SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGIC IMAGINATION

SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGIC IMAGINATION

Also by Nicholas Grene BERNARD SHAW: A Critical View SHAKESPEARE, JONSON, MOLIERE: The Comic Contract SYNGE: A Critical Study of the Plays TRADITION AND INFLUENCE IN ANGLO-IRISH POETRY (editor with Terence Brown) SHAW, LADY GREGORY AND THE ABBEY: A Correspondence and a Record (editor with Dan H. Laurence) J. M. SYNGE: The Well of the Saints (editor)

Shakespeare's Tragic lntagination Nicholas Grene Associate Professor of English Trinity College, Dublin ~ Palgrave Macmillan

ISBN 978-0-333-66864-1 ISBN 978-1-349-24970-1 (ebook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-24970-1 SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGIC IMAGINATION Copyright 1992, 1996 by Nicholas Grene Reprint of the original edition 1996 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the ease of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address: St. Martin's Press, Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1996 ISBN 978-0-312-06218-7 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-312-16184-2 (pbk.) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Grene, Nicholas. Shakespeare 's tragic imagination / Nicholas Grene. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-06218-7 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-312-16184-2 (pbk.) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616-Tragedies. 2. Tragedy. I. Title. PR2983.G74 1991 822.3'3-<1c20 91-8155 CIP

To Sophia, Hannah, Jessica, Clement

Contents Acknowledgements Preface Preface to the 1996 Reprint viii ix xii 1 From the Histories to the Tragedies 1 2 Julius Caesar 14 3 Hamlet 37 4 Troilus and Cressida 64 5 Othello 90 6 Timon of Athens 126 7 King Lear 149 8 Macbeth 193 9 Antony and Cleopatra 223 10 Coriolanus 249 11 Sacred and Secular 274 Notes 287 Bibliography 300 Index 306 vii

Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge gratefully a year's leave of absence from Trinity College Dublin in 198~9 and, equally gratefully, a Visiting Fellowship for that time at Clare Hall Cambridge where much of this book was written in most congenial conditions. I owe a great deal to two friends (and former colleagues at the University of Liverpool). Hermione Lee was warmly encouraging at a crucial early stage of planning the book, and gave every line of my first draft the benefit of her wonderfully acute eye for flabby writing and fudged argument. Her critical comments made splendid reading. Philip Edwards, struggling heroically with an almost illegible typescript, offered both detailed and general advice which I found most helpful in revising the book. His generous and appreciative reaction was all the more heartening coming from someone whose own work on Shakespeare I so much admire. I gained also from the constructive criticisms of Lucy McDiarmid on the first chapter, though I am afraid she may not see much improvement as a result. My wife Eleanor not only made useful editorial suggestions on the book, but put up patiently- and at times impatiently- with the endlessly repeated obsessions of the writer writing it. The book is dedicated, with dearest love, to my children. viii

Preface My starting-point for this book was a sense of wonder at the contiguity of Shakespeare's last three tragedies. The world of Macbeth, so much the incarnation of a metaphysics of absolute good and evil, seemed extraordinarily remote from the shapechanging relativism of Antony and Cleopatra or the analytically observed psychological and political realities of Coriolanus. Yet there were similar thematic concerns, similar preoccupations, running through all three: the relation of power to legitimating authority, for instance, or of male and female roles in the imagination of (male) heroic endeavour. Looking back through the tragedies, I felt increasingly that this pattern of striking difference in imaginative milieu combined with thematic congruences was repeated in earlier pairs of companion plays: King Lear and Timon of Athens; Othello and Troilus and Cressida; Hamlet and Julius Caesar. There appeared to be a doubleness in Shakespeare's tragic imagination itself, which could be traced back eventually to different modes in the histories. The book that follows is my attempt to explore this doubleness. It is worth exploring if only because it represents a way of looking at the full sweep of Shakespeare's work in the tragic form in the period from 1599 to 1608 when that was his main creative concern. As such it may be a means of avoiding the limiting effects of some previous critical approaches to the tragedies. The prescriptive/evaluative model of A. C. Bradley is still, at the opposite end of the twentieth century from Shakespearean Tragedy, immensely influential in isolating the four 'major' tragedies. After Bradley, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth came to constitute a sort of inner canon, the other tragedies defined as they variously fell short of, or were lesser in kind, than these. Even though the generic superiority of the Bradleyan 'big four' might not be universally accepted, a second tendency in modern criticism reinforced their special status. This was the establishment of separate categories corralling off some of the tragedies from the tragedies. The viewpoint of Vivian Thomas, in his recent book on Shakespeare's Roman Worlds, is representative: 'The substance and vision inherent in the Roman plays is such that the perspective of tragedy is inadequate ix

