Thinking with Shakespeare

Comparative and Interdisciplinary Essays

William Poole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351195973
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"Shakespeares works do not embody any doctrine or set of beliefs, as his critics have long been tempted to suggest, but they do stage encounters with certain kinds of thinking ethical, political, epistemological, even metaphysical that still concern us nowadays. They can be shown to draw on ancient philosophies Platonism, Stoicism, Scepticism either directly or through medieval and continental Renaissance thought. Or their scenarios can be likened to those of other kinds of intellectual argument, such as legal or theological discourse. The essays collected in this volume demonstrate the value of thinking with Shakespeare, either as embodied in Shakespeares own creative programme or in our use of philosophical paradigms as an approach to his works. The contributors are Colin Burrow, Terence Cave, Gabriel Josipovoci, Charles Martindale, Stephen Medcalf, Subha Mukherji, A. D. Nuttall and N. K. Sugimura."

Part 1
Approaches

Chapter 1
Why Shakespeare is not Michelangelo

Colin Burrow

This frivolous title invites a frivolous response. Yes, Shakespeare did not, so far as we know, paint; and yes, it is very unlikely indeed that he ever attacked a piece of stone with a chisel. Hamlet is visibly not the roof of the Sistine Chapel, whatever its hero may say about majestical roofs fretted with golden fire. So Shakespeare is not Michelangelo at all.

The question I would like to consider, however, is not perhaps so much why Shakespeare is not Michelangelo as how he is not: that is, Michelangelo has been, since the 1540s and certainly since the first publication of his Rime in 1623, regarded as a philosophical poet, whose work manifests a set of ideas about truth and about beauty.¹ Shakespeare is a profoundly different kind of writer. In making a comparison between the two poets I will engage with some of the many things which A. D. Nuttall has thought about during his long and continuing career, although I will consider more the relationship between Shakespeare and that branch of philosophy known as aesthetics than the ethics, metaphysics or theology which have consistently lain beneath Tony's criticism. I will ask what sort of attitude we should take to Shakespeare's Sonnets as art objects, and I will do so from the perspective of someone who suspects that the word 'object' is not the right one to use of poems. I am also going to return to the kind of literary criticism which no-one now is allowed to do any more, and seek to explain in a primitive way not only why Shakespeare's Sonnets are not like Michelangelo's, but also why I think they are better than Michelangelo's. This will entail thinking about what we do with the word 'philosophy' when we use it in literary contexts.

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of philosophical approach to literature, which are often found blended in the wild. The first might be called the 'interior approach'. This tries or claims to find a philosophical system embedded in literary works. The most naive version of this way of talking about literature philosophically would be to make a claim of this sort: 'in this sonnet Shakespeare expresses his philosophy of love', or 'Shakespeare here explores his view of friendship'. The 'his' here might then be qualified by reference to an anterior philosophical tradition — Platonism, say, or Neoplatonism, or Plutarch — and the critic might go on to argue that for various reasons Shakespeare either modifies or distorts the prevailing premises of that tradition. A reductive version of this method could lead to the extraction of a more or less simple set of precepts from the works ('love the form of the good'). The interior approach, unless it is used with great delicacy, tends to make philosophy emerge as the master discipline, as texts get crunched into propositions to which, it would be claimed, the author of the text under discussion would have given assent. The core problem with this kind of approach in its cruder forms is its predictive poverty. It is probably the case that all agents have a complex set of beliefs, at least some of which could be formulated in language appropriate to a United Nations charter ('all people are entitled to respect', for instance; or 'aspire to winning the respect of your superiors'). It is also probably the case that a sophisticated account of those beliefs could be worked out from our words and behaviour. It is, however, extremely improbable that any level of sophisticated mapping out of those propositions could issue in a mind map of the philosophical systems in play in any text sufficiently sophisticated to enable the reader to predict what would come next. A complex model might enable a careful reader to know what the next sentence would be about, perhaps; but it is in the nature of writing to resist the predictive, to provide a next word which is not the inevitable word.

