Shakespeare and the Apocalypse

Visions of Doom from Early Modern Tragedy to Popular Culture

R M Christofides

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441101303
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

By connecting Shakespeare's language to the stunning artwork that depicted the end of the world, this study provides not only provides a new reading of Shakespeare but illustrates how apocalyptic art continues to influence popular culture today. Drawing on extant examples of medieval imagery, Roger Christofides uses poststructuralist and psychoanalytic accounts of how language works to shed new light on our understanding of Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. He then links Shakespeare's dependence on his audience to appreciate the allusions made to the religious paintings to the present day. For instance, popular television series like Battlestar Galactica, seminal horror movies such as An American Werewolf in London and Carrie and recent novels like Cormac McCarthy's The Road. All draw on imagery that can be traced directly back to the depictions of the Doom, an indication of the cultural power these vivid imaginings of the end of the world have in Shakespeare's day and now.

Chapter 1

The Reechy Painting and the Old Church Window

Apocalypses Then and Now

We are still here. (Or at least we believe ourselves to be, which, for the purposes of this book, will suffice.) Angelic trumpet blasts have yet to raise the dead out of their sodden graves, demonic reapers with rigor-mortized skin, dragging the damned to the hot, burning bosom of hell, stalk our movie screens rather than our streets, and the overlord who sits in judgement upon all our souls has, thus far, kept His divine counsel. Eschatology, the branch of Christianity concerned with the end of the world, exists precisely because of the continued non-arrival of its object of study; in order for eschatology to be an ongoing subject of interest, the world-destroying event of annihilation and cathartic, holy rebirth with which it concerns itself must not have happened. Yet. Alongside the theological scholars who make the end of the world their business, culture has long circulated stories that imagine or allude to the imminent but still-to-come destruction of humanity.

As we shall see, this paradox of the triumph of the skies being there as a consideration and not there as an actual occurrence, a trope that unfixes any distinction between presence and absence, has deeply important consequences for the study of language and literature: this dynamic structures both language and Shakespearean tragedy. To rephrase this, the usual patterns of apocalyptic narratives provide allegories both for the ways in which Shakespeare’s tragic plots develop and for how language produces meaning. Without the divine intervention that ties up loose ends and brings unity to comedies, tragedy has no recourse to a utopian conclusion. Language works in a similar way, as without divine intervention it is unfixed, unanchored and unstable. Moreover, Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists call on the final, apocalyptic Judgement, the literal, promised Doom, which would end confusion and ward off or reverse tragedy. Earthly destruction and disaster thus stand unredeemed by any supernatural disclosure or revelation, by apocalyptic punishment for the wicked and salvation for the just.

In short, this book contends that language is structured like an apocalyptic narrative and that, in turn, Shakespeare’s tragedies are structured like a language. Such a structure, however, will prove to be unlike what we commonly understand as a structure; it is a structure haunted by an anti-structural anomaly. That is to say, the arrival of the Apocalypse, which, as the Greek origin of the word signifies, promises the revelation of unequivocal, univocal truths, never materializes. Instead, it remains forever just out of reach in some fiery, earth-shattering future, in the realm of the ‘yet’, the absence that, paradoxically, defines eschatology. By its focus on the Apocalypse, eschatology makes this absence partially present to us, in harrowing, textual forms.

Deliberately or not, Shakespeare mimics this schema by withholding the cataclysmic event that his tragic dramatis personae nevertheless call upon. The luckless, blighted and fatally obdurate either fear or appeal to the form of Judgement seen in pre-Reformation representations of the Apocalypse, church paintings and stained glass depictions commonly known as Dooms. On the stage, a deus ex machina such as this could undo the ambiguities and dissimulations of language, and, by extension, resolve, avert or forestall tragedy. However, Shakespeare ultimately keeps this divine intervention offstage, allowing the tragedy to play out. Consequently, equivocations, which are actively, even supernaturally, cleared up in the comedies, propel the plots of Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear to their tragic conclusions.

