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Critical perspectives 1: Neoclassical and Romantic approaches
Approaches to Shakespeare have varied from age to age since the plays were first performed and published. One of the difficulties for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century critics was the problem that, if Shakespeare flouted neoclassical rules, how is it that he is so good? The Romantics’ concept of ‘the organic nature of art’ provided an answer to the question but as a result they began to venerate him, which led to the rise of ‘bardolatry’.
The fact that Shakespeare did not generally follow the neoclassical rules for dramatic writing is one of two major criticisms that have bedevilled him. The second is the claim that this man from the parochial town of Stratford-upon-Avon, who had received no university education, could not possibly have written the plays. In one sense the two issues – the divergence from neoclassical rules and the authorship question – are grounded in social perceptions, prejudices and intellectual elitism, all of which have been exposed by contemporary criticism.
The allegation that he could not have written the plays is still levelled by some against Shakespeare, despite historical evidence to the contrary and the weight of mainstream literary scholarship that has supported his authorship. It is the subject, for example, of the film Anonymous, which peddles the theory of the Earl of Oxford as the writer of the plays, with little understanding of how the myth began or of how impossible the claim is.
If you read, for example, James Shapiro’s Contested Will or Michael Wood’s In Search of Shakespeare or Jonathan Bate’s The Genius of Shakespeare, you will see that the authorship question has surfaced many times since Shakespeare’s death but that it was based often on misleading or fraudulent evidence. Michael Wood discusses the quality of Shakespeare’s grammar school education in Stratford and provides a useful account of the influence of his family, especially Mary Arden his mother, and his general upbringing, on the development of his imagination.
The seventeenth century
From Robert Greene’s 1592 ‘upstart Crow’ complaint onwards, Shakespeare has often been viewed with some suspicion – even, at times, hostility. How could this non-university-educated newcomer to the literary and theatrical scene be so good? Plays in English were not considered ‘literary works’ until Ben Jonson in 1616 published a folio edition of his own plays, calling them Works. In Shakespeare’s own day, some of his poetry – surprisingly not the Sonnets – was highly successful and well regarded, but the fact remains that he was neither aristocratic nor highly educated. Even Ben Jonson, while admiring his unique, timeless talent, quipped, perhaps ironically, that Shakespeare had ‘small Latin and less Greek’. But, as modern historians have noted, such was the educational system and the standard of the Elizabethan grammar schools that a boy on completing his school education may have been as proficient in Latin as Classics graduates are today. Ben Jonson was not university educated either but he was an exceedingly good classical scholar, so the description ‘small’ has to be put into perspective.
Throughout the seventeenth century, Shakespeare was considered, not only by Ben Jonson but also by later poets such as John Milton (1608–74) and John Dryden (1631–1700), to have been a ‘natural genius’. But do natural geniuses actually exist? Perhaps it is no small wonder, given the breadth of material in the plays, that claims – sometimes based on fraudulent evidence – were made that Shakespeare could not have written them but was merely a front man for an intellectual or aristocratic writer such as Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford who wished to remain anonymous. None of this squares, however, with the facts as we have them or the contemporary evidence concerning Shakespeare’s authorship, although later in his career he did collaborate with younger dramatists. The way in which he has been regarded, nonetheless, and the reputation he has acquired over the last four centuries, help shape the way we now approach him.
Milton saw Shakespeare as the supreme English poet but both he and Dryden still had difficulty with his apparent failure to obey the neoclassical rules; they blamed the ‘fury of fancy’ for transporting Shakespeare beyond the bounds of judgement. Antony and Cleopatra, for example, darted from city to city and country to country over several years and contained multiple plots and subplots. This kind of structure went against what was regarded as the disciplines of the art form. Dryden’s own play All for Love (1678), a version of the Antony and Cleopatra story, is in the neoclassical disciplined style, and is occasionally produced on the modern stage in repertory with Antony and Cleopatra. It is a good play but it lacks the breadth of imagination and the theatrical presence of Shakespeare’s masterpiece.
As early as 1681, Nahum Tate regarded Shakespeare’s King Lear as ‘a house of unorganized treasures’, and he rewrote the ending in order to allow Cordelia to fall in love with Edgar and let Lear survive. Tate’s version commanded the stage for the next 150 years. In a more seriously critical vein, in 1697 Thomas Rymer had declared Othello to be a ‘bloody farce, without salt or savour’. Shakespeare’s tragedy did not harmonize with the taste of the age or its literary sensibilities.
The eighteenth century
The late seventeenth-century criticism of Shakespeare continued into the eighteenth century. In France, Voltaire declared Shakespeare to be an ‘English buffoon’, describing Hamlet in 1748 as ‘a vulgar and barbarous drama, which would not be tolerated by the vilest populace of France or Italy’. His choice of the phrase ‘vilest populace’ is of interest to us, especially when we recall the location of the Globe theatre in the suburbs, in what we might now call a red-light district just beyond the boundaries of the city of London.
