Shakespeare and Modernity

Early Modern to Millennium

Hugh Grady, Hugh Grady

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134616381
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This in-depth collection of essays traces the changing reception of Shakespeare over the past four hundred years, during which time Shakespeare has variously been seen as the last great exponent of pre-modern Western culture, a crucial inaugurator of modernity, and a prophet of postmodernity. This fresh look at Shakespeare's plays is an important contribution to the revival of the idea of 'modernity' and how we periodise ourselves, and Shakespeare, at the beginning of a new millennium.

1
Introduction

Shakespeare and modernity

HUGH GRADY

One of the many remarkable features of the four-hundred-year-old archive of writings about the plays of William Shakespeare is the frequency with which his work is termed ‘modern’. The only major exception occurs in the mid-twentieth century when, for a period of a few decades, a devaluation of the concept of modernity made it a feature scarcely to be prized in a figure of international prestige. Yet, as we begin the new millennium, it seems evident that new thinking about the nature of the topic and its implications has caused the question of Shakespeare’s modernity to move once more to the forefront of critical attention. This collection of chapters is dedicated to exploring the most important of those new ideas and to probing the issues at stake in Shakespeare’s relationship to that particular constellation of cultural events which has come to be known as ‘modernity’.

Of course, just what we mean by ‘modernity’ is itself a crucial issue within several contentious debates of contemporary critical theory. In fact, it has by now become so complex and variegated a matter (especially since the acceleration of technical and social change characteristic of the past century) that words with the stem or root ‘modern’ have proliferated. We now speak of the modern, modernity, modernism, modernization and the postmodern (with a number of possible variations for this last), sometimes as rough synonyms, sometimes to try to designate specific aspects of the cluster of ideas that has developed around the term. The result has been a confusion of terminology and a corresponding confusion of ideas.

The terms ‘modernism’ and ‘modernity’ (and consequently their correlates ‘postmodernism’ and ‘postmodernity’) can be particularly puzzling. I will try to maintain a consistent distinction between the two. In what follows, modernism will refer to an aesthetic and cultural period of the twentieth century, typified by radical experimentation across all the different art forms: it refers to the age of Picasso, Joyce, Stravinsky, Faulkner, Lawrence, Pirandello, and so on – a period which may or may not have already ended, to be succeeded by one encapsulated in a new aesthetic term: postmodernism. Modernity, in contrast, will refer to a longer historical period typified by capitalist economics, a secular mentality, and a scientifically based technology. Confusingly, aesthetic modernism is in many ways a protest against social and technological modernity, although celebrations of modernity were never excluded from it.¹ But many of the modernist masterpieces – Eliot’s The Waste Land and all of D. H. Lawrence’s novels, for example – were passionate protests against a modernity which seemed to have spawned societies that were mechanical, soulless, fragmented, and generally injurious to the human spirit.

The term modernity thus denotes a qualitatively new kind of anti-traditional society which arose in the West.² Its beginning is difficult to locate, but it has been variously assigned to the late medieval period, the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment. Its dynamic qualities make it hard to pin down: modernity unfolds as a process developing and changing over time. The issue of Shakespeare’s connections with it is complicated by the difficulty of determining precisely when modernity began. But most observers would agree that it most clearly emerges in that epoch in which societies began to develop capitalist economies and centralized national governments, while generating a new sense of individualism and new notions of subjectivity. This notion of modernity as a system, not just a shorthand word for the current period, developed from Hegelian philosophy and migrated from Hegel into Marxism where it was accordingly redefined in reference to Marxist theories of capitalism (Habermas 1987: 4). In the theoretical ferment of recent years, however, capitalism has lost some of its centrality for the intellectual inheritors of Marxism, and notions of a modernity not wholly explicable as an outgrowth of capitalism have been revived in an attempt to reinterpret our historical situation. Because of their complexity, ideas of the modern are prisms through which to try to focus and understand important issues about what kind of society we live in, how we have developed historically, and how we can interpret the art, literature, and culture of the past. In the process, a culturally central figure like Shakespeare necessarily becomes a crucial focus of attention. It is no surprise to discover that critics have been arguing about his ‘modernity’ for a long time.

A Romantic/modern Shakespeare

To many in the nineteenth century and the decades just before and after it, Shakespeare seemed remarkably ‘modern’ (in the word’s simplest sense), having been transformed by Romantic critic-poets, first in Germany, then in the rest of Europe (including Britain), into a nearly contemporaneous figure. Indeed, for German writers such as Lessing, Goethe, and Schlegel, Shakespeare functioned almost as a model: a figure to contrast with a French neo-classicism which had come to seem stultifying and mechanical. Where seventeenth- and eighteenth-century neo-classical writers had criticized Shakespeare for his ignorance of the so-called ‘rules’ of drama and for lapses in diction and decorum, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, echoing the Germans and speaking for a new generation, asserted that Shakespeare’s judgment was equal to his genius and that his works were unique, almost organic structures of literary art unsurpassed in world literature. The Romantic Shakespeare, famous for his complex characters and poetic transcendence, reigned until the early twentieth century.

