Shakespeare

[RiverNotch]

Reviving this thread while I read/reread him, his critics, and his contemporaries....

It's so weird, but my esteem for Shakespeare has only grown, especially with this present "deep dive". My reading list for this is pretty massive -- I'm not even halfway through -- but so far I'm getting a strong sense of the "Shakespearean difference", as Harold Bloom (kinda pigheadedly) puts it.

On rhyme:
I reiterate that his rhymes are tortured only insofar as the great vowel shift happened -- during his time, they're perfectly natural. If you have any facility with accents, I suggest you learn the accent before reading or rereading him, as it genuinely makes a difference, not only with the rhymes, but also with the puns and, really, the general character of his works: http://www.paulmeier.com/OP.pdf


On "tortured verse":
I'm gonna be following a critical trend that's existed since the Victorians, and continues to be followed by people across both sides of the discussion, which is to look at the works in the context of Shakespeare's life. Oxfordians will be banned (jk).

The early 1590s is evidently when he started his career as a playwright, and the plays he wrote here were kinda bad. Like, it's as Achebe said, with Marlowe being more understandable at this point than Shakespeare: Marlowe started off earlier, and in plays like Titus Andronicus or 1 Henry VI, Shakespeare was clearly imitating Marlowe. The verse being tortured is understandable, though not necessarily excusable.

Marlowe dies. Shakespeare begins to develop his own identity. You have him showing off his potential as a psychoanalyst with Richard III, and as a classicist with The Comedy of Errors, then you get the lyrical plays: Love's Labour's Lost, Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream. For the first two lyrical plays, his verse is definitely "tortured", but in very purposeful ways: Biron and Richard II are narcissists, Armado is a braggart, Holofernes is a pedant, and so on. From this point on, though, Shakespeare simply writes better than Marlowe, with his "tortured" writing being matched by Marlowe's bluster or somewhat pedantic multilingualism (the amount of Latin in Doctor Faustus was kinda annoying, tbh xD).

Then you get the "great" plays. Falstaff, in the Henry IV plays, typically talked in prose, but the prose is so good it's practically poetry. And then, of course, Hamlet (which is generally poetic regardless of form -- "To be or not to be" is in poetry, but "Alas, poor Yorick" is in prose), Troilus and Cressida, King Lear: at around this point, something that occasionally shone through in earlier plays (say, Faulconbridge in King John, or Bushy's speech on grief in Richard II) becomes a habit here. Like Dickinson, the characters in Shakespeare's plays begin thinking, even feeling, in verse. And when their verse gets "tortured", it's not because it's "tortured", it's because they're tortured.

Finally, the romances, especially the collaborative ones. The verse in Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen that was definitively Shakespeare's are often tortured, yes, but no longer in a way that's particular to the characters. Indeed, the characters stop being characters the way Desdemona or Rosalind or Juliet are characters; they instead become mouthpieces. Mouthpieces for what? Not for anything ideological, which Shakespeare was never wont to betray, nor for anything rhetorical or theatrical, which is more for his collaborators. Instead, the "tortured" verse they deliver strikes one as a series of experiments, perhaps on the limits of language, a sensibility which is as modern as Titus Andronicus presages the modern slasher film.

So, I kinda agree, and indeed critics that are not professed bardolaters -- say, Samuel Johnson, or Frank Kermode -- have been saying this for years. It's just not a big deal xD


On plays vs. poems:
This is a sentiment that some of the oldest critics actually agree with. Samuel Johnson only edited Shakespeare's plays (or rather, those plays considered to be his plays at the time, to the exclusion of Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and Edward III), while Hazlitt had this to say: "Our idolatry of Shakespear (not to say our admiration) ceases with his plays. In his other productions, he was a mere author, though not a common author. It was only be representing others, that he became himself." I'd counter one of the posts in saying that when he writes for the sake of writing, as he does in the sonnets, is when he seems to be at his weakest, largely because his chief constraint, that of "form", is far more nebulous than his usual constraints, those being "character" and "theatricality".

However, some more modern critics, like Harold Goddard, persuade me to think of the poems as more than merely impressive, if only because of the insights they are able to deliver into his plays. Or maybe it's because the sonnets are among the first books of poetry I really read. Though I absolutely love that one of the sharper indictments of the sonnets in this thread is by Leanne (eternal memory), who's written one of my favourite sonnets in general xD


On the plots of the plays:
As Goddard notes, one of the "gifts" Shakespeare evidently didn't have is inventing, as opposed to adapting, plots, so I'd say the man could hardly be blamed for them. When he did invent a plot, such as in A Midsummer Night's Dream, or when he altered it to the point of being original, such as The Comedy of Errors having two pairs of twins over The Menaechmi's one or the Henry-Henry dynamic in 1 Henry IV, it's often an improvement. I'd say, as a student of life, Shakespeare was less invested in imitating what he studied, as opposed to staging it wholesale, which meant preferring to take plots from chronicles, or from other people's narratives understood as chronicles, rather than to make his own.


On cultural bias:
It's definitely something to criticize, but it's also something to just accept -- Shakespeare seems peerless in large part because of imperialism. The fact that I can't speak of non-Western literature on this is probably the big exclamation mark on this, especially when I'm not a Westerner, and have only been physically in the West for a total of six weeks. So, setting the "Global East" aside, who are, conceivably, Shakespeare's peers? I would only really consider, for this, authors who could not have been influenced by Shakespeare, and the likes of Goethe and Austen, not to mention Dostoevsky and Freud, would undoubtedly consider themselves to be his inheritors, not his peers. 

Marlowe? Marlowe died. There's genuine potential in his Edward II, but all we have from him now are caricatures (except, arguably, his Faust, but that's one character in a very short play). Jonson? Again, the issue is variety. In Shakespeare, we have both Hamlet and Prince Hal, we have Rosaline and Rosalind -- tragedy, comedy, history, and romance, all bases covered. Meanwhile, Jonson's Sejanus getting booed off the stage is what led Shakespeare to write Othello. Jonson might be a great author, but perhaps not great enough.

I'd say Shakespeare's peers were more liable to be people he never actually met. I'd say Chaucer, from whom he got The Two Noble Kinsmen and possibly Troilus and Cressida, is up there. Likewise, Cervantes -- the lost Cardenio, as well as a few plays by Shakespeare's reputed dramaturgical heir, John Fletcher. Probably also Montaigne and Rabelais. Maybe even Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. I doubt vernacular poets before these authors ever wrote with the same depth of characterization, while those who wrote in the "proper" languages of Greek and Latin -- i. e., the ancients -- are so far removed from us, that it seems improper to compare even the least among them (Statius?) to the likes of Shakespeare. And maybe the same goes for pre-colonial Eastern writers.

But why do we fixate on Shakespeare, rather than those authors I suggested may be his peers? Well, I bet an article in Italy's version of the Guardian would sing the same sort of praises of Dante, but at the same time, Dante wrote his epic, Chaucer his anthology, Cervantes wrote his novel, while Shakespeare wrote his plays. I think, of all these so-called canonical authors, it's Shakespeare that had the most variety, the most potential to represent every one of us, every aspect of our world. Heck, most of his plays aren't even set in England xD But really: Shakespeare is one of the greats by his talents, yet is a peerless great by pure accident.