'Toffee apples are over-rated.' Could any model of the premises of a mind be sufficiently highly developed to predict that that would have been my next phrase? If we are to talk about literature philosophically, with a view to describing the interior structuring beliefs that shape a given work, we ought to do it in a way that accepts the complex relationship between dispositions ('Shakespeare admired the nobility') and acts (the creation of Claudius). We need also to accept that literary acts are convention-bound and dispositionally mappable only to an extent, and that a central principle of literary acts might be a conceptual version of the figure of variatio, whereby slight shocks, surprises, impromptu departures from a philosophical script are not just incidental but structural principles. Aesthetics here has a major advantage over philosophy as an approach to the literary, since it allows for surprise. Interior philosophical analysis tends implicitly to deny that we read things that both make and break patterns, and that the breaking of a pattern, or a moment of unpredictable revolution against the principles that have apparently been followed in a text up to that point, is usually the moment that provokes amazement, or delight, or whatever we are to call the experience that makes most of us (except most dons) read.

The second way of thinking about literature philosophically, broadly speaking, is an 'exterior approach'. Critical studies of this type tend to make a philosophical system into an adjective, and present an Aristotelian, or Kierkegaardian reading of a given author. The major risk of this kind of approach is that a historically posterior philosophical position is adopted, and Shakespeare, or whoever it might be, is then taken as having anticipated that philosophical system. But the main claim of such approaches is usually, implicitly, not that this kind of time-warp in intellectual history has occurred, but that posterior philosophical impositions can give us an aspect under which to view a particular work of art. The exterior philosophical approach in this form is potentially very close kin to most forms of critical activity which seek to be more than purely historical. Exterior philosophising can be a form of aesthetic advice: it takes a philosophical system or idea and a text and it invites readers to see the text under the aspect of that philosophy; and as it does so it claims that if readers do view it under that aspect they will hear it or see it in a new way ("if you read this line as an existentialist it can be heard as one which enacts a lurch into freedom'). In some minimal way all criticism is doing this kind of posterior aesthetic philosophising: it commends a view of a text to its readers, and that view might incorporate all or some of the critic's philosophy. The principal risk of most exterior philosophising, though, is that it tends to end up making universalisable claims; that Donne's poems make signs slide, as they always do, say, or that Milton shows us man being appellated by a subjecthood that is always (already) before him. The exterior approach, with its posterior application of philosophies to texts, has a tendency to end up claiming to be interior—that is, to have shown us something in some sense there in the work that its analysing; and it too can seek earnestly to look the other way when a text resists or shocks or surprises by not quite doing what it should be doing if it exactly fitted the philosophy through which it is being read.

The value of the shocking is the central reason why philosophical approaches to literature (and here one could also include many theoretical approaches to literature) need to be more aesthetic than they have tended to be in the past. Criticism partly is an improvised interplay between interior and exterior philosophising: it is an activity which involves thinking with a text as well trying to work out the thinking that lies behind a text. Part of that process might lead a critic to say 'read this philosopher: it will make you see things in Shakespeare'; another part of that process might lead another or even the same critic to say 'take this provisional view of some of the dispositional preferences which are manifested m this work; it will help you to understand even moments which do not appear directly to manifest them.' Both of these forms of philosophising start to lose touch with art when they begin to see literature as the exoskeleton which takes its warped form from the real philosophical structures beneath it. Philosophical responses to literature should be mobile and accommodating; they should sharpen the gaze, but they should also let you apprehend moments of bluriness in your vision, and they should not prevent you seeing moments which thwart attempts to turn them into principle.

Beliefs tend to hunt in packs. This is to say more than that someone who holds directly contradictory beliefs (that God exists; that God cannot exist) is in a bit of a mess; rather, it is to say that beliefs about one area of human activity can have a foreseeable companionship with beliefs about another area. My argument so far is about the relationship between literature and philosophy, but underlying it is a clear dispositional preference that accompanies my beliefs in those areas. I have been briefly and sweepingly critical of attempts either to extract philosophical systems from literature, or to impose posterior philosophical systems on fictions. Implicitly in these arguments I have been attaching aesthetic value to something we might call mobility: that is, texts that resist the extreme forms of exterior or interior philosophical approaches are texts that I am implicitly valuing.

