Review of Periodicals 44:1 (Spring 1994), 19-20

Yankee Doodle Hamlet

At Richard Nixon’s funeral in May, Henry Kissinger eulogized the ex-president in terms taken from Hamlet’s brief encomium of his father: “He was a man, take him for all in all / I shall not look upon his like again.” The circumstance suggests how easily Britain’s cultural materialist method of Shakespeare criticism, which evaluates the uses of Shakespeare by the British government to advance various ideological projects, could be employed by Americans to clarify the rhetorical schemes of the more literate players of our own past and present political games. In analyzing the late-seventeenth-century Boston printer Isaiah Thomas’s reworkings of Hamlet’s soliloquies to support the revolutionary cause, Neil York gives Yankees, not to mention Southerners, a place to start. “Be text [taxed], or not be text, that is the question,” Thomas told readers of The Massachusetts Spy in 1771, asking

Whether ‘tis nobler in our minds to suffer
The sleights and cunning of deceitful statesmen,
Or to petition ‘gainst illegal taxes,
And by opposing end them? –
To live, to act, no more, and fast asleep,
To say we and Assemblies and the thousand
Liberties that Englishmen are heirs to,
‘Tis a determination directly to be crush’d:
To live, to eat, perchance to be all SLAVES…
It wasn’t Shakespeare, but it did make some colonists mad.

York’s article is largely an entertaining chronicle of Thomas’s publishing career, as he moved from editorial jobs in Nova Scotia to England to the Carolinas and back to Boston, always employing the classics and the free press to “defend the GLORIOUS CAUSE of LIBERTY,” usually in all caps. But York also glances at other colonial writers’ uses of both Hamlet and Julius Caesar to support war with England, suggesting that Shakespeare was irresistible because of his eloquent representations of virtuous men’s discontent with an oppressive government, whose instrument of control was a malicious and deceptive power-clique. Offering evidence from various colonial writings, York demonstrates the widespread early American view that the Townshend duties, the Stamp Act, and “the so-called Coercive Acts” were “proof that evil was afoot, that there were malicious minsters in London determined to enslave” colonists. Hamlet’s discourse of discontent against a depraved state which conspires to silence him was, of course, a powerful rhetorical model for the expression of these complaints, and thus for the formation of an early nationalistic consciousness.

[“Hamlet as American Revolutionary,” Hamlet Studies 15: 1 and 2 (Summer and Winter 1993), 40-53]

Alexander and Henry V

In a famous passage of Henry V, Fluellen likens Alexander the Great’s drunken murder of his friend Cleitus to Henry’s banishment of Falstaff, who dies shortly afterward of a broken heart (assisted by numerous natural causes). The comparison has been variously interpreted as praise for Henry’s heroic character or as ironic denigration of a monarch who would exploit or enhance his political position by “kill[ing] his best friend” (4.7.41). Judith Mossman provides an unusually detailed comparison between Shakespeare’s Henry and Plutarch’s Alexander to advance a third alternative: that Fluellen’s analogy, along with numerous more subtle references to Plutarch in Henry V, are designed to construct Henry as “a more virtuous version of Alexander.” The ground of Mossman’s argument is an elaborate disclosure of the structural and thematic parallels between Plutarch’s life of Alexander and Henry V: e.g., :both works begin with apologies that, while professing to excuse the shortcomings of their respective genres, in fact bring out their strengths,” and both the narrative and the drama describe men who “attain great eminence when very young through military conquest of a larger and richer country than their own,” who “have a reputation for drinking and riotous living,” and who “die young” after which “their conquests do not remain under the control of their rightful successor.” Shakespeare does not, she adds, elide the “darker side” of the king he celebrates, any more than does Plutarch, whose account of Alexander is not “straightforwardly heroic.” The night scene before Agincourt in particular shows Henry’s human confusion over the justice of his war. However, Mossman argues, Henry’s self-doubts and manifest imperfections here “profoundly engage us…in a way that Alexander’s certainly does not.” They add to the play’s master-trope, which is the poetic dissolution of imaginative distance between the experience of virtuous king and virtuous commoner, intended to inspire a nationalistic sense of English brotherhood. With admirably close reading, Mossman shows how Henry’s characterization serves this poetic design not only by recalling Plutarch’s descriptions of Alexander’s kindness, but also by invoking Plutarch’s criticisms of Alexander in order to put forth Henry as “similar to Alexander but morally superior to him.” For example, Henry’s rainy self-immersion in the “painful field” with his followers recalls the thirsty Alexander’s public bestowal of water on his men; both leaders infuse their soldiers with new energy through their example. But whereas Plutarch tempers his description of Alexander’s self-sacrifice with cautionary examples of his tyrannical impulses – the impulsive slaying of Cleitus, for example – Shakespeare takes pains to present Henry as “no tyrant, but a Christian King,” performing his political executions (e.g., Bardolph’s hanging) at emotional cost to himself for the good of both England and France, and thus laying down his old life for his friends. Thus Shakespeare both draws from and builds on Plutarch, creating a dramatic historical method that synthesizes ancient historiography and Biblical typology to celebrate “the mirror of all Christian kings.”

[“Henry V and Plutarch’s Alexander,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994), 57-73.]