X Preface to provide a thoroughgoing critical appreciation of them'. 1 Troilus and Cressida, also, has been removed into an indefinite class of 'problem plays', bracketed with Measure for Measure and All's Well outside the tragic form altogether. Kenneth Muir's statement, in Shakespeare's Tragic Sequence, was intended as an empiricist reaction against this isolation of Bradley's four tragedies from the others: 'There is no such thing as Shakespearian Tragedy: there are only Shakespearian tragedies'. 2 This is a sane corrective, but it has its own limitations in restricting the understanding of the tragedies to a 'sequence' only of one play after another. It is perhaps impossible to see Shakespearean tragedy clearly and see it whole. This book is no exception in so far as, following through a view of Shakespeare's tragic imagination which grows out of the histories, it omits the two earlier tragedies Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet. The design of its argument is to offer individual readings of the nine plays of the main tragic period which may help to illuminate their interrelationship. There are striking differences between the Bradleyan four and the other five, differences above all in mode and milieu. To see this, and yet to see also that all nine works are bound together by a pattern of themes and images mirrored from one to another, may take us some way towards a more comprehensive concept of Shakespeare's tragic drama. I hope at least that, by not quarantining some of the tragedies as 'Roman' or 'problem' plays, by looking at juxtaposed pairings both obvious (Julius Caesar and Hamlet) and less obvious (Troilus and Cressida and Othello) while observing differences, it may be possible to hold the plays together in relationship without reducing them to a monolithic one or to the sum of their various parts. In writing about the tragedies, though I have not been primarily concerned with staging or with its interpretive variations, I have tried always to see the plays as texts for enactment. This is not a matter of analysing stagecraft or spotting actors' points, but of intuiting what the plays have to say dramatically. Just what they appear to say, and to whom they are speaking, necessarily changes depending on the age, the circumstances, and the medium of representation. Nevertheless, for all the unstable variables, there remains a strong sense when we watch or read the tragedies of Shakespeare that what we attend to are coherent, if elusive and almost infinitely multi-faceted, imaginative forms. The critical readings in this book constitute one attempt to define such forms.

Preface Xl As a means of embodying in my writing an awareness of the potentially shifting perspectives, I have worked with a conventional code of reference points. I have used the first person pronoun in the text to indicate where I as critical interpreter differ from others. I have referred to 'the audience', or 'the Elizabethan/ Jacobean audience', when the original reception of the plays is at issue. Most of the time, however, I have adopted the style 'we' for an audience implied within the text which is not merely the contingent assembly of customers for whom Shakespeare wrote, nor my book's readers grammatically inveigled into collusion with my opinions as critic, but the necessarily changing, yet not wholly subjective and unstable, collectivity to which the dramatic representation called for by the text reaches out. A last prefatory note on scholarship. To write about Shakespeare is fully to discover the meaning of critical belatedness. Not only are there the incomparably great voices of the past on the subject, Johnson or Coleridge, but every available position seems to have been occupied, all the possible. words used up. If I try to acknowledge even a representative sample of those who have gone before with whom I agree or disagree, the result is soon an argument intolerably fussy, tortuous and over-annotated. And yet how arrogant or naive it may appear to ignore so much that is subtle, relevant and illuminating in the scholarship and criticism of the past and present. What I have done in the face of this dilemma, is lay down certain rough ground-rules for myself. I have quoted from critics only where the quotation bears immediately on my argument. I have not referred to books and articles simply in order to demonstrate I have read them. I have provided references to material which I have found useful and which readers may want to look up. I have tried to be aware of textual issues where they affect my readings without involving myself in the full, and often compelling, complexities of Qs and Fs. I hope that the balance struck between a readable individual argument and the acknowledgement of critical context proves an acceptable one.

Preface to the 1996 Reprint This book was in a sense written against the run of contemporary criticism of Shakespeare. It does not start from an engagement with current theoretical debates and, at a time when historical and cultural contexts are frequently highlighted, it makes the reading of individual texts central. Since the book was published there have been at least two works indicting theoretical 'appropriations', materialist 'misrepresentations' of Shakespeare (Brian Vickers, Appropriating Shakespeare, New Haven and London, 1993; Graham Bradshaw, Misrepresentations: Shakespeare and the Materialists, Ithaca and London, 1993). To one approving reviewer of Shakespeare's Tragic Imagination (TLS, 24 December 1993), it commended itself exactly because it represented a middle course between older 'humanist' interpretations of Shakespeare and recent theoretically-inflected rereadings. On the other hand, some reviewers, while acknowledging value in the detailed discussion of the plays and the principle of pairing them, were critical of the informing argument contrasting sacred and secular forms of the tragic imagination because of what they judged to be its inadequate historical grounding (Shakespeare Survey, 46, 1994; Etudes Anglaises, XLVII.3, 1994). If Shakespeare's Tragic Imagination does not conform to the norms of contemporary Shakespearean criticism, it is not because I set out deliberately to challenge those norms, as Brian Vickers and Graham Bradshaw have. The reading of individual texts is central to the book because that is where it had its beginnings, as I explain in the original Preface. Much of the book, in fact, is taken up with issues which preoccupy modern criticism: gender; authority and power; the mythopoeia of self and society. I knew that I ran a risk in not adopting an avowed theoretical stance at a period when issues of theory are being so fiercely controverted. But I felt that I could not become involved in that debate without giving over a great deal of the book to the debate itself and moving the focus away from the experience of the plays which was my main interest. What is more, concentrating on current theoretical issues would have restricted the use to be made of the rich heritage of Shakespearean commentary, the great variety of critical voices from earlier periods of which I have tried to give a sampling throughout. I accept that the dialectic xii

Preface to the 1996 Reprint xiii of the sacred and secular could be more precisely localised in terms of the cultural milieu of the Renaissance. But, once again, my aim was to come at a sense of the detailed interaction between imaginative modes within Shakespeare's tragedies, not primarily to place that interaction as characteristic of their time. This is an academic study and I like to think that it may take a respectable place among other academic studies of Shakespeare. I am, however, especially pleased to see it issued in this paperback edition because I strongly believe that literature in general and Shakespearean drama in particular are not the exclusive territory of academics. Shakespeare's tragedies go on being read, studied, watched, produced, translated, adapted all over the world, and the power of these texts is experienced by many people who have no special concern with scholarly controversies. My hope is that Shakespeare's Tragic Imagination is written so as to be accessible to anyone from this immense audience of Shakespeareans who may be interested in reading it. Nicholas Grene Trinity College, Dublin 1996