In the modern age, the creative opportunities afforded by an unknowable event have made it possible for the final moments of humanity to be rearticulated throughout popular culture for a more secular society. Shakespeare’s audience would almost exclusively have understood the event in Christian terms as the return of Christ to defeat the Antichrist, judge each and every person, alive or dead, and build a kingdom of heaven on Earth. Contemporary fiction, on the page or on the screen, draws on religious mythology when it reinvents the Last Judgement as an apocalypse with a small ‘a’. For example, these apocalyptic scenarios are common in the field of science fiction, a genre that will be drawn on throughout this book, with James Cameron’s Terminator films perhaps the most commercially successful manifestation of the trend. Concerned with a yet-to-arrive nuclear apocalypse foretold by a time-travelling soldier, the original 1984 film, The Terminator, follows the fortunes of Sarah Connor, future mother of a post-apocalyptic hero, as she and the soldier are pursued by a cyborg assassin, while the 1991 sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, follows Connor and her young son as they try to prevent the impending disaster from ever occurring. In a scene from the original that encapsulates the dilemma faced by the characters of the films, Kyle Reese, the time-travelling soldier, finds himself unable to adequately communicate with police interrogators who believe him to be either insane or withholding vital information on a killing spree of Los Angeles residents all called ‘Sarah Connor’. Reese, of course, is not insane or withholding the truth but is temporally out of joint: his words, and the words of anyone with knowledge of the future war, lose any truth value because they are post-apocalyptic words delivered to pre-apocalyptic interlocutors.

A tension, then, exists between language and the advent of an apocalypse, one on which the suspense of the Terminator films relies. Examining the textual politics of the Cold War, Jacques Derrida articulates this tension in a rare moment of simplicity: ‘No truth, no apocalypse’ (Derrida, 1984: 24). In the case of the exclusively divine apocalyptic arrival familiar to Shakespeare’s audiences, linguistic nuances and contradictions are eliminated by a supernatural figure through which absolute knowledge flows, a figure who delivers, at the end of the world, an end to the flux and instability of language. Prior to the cataclysm language is characterized by an absence of truth, by misconstruction, misunderstanding and ambiguity, an unstable condition summed up by equivocation, and, as Catherine Belsey notes, ‘equivocation . . . is the paradigm case of all signifying practice’ (Belsey, 2001: 83).

The Apocalypse and Equivocation

Equivocation was topical in 1606 when Father Henry Garnet, implicated in the Gunpowder Plot of the previous year, was tried before the King’s Council at Guildhall. He justified his opaque answers at the trial on the basis of his adherence to the Jesuitical doctrine of mental equivocation, which allowed him, he claimed, to fulfil his obligation to his inquisitors but still observe the covenant of the private confession that revealed the plot against King James I. One reason for dating Macbeth as late as 1606 is the widely held belief that Shakespeare’s hell-porter alludes to Garnet’s trial:

Knock, knock. Who’s there, i’th’other devil’s name? – Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven: O! come in, equivocator.

(2.3.7–12)

The hell-porter’s imaginary newcomer arrives there because he has been unable to equivocate to heaven. This canny, conning practice, from the Christian perspective of the four tragedies in question, only occurs in a fallen world. But rhetorical art cannot hoodwink God: the Last Judgement, the definitive, unequivocal separation of the saved from the damned, is the point when all equivocation comes to an end.

Early-modern Bible illustrations imply just such a difference between mortal language and the language of God. Woodcuts from the first page of Genesis suggest, in some cases, the transparency of language before the fall, its singular meaning and, in other cases, the opacity of a fallen language where meaning runs riot. Some woodcuts show the Tetragrammaton, the Hebraic name of God always rendered without vowels to emphasize its ineffability, placed above creation. Several other versions have instead Adam naming the animals overseen by the Tetragrammaton. Before the Fall, Adam could not misname the animals because the truth and clarity of his choice was guaranteed by God. Conversely, these prelapsarian images are replaced in some editions with a depiction of the Fall in which Adam and Eve stand by the Tree of Knowledge, their disgrace written in English on the unfurling scroll that links them to the tree, the unspeakable, ineffable Tetragrammaton above them in the angry sky. Viewed up close, the acquiescent animals that Adam once blessed with their divinely sanctioned names now wear looks of despair as they surround him and Eve (see Belsey, 2001: 36–46).

