218). Shakespeare’s AYLI challenges us, pedagogically and performatively, to consider multiple ways the face of an Other is and is not welcomed, how the Self is and is not taught. This ethical challenge, for Levinas, is a hallmark of Jewish thought. As Howard Caygill mentions in his essay on “Levinas and Shakespeare,” in “a note from 1946 [Levinas] writes: ‘My philosophy—is a philosophy of the face to face. Relation with the other without intermediary. That’s Judaism’” (149). The note comes from Levinas’s Carnets de captivité, page 186.
72 Seward, “Mrs. Siddons in Comedy,” 163.
73 Wofford, “To You I Give Myself,” 164.
74 Ibid., “To You I Give Myself,” 168.
75 Michael Hattaway, ed., As You Like It (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 33.
76 Hattaway, As You Like It, 42.
77 William Scott, “‘A Woman’s Thought Runs Before Her Actions’: Vows as Speech Acts in As You Like It,” Philosophy and Literature 30 (2006): 530.
78 Scott, “A Woman’s Thought,” 535, 537.
79 Sam Girgus nicely addresses Levinas’s comments on “divine comedy” when he write about cinema, Kristeva, and Levinas. See Sam B. Girgus, “Afterword: The Abyss: Woody Allen on Love, Death and God,” in A Companion to Woody Allen, ed. Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons: 2013).
80 See Chew, “This Strange Eventful History,” 163, 165.