This claim about value takes me to why Shakespeare is better than Michelangelo and why he is not Michelangelo. Blandly, one could state that obviously both wrote love sonnets, some of which were or which appear to be directed to a younger man; both were widely recognized as geniuses more or less as soon as the category of 'genius' came into being; and both were at various points bowdlerized by their editors to change the sex of the addressees of several of their poems.² Some critics have pressed the comparisons further than this. John Kerrigan has argued that both poets produce 'Sonnets of Art', that is, poems that reflect on the processes of their own making, and are in significant ways about art.³ Leonard Barkan has argued for a large-scale analogy between Michelangelo and Shakespeare, and has suggested that Michelangelo's interest in sculpture as a manifestation of an idea that is beyond anything present in nature carries across to the ending of The Winter's Tale. For Barkan Shakespeare transcends sculpture by providing a 'four dimensional' reality in the final transformation of Hermione from a statue into life, but 'for narrative and thematic purposes, Shakespeare depended upon all those traditions which saw sculpture as both prime among the arts and closest of all the arts to real life.'⁴

Michelangelo is a poet of whom it is possible to say that he has an aesthetic and probably also a philosophy (at least one can say this with some confidence about his poems that are likely to date of the mid-i54os). Much of his verse also has what one might call an internal aspiration towards 'the hard'. He likes things, and things that are of physically resolved form. In the first quatrain of the poem numbered 63 in Girardi's edition of the Rime,⁵ Michelangelo imagines a spark being struck from marble; he then describes the calcination of marble into lime by fire; but then the tendency towards the hard comes in, and the lime becomes plaster, which in turn becomes a building, which, like a soul purged by fire, lives on.

Sì amico al freddo sasso è 'Ί foco interno
che, di quel tratto, se lo circumscrive,
che l'arda e spezzi, in qualche modo vive,
legando con sé gli altri in loco etterno.

[So friendly to the cold stone is the fire within it that if, when drawn forth from it, the fire so surrounds it that it burns and breaks it, the stone lives on in a certain way, binding with its substance other stones into an eternal place.]

To say that Michelangelo wants a poem to be a thing is perhaps not quite right; but he is interested in objects that are of one physical shape, that can be grasped in a moment, and are durable. Several of his poems, and especially poems that editors are prone to say were directed to Vittoria Colonna (his close friend and image of loveliness from the mid-1540s), take sculpture as the prime art, the one to which all other arts aspire. It is often said too that sculpture is for Michelangelo the prime art in that what the sculptor seeks to do is to find within the stone the 'concetto', or the pre-existent form of the beautiful thing that lies within it.⁶ Now the primacy of this aspect of Michelangelo's thought is deeply entrenched in, perhaps partly constituted by, his reception history. On March 7th 1547 Benedetto Varchi gave a learned lecture on Sonnet 151 that presented Michelangelo as a kind of Neoplatonist whose verse is substantially about the transcendent fixity of the form of the beautiful.⁷ (Varchi also saw in the poem something of Aristotle's conception of a potentiality within matter, rather than a Platonic form). The poem that Varchi analysed was printed first in sequence in 1623, in the volume of Rime that Michelangelo's grandnephew Michelangelo the Younger edited, expurgated, and carefully designed to highlight the artist's philosophical side. In Girardi's chronological reconstruction of the Rime it is number 151; but it is important to remember that for most early readers this was their first encounter with Michelangelo's Rime:

Non ha l'ottimo artista alcun concetto
c'un marmo solo in sé non circonscriva
col suo superchio, e solo a quello arriva
la man che ubbidisce all'intelletto.

...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I: Approaches
• PART II: Investigations
• PART III: Afterwords
• Bibliography
• Index