Shakespeare developed his theatre for all, but in the late seventeenth century and into the eighteenth literary intellectuals regarded Ben Jonson as the purer craftsman. Nonetheless, it was Shakespeare whose reputation grew in spite of his apparent failure to follow neoclassical rules.
The influential scholar Samuel Johnson (1709–84), in his Preface to Shakespeare, rejected the concept of the Unities as an appropriate measure of quality for drama. He saw Shakespeare as depicting ‘life’ and advised that we should consider most of the plays as ‘tragic comedies’. Johnson was, however, critical of some of Shakespeare’s dramatic poetry: he wished to expunge the famous lines in Macbeth ‘Here lies Duncan, his silver skin laced with his golden blood’ with ‘an universal blot’. He also expressed great difficulty with the harrowing final scene of King Lear.
‘Shakespeare’s plays are not in the rigorous or critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination; and expressing the course of the world, in which the loss of one is the gain of another; in which at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend.’
Johnson, Dr S. (1765). See Powell, R. [1980: 141], Shakespeare and the Critics Debate. Basingstoke: Macmillan
Dr Johnson’s perspective is that Shakespeare does not adhere to the Unities because he has imagination to portray a common humanity, which is not modified by the constraints of time and place.
In the latter half of the eighteenth century Shakespeare was regarded as being able to deal with generalized passions. If you want to know about jealousy, refer to Othello; if you want to know about young love, refer to Romeo and Juliet; for mature love, see Antony and Cleopatra; for debilitating ambition, see Macbeth; for procrastination, see Hamlet, and so forth. Shakespeare’s genius is thereby considered to lie in the portrayal of a human nature to be found in young lovers and ageing monarchs. His characters are types, displaying human passions.
‘…he was the man who of all Modern, and perhaps Ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the Images of Nature were still present to him.’
John Dryden in Powell (1980: 140–41)
Nevertheless, as we have suggested, Samuel Johnson is still critical of the dramatist. There is little moral purpose behind the plays; the plots are loosely constructed and even though the Unities are rejected there is no sense of time or place – no clear geographical location whether the setting be Rome, Egypt or Venice. But even more problematic for Samuel Johnson and eighteenth-century Augustan cultural attitudes is the fact that Shakespeare is seen to be deficient in language and decorum, having a laboured narration. In language, Shakespeare’s use of the pun, for example, irritated Johnson as being tedious. It was, he claimed, Shakespeare’s ‘fatal Cleopatra’. This is indicative, perhaps, of what Johnson regarded as a general deficiency in gentility and the protracted narrative scope of some of the plays.
Today we recognize that Samuel Johnson is judging the plays by the social attitudes and ideologies of his own age. Despite his rejection of the Aristotelian Unities, he remains bound within the neoclassical tradition, with eighteenth-century notions of decorum and the mindset that accompanies them. Such an eighteenth-century taste for decorum and elegance did not sit easily with what then might have been considered the crudity of Shakespeare’s frequent use of the pun. Today, however, modern criticism appreciates the pun’s social and political subversive nature – as noted, for example, by Peter Davison:
‘The pun – and again, the bad pun especially – as used by Shakespeare, plays not only upon the word but upon the individual’s relationship with the community, within the play-world and the real-world. It epitomizes both our individuality and, through the response, that we have a place in the community. Of all literary devices it is the one that, in a hierarchical community, can most readily transcend class…The bad pun may be said to be the epitome of “popular appeal”, demanding of an audience to a play conscious awareness of, and response to, extra-dramatic, social, relationships.’
Davison, P. [1982: 78], Popular Appeal in English Drama to 1850. Basingstoke: Macmillan
If the pun caused Dr Johnson unease, so too the ending of King Lear undermined his sense of decorum and violated his eighteenth-century commitment to a kind of poetic justice:
‘…if my sensations could add anything to the general suffrage, I might relate that I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as editor.’
Johnson, Dr S., in Woudhuysen, H.R. (ed.) (1989: 222–3), Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare. Harmondsworth: New Penguin Shakespeare Library
Nahum Tate’s 1681 adaptation accorded with natural justice until a revival of something like the original version of King Lear in the early nineteenth century, when in 1823 the actor Edmund Kean and later in 1838 Charles Macready moved performances away from Tate’s happy ending and gradually reinstated the ending of Shakespeare’s tragedy with which we are familiar today, and of which Charles Dickens approved.
The late 1780s proved a great turning point in the history of the Western world with the American War of Independence in 1787 and the French Revolution in 1789. It was perhaps as seismic a shift in cultural and social perceptions as was the European Reformation and Henry VIII’s revolt against Rome in the sixteenth century, both of which had such a profound effect in Shakespeare’s lifetime. The French Revolution was not only a political but an intellectual movement, which had an effect on the emergence of the European Enlightenment and Romanticism at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, and which paved the way in turn to the growth of realism as the nineteenth century progressed.