Consciously or unwittingly, such woodcuts present a division between man and God as, at the same time, a difference between mortal and immortal communication. The Fall marks the point at which the Creator lets go, but it also signals the moment when human beings start to emulate His creativity, to exploit a fallen language in the possession of multiple, disseminated meanings. Ironically, the full possibilities of such a language are realized by equivocation; it is language at the apex of its creative powers. Not only would Shakespeare’s plays lose much of their complexity without equivocation, a condition only possible in a fallen world, but, without the heterogeneity afforded language by its separation from an unequivocal source, literature, including Shakespeare’s plays, might not be possible at all. Paradoxically, equivocation – the playful movement of language – can be seen not just as a curse of the Fall, but as one of its recompenses.

An unfixed linguistic trope, equivocation threatens inaccuracy even as these few paragraphs seem to promise the opposite by providing a definition. Father Garnet’s equivocations were effectively lies, exemplifying equivocation as a way of lying by withholding part of the truth, but it may also be a strict adherence to the letter of the truth that invites another meaning. Alternatively, equivocation exploits the plurality of meaning, inviting uncertainty through utterances susceptible to more than one reading. Examples of these definitions are evident in modern political controversies. In 1992 Bosnian Muslim Dzemal Partusic revealed the atrocities perpetrated in a Bosnian-Serb prison camp with an equivocation: ‘I don’t want to tell any lies, but cannot tell the truth’ (Vulliamy, 2008). Partusic’s words, practically a definition of equivocation, confirmed the suspected atrocities by explicitly withholding any confirmation, satisfying both an inquisitive reporter and the prison camp’s gun-wielding guards. Defeated 2008 Democratic presidential candidate and current Secretary of State Hilary Clinton did indeed lie about the circumstances of her own visit to Bosnia in 1996. Video footage of her arrival at Tuzla showed it to be routine, with no hint of the hazardous, unseen sniper-fire she would later recall. As the BBC reported, Clinton described the error as a ‘misspeak’, an ambiguous term that suggested a dramatic exaggeration but fell deliberately short of admitting the lie (‘Does “misspeak” mean lying?’, BBC). Such public relations tactics also characterized the New Labour government in power in Britain from 1997 until 2010 and, in the summer of 2008, came back to haunt one of its two major architects. Without a clear declaration of intent, David Miliband, Foreign Secretary at the time, nevertheless signalled the start of an ultimately aborted leadership campaign against then Prime Minister Gordon Brown with opaque, but calculated, comments: ‘I have always wanted to support Gordon’s leadership’. The dissimulation was swiftly paraphrased in the national press: ‘I hoped he would be a good Prime Minster, but I have been forced to conclude that he cannot be’ (Rawnsley, 2008). Miliband’s statement addressed the Labour Party in a manner similar to Macbeth’s temptation of Banquo: help me to replace our current leader, and your loyalty to me will be repaid. Fatefully, Miliband would come to rue his patience when, in a Shakespearean twist, he was beaten to the party leadership by his ambitious younger brother, Ed, who declared his candidacy after another tense period of prevarication.

Shakespeare did not need to wait until the trial of Father Garnet to discover the possibilities of equivocation. The practice features in his plays much earlier. Villainous characters make seemingly innocent statements that mislead others, or they use ambiguous terms that invite misapprehensions but maintain their integrity. Such linguistic manipulations are not, however, exclusively evil. Jokes exploit double meanings to display the wit of the speaker, and romantic couples suggest their love with words that shy away from declaring it. Furthermore, it is not only a way of speaking; it may also be structural. Many characters hold titles or occupy positions that are equivocal, for example the comic heroines who equivocate when they tell the truth disguised as boys, the dramatic irony in these cases dependent on meanings available to the audience but not to the figures on the stage.