The German philosopher Georg F. W. Hegel crystallized for posterity the notion of Shakespeare as an inaugurator of modernity. Hegel’s comments on the individual plays were unremarkable; he saw them more or less as coexisting with the contemporary German dramas he occasionally discussed. But his complex, multi-valent systematizing philosophy enshrined the idea of a progression toward modernity and formalized the now widely accepted division of history into three broad epochs – the ancient, the medieval, and the modern. Hegel attempted to show how politics, art, religion, and the human spirit itself all participated in an interconnected historical development, leading to increasing rationality and freedom. For him, Shakespeare, with his strikingly individualized characterizations, stood as a figure representative of an epochal new individualism and subjectivity characteristic of modernity. Hegel’s briefly sketched remarks on the Renaissance were fleshed out and developed in one of the most influential studies of the Renaissance, Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Burckhardt (1990) took Hegel’s generalizations about a new modern individualism and a new subjectivity and used them to open up and explicate the culture and art of Renaissance Italy from Petrarch to Michelangelo, explicitly treating the Renaissance as the beginning of a modernity defined by a new subjectivity. Shakespeare is mentioned only briefly in Burckhardt’s book (1990: 204–5), but he is clearly associated with the central topics of individualism and subjectivity in ways that are still influential in our own time, as the chapters by Stephen Cohen and Douglas Bruster in the present collection illustrate. But this Hegelian-Burckhardtian-Marxist view was soon challenged by a number of the mid-twentieth-century proponents of what might be called a pre-modern Shakespeare.

A modernist/pre-modern Shakespeare

In clear reaction to the Romantic/modern Shakespeare and under the influence of a new modernist aesthetics, some of the most influential of twentieth-century critics set out to produce a Shakespeare who would represent a vanished, idealized past. Irretrievably lost, such a past was nonetheless useful in the twentieth century as a means of measuring how far from grace modernity had fallen. The hope was that through new artistic practices, open to the primitivism of the past, modern society might yet revive itself.

This pre-modern Shakespeare had many facets, and some modernist-influenced critics – one thinks of Wyndham Lewis (1927) early in the period and Jan Kott (1966) late in it – wrote powerful dissenting views which stressed Shakespeare’s modernity. But the prevalent tone was set by T. S. Eliot, who in his chapter ‘The beating of a drum’ (1923) emphasized Shakespeare’s kinship with the rituals of ‘primitive’ or pre-modern peoples given sympathetic attention by the new discipline of anthropology. Arguing against late Victorian defenders of Ibsen’s and Shaw’s realist theatre, Eliot claimed that Shakespeare spoke to the twentieth century precisely because he was ‘primitive’, less encumbered by the stultifying legacy of the post-Enlightenment West. A rhetoric of timelessness often coexisted with the treatment of Shakespeare as pre-modern. But, in contrast to the incessant movement and transformation central to modernity, this reinforced an idea of art as that which, in the modern world, resists change. Art became, as French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966: 219) would put it many years later, a kind of national park for the preservation of the primitive in modern societies. Shakespeare was its largest, most glamorous denizen.

One influential school of mid-twentieth-century critics, the formalists or, as they were ultimately called, the New Critics, turned Shakespeare’s plays into closely studied sets of poetic images and figures, generating symbolic statements about eternal truths.³ Other mid-century critics had misgivings about the ahistoricism of the New Critical approach to literature, arguing that to read centuries-old texts like Shakespeare’s outside their own historical context was to commit what historians have called the ‘presentist’ fallacy – to treat human society and culture as if it were unchanging over time and thus to read the texts of the past as if they were part of the present. For example, the influential British critic F. R. Leavis (1952), although a formalist in many ways, historicized Shakespeare to the extent of seeing him and other valued authors as products of an ‘organic community’ – one now lost in the fully modernized world of the twentieth century. Another influential Shakespearean, E. M. W. Tillyard (1943), wrote that implicit in Shakespeare’s works was an integrated ‘Elizabethan World Picture’, a view of the universe and of history reflecting a divine order absent in a disenchanted, prosaic modernity. The American New Critic most influential in writing about Elizabethan literature, Cleanth Brooks (1947), endorsed Eliot’s notion