Romanticism
The Romantic Movement fundamentally changed attitudes towards Shakespeare. English Romantic critics and poets and writers and poets in Germany regarded poetic expression as the pinnacle of philosophy. If Shakespeare were the supreme poet, then he was to be venerated as the greatest of all thinkers, paving the way for ‘bardolatry’ to take hold.
Hector Berlioz (1803–69), an intensely romantic composer who composed the wildly macabre Symphonie fantastique and works based on Shakespeare’s plays, regarded him as ‘the living and loving God’:
‘Shakespeare! You were a man. You, if you still exist, must be a refuge for the wretched. It is you that are our father, our father in heaven, if there is a heaven…Thou alone for the souls of artists are the living and loving God. Receive us, father, into thy bosom, guard us, save us! De profundis ad te clamo. What are death and nothingness? Genius is immortal!’
Berlioz, H.; see Bate, J. (1989: 247), Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination. Oxford: Clarendon Press
In England, the influential Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) concentrated attention on language and the characters that spoke it. The question of genius was resolved through an understanding of language and character as the fundamental components of the plays.
Coleridge developed the notion from German philosophy of the organic form of the play as opposed to the mechanical and rustic forms identified by earlier criticism. A. W. Von Schlegel (1769–1845) between 1808 and 1811 had challenged the rules that neoclassicism had imposed upon plays. In his view, it was this imposition that had produced a lifeless garden of artificial flowers, but for him true art had to be organic. Art changes from principles within itself; it is innate and unfolds like a flower according to its own organic nature. The consequence is that you don’t criticize one flower because it is not like another one. You appreciate it for itself, for its own innate nature.
‘Form is mechanical when, through external force, it is imparted to any material merely as an accidental addition without reference to its quality…Organical form…unfolds itself from within, and acquires its determination contemporaneously with the perfect development of the germ. We everywhere discover such forms in nature…In the fine arts, as well as in the domain of nature – the supreme artist – all genuine forms are organical, that is, determined by the quality of the work.’
Schlegel, A. W. von; see Bate, J. (1989: 12–13), Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination. Oxford: Clarendon Press
Applied to Shakespeare or other great poets, this approach insisted that the artist might not be aware of the organic laws governing the unfolding of the work of art, since it is a combination of the unconscious and the conscious mind in cooperation that creates the poem or the play.
‘…the poet, in his dreams, institutes, as it were, experiments which are received with as much authority as if they had been made on waking objects.’
Schlegel, A. W. von; see Bate, J. (1992: 97), The Romantics on Shakespeare. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books
The Romantics held that the uniqueness that informs everything emerges from the creative process. Language is thus regarded as the living principle of the play rather than the coat with which its thought is clothed. The play grows out of the words and thus, to understand the play, you need primarily to appreciate the language. Language, metre, poetry are a tripartite living principle. To understand the organic nature of the plays, you must first savour their language. As the twentieth-century critic L. C. Knights was to argue, the better the language the better the play. It is the language, the poetry that is paramount and continues to this day to be seen by many distinguished Shakespearean scholars and directors as the primary element of Shakespearean drama.
‘[Shakespeare] creates people, talking really, within a poem. There is poetry in structure, in juxtaposition, in rhythm. A poem is communication through image – and it is an ambiguous communication at that. Each individual image defies analysis, and together they add up, not to a thesis but to an experience. The ambiguity is intentional. The less it is explained by decor and costume, the greater is its richness. Whatever else we attempted or achieved in the production…everything – rehearsals, staging, performance – was aimed at communicating its poetry. Not just the spoken word, but the real poetry of the whole. The golden armour of the French…the follow spots…canopies…music, the empty stage, the actors’ changing styles and utterances, all were images within the overall poem.’
Terry Hands, former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, quoted in Beauman, S. (ed.) (1976: 26–7), The Royal Shakesepare Company’s Production of Henry V for the Centenary Season at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Oxford: Pergamon
Further, as the plays are composed of elements, the critic must search for the organizing principle of the play from within. For nineteenth-century commentators, influenced by developments in the novel as a literary form, this was located not in the plot but in ‘character’.
Organic growth, language and character, the determining features of the emerging novel form, become, through Romanticism, the dominant criteria of literary criticism for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Characterization starts to be seen as the determining force of the drama. Beginning with Maurice Morgann’s 1777 Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff and developed in William Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817), attention was focused on close textual analysis of what characters say of themselves as individuals whose lives extend beyond the actions in which they are involved. It is almost as if the characters are real people, and judgements are made about them as organic individuals. It was a critical trend which developed into the twentieth century with the appearance in 1904 of A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy, but which still retains a certain respectability. It is an approach, as we will see later, that began to be challenged in the 1930s, but which has also been challenged vigorously by more recent twentieth- and twenty-first-century criticism.