Derrida has argued that Western philosophy – or metaphysics, as he calls it – traditionally, and erroneously, assumes an external point of reference, a transcendental signified where unequivocal truth resides. In the Christian worlds of Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth, as well as in the profoundly Christian language that invades the pagan world of King Lear, such a transcendental signified can be taken as God, or, appropriately, the Logos. In this designation often used by Christian theology, Jesus Christ is linked to the original Greek ‘logos’ that denotes both ‘reason’ and ‘word’. The divine reason connects truth, rationality and language, as in the New Testament: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (Jn. 1.1). As Derrida himself puts it, ‘all the metaphysical determinations of truth . . . are more or less immediately inseparable from the logos’ and, by way of example, this can be understood ‘in the sense of God’s infinite understanding’ (Derrida, 1997: 10–11). The main implication of Derrida’s work on language is that communication does not take place in the simple, transparent way we commonly assume because messages are not received in the exact forms they are sent. Separated by disobedience from the authority of the Logos (as God, or divine law, which cannot lie or be irrational), Adam and Eve and their descendants have lost their hold on the connection between truth, reason and speech and must understand or delude each other as best they can. Equivocation, whether as ambiguity or dissimulation, is not just a historical issue; it is the human experience of language.

Pre-Reformation religious imagery of the Last Judgement envisages a Logos – the triumphant, returning Christ – who, in Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear, is taken as capable of arresting both equivocation and tragedy. These four plays unleash the dark, anarchic side of linguistic heterogeneity when the holy Logos, the transcendental signified lacking from a fallen language is, analogously, withheld by Shakespeare. But this lack not only accounts for the tragic consequences seen in Shakespearean tragedy; it is also the very condition of artistic possibility. Antony and Cleopatra, considered by many to be one of Shakespeare’s major tragedies, similarly explores the creative might of human language and its fractured relationship with divinity. Cleopatra, a mortal character, also has immortal, otherworldly qualities: her beauty positions her outside the play’s world, as a Venus-like goddess beyond the inadequate descriptions of her exotic seductive powers. Unlike in the four major tragedies studied in the following chapters, where a metaphysical presence is summoned but kept offstage, Cleopatra is an onstage presence defined in metaphysical terms. That fulsome praise in her honour is delivered in her absence separates her supernatural erotic powers from her presence before the audience. Although Cleopatra’s ineffable beauty escapes adequate description, the play relies on the power of the signifier to persuade Shakespeare’s audience that the boy playing Cleopatra can be compared to a goddess of love. This signifying power flourishes in the absence of a Logos but can also be abused to engender the cross-purposes that plague the figures of tragedy.

In comedies any misunderstandings are finally resolved. Moreover, sometimes closure explicitly depends on divine intervention. Hymen, goddess of marriage, reveals Rosalind’s true identity and, as a result, resolves the events of As You Like It. We see Rosalind reunited with her father, the Duke, and married to Orlando, while all the other romantic loose ends are tied up. In Pericles, the immaculate Diana, chaste, lunar goddess of the hunt, directs Pericles to her temple where he finds the wife for whom he grieves still alive, while in Cymbeline the tablet left by thunder-throwing Jupiter foretells the succession of disclosures and discoveries in the final scene of the play, where Imogen and Posthumus are reconciled and Cymbeline finds his long-lost sons. In another example, Apollo’s Oracle at Delphos offers the truth against which the disgrace and rehabilitation of Leontes is measured in The Winter’s Tale. Leontes dismisses the Oracle’s words as false, but they are confirmed by the death of his son, Mamillius, and the Oracle is validated again at the end of the play with the arrival of Leontes’s lost daughter, Perdita...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series-Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Typography
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Chapter 1: The Reechy Painting and the Old Church Window
• Chapter 2: Hamlet and the Living Dead
• Chapter 3: Masochistic Damnation in Othello
• Chapter 4: Macbeth and the Angels of Doom
• Chapter 5: The Promised End of King Lear
• Chapter 6: The End
• Bibliography
• Index