“Put Money in Thy Purse…Put Money in Thy Purse…”

In describing Shakespeare’s characteristic thematization of the human imagination’s often tragic rage for narrative coherence, Joel B. Altman at times unnecessarily complicates a “postulate that may seem self-evident” (85) about human communication, including audience reception – a risk his opening sentence acknowledges him to be taking. It would, after all, be clearer to describe Northumberland, Ross, and Willoughby’s stylized choral commentary in Richard II, 2.1, in which widely separated historical events are noted in quick succession, as a prototype for Henry V’s  compression of “the accomplishment of many years / Into an hour glass (Ind. 30-31), rather than as Shakespeare’s attempt to “solicit the meaning-making faculties of his audience by simulating the complete and anachronistic evidentiary offerings present in actual life” (87). (The unnaturalistic collapse of historical events by a chorus or choral figure is, of course, a dramatic convention which Shakespeare imitates rather than invents. Its locus classicus is not Richard II but the opening of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, wherein Clytemnestra’s watchman spies the fire signaling Agamemnon’s departure from Troy immediately before Agamemnon’s appearance on stage.) When Altman launches his detailed analysis of misleading utterance in Othello, however, his discussion turns fresher, and the complexity of his own utterance justifiable. Ingeniously tracing the complicated history of Desdemona’s handkerchief backwards in Othello to the nuptial tent woven by Cassandra in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso to Brandimarte’s tent fashioned by the Cumaean sybil in Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato, Altman reveals how Iago’s improvisational appropriation of the symbolic handkerchief to fuel Othello’s jealousy, as well as the oblique riddling language Iago uses to inspire Othello’s misconceived tale of sexual betrayal, casts Iago in the role of “desacralized sibyl…who distributes ambiguous words and signs from an evacuated interior that only appears to be full in knowledge” (95). Altman carefully matches the references in Othello to “exsufficate and blown surmises,” “scattering and unsure observance,” and even Desdemona’s intermittent, “parcel[ed]” attendance on Othello’s story-telling with the scattered, wind-blown leaves from with Virgil’s sybil takes her incoherent prophecies. Not only does Shakespeare associate Iago and ultimately Othello with the deceptive oracular utterances of the Cumaean sybil, he also exploits the Renaissance association of sophistical rhetoric and “magic charm” (105) in order to create Iago as a Janus-faced sybilline witch whose incantations generate what the sophist Gorgias called “peitho” (104): the literal transformation of the hearer. Iago’s demonic spells, of course, only destroy their hearers, who, crazy for even a tragic story, piece together their own nightmares from the two-faced charmer’s parsed phrases.

[“ ‘Prophetic Fury’: Othello and the Economy of Shakespearean Reception,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 26:1 (Spring 1993), 85-113]

Assessing New Historicism Again

New Historicism had barely emerged as a method to be reckoned with in Renaissance studies when cautionary (re)assessments of its usefulness began to appear in print as well, many of these by avowed practitioners. One of the latest of these is “New Historical Shakespeare” by the University of Alberta’s Jonathan Hart, who has by his own admission been radically and positively influenced by the “cultural poetics” of Stephen Greenblatt and his American followers and the roughly analogous “cultural materialism” of British new historicists. Hart reiterates some familiar definitions and distinctions relative to these two critical schools – chiefly, that while both Greenblatt-style American new historicism and British cultural materialism claim “a methodological self-consciousness that does not assume transparent signs and interpretive procedures,” cultural materialism “is more direct and explicit in relating British past and present than new historicism is in comparing the American present to its European past.” Hart also notes (with a trace of disappointment?) that with the recent executive ascendancy of the lef-leaning Democrats in the U.S., the chances of American new historicism taking on the overt radicalism of British cultural materialism look slim. Since much of Hart’s essay is devoted not to Shakespeare but to this type of analysis of the academy’s ideological relationship to governmental powers, as well as to clarifying the notions of history implied by new historicist rhetoric, his title “New Historical Shakespeare” is somewhat misleading – which is in fact a charge frequently levied against arch historicist Greenblatt, whose titles mention Shakespeare but whose writings deal only minimally with Shakespeare’s texts (see Brian Vicker’s Appropriating Shakespeare [Yale UP 1993] for a recent instance of this complaint). What Hart does offer is an eloquent and fascinating demonstration of how, while new historicists characteristically employ the riddling tropes of anecdote and analogy in order to suggest rather than assert broad historical connections, and thus to avoid “the excesses of the metaphysics of the universal,” still this alternative “metaphysic of the particular” is inescapably grounded – as are all metaphysics and indeed all communication – in totalizing philosophy. For most new historicists this total system is an hypostasized “postmodern Marxism,” itself oxymoronic “because postmodernism is a world without end and Marxism is highly teleological.” Hart bolsters this argument by showing how historians from Thucydides (who “was not there to record Pericles’ oration and had to reconstruct it”) to Shakespeare himself (who describes Cleopatra on a barge in Plutarchan literary style) used anecdote, not to subvert grand historical teleologies, but to reinforce them. Best of all – fashioning his broad historicizing system – Hart ends with a useful and amusing summary of academic appropriations of Shakespeare, beginning with comments on St. John’s College Cambridge students in their 1601 performance of The Return from Parnassus, Parts 1 and 2, which marks Shakespeare’s subversion of moldy classicism, and ending with the various political Shakespeares of new historicists Terence Hawkes, Christopher Norris, and Catherine Belsey.

[“New Historical Shakespeare: Reading as Political Ventriloquy,” English 42:174 (Autumn 1993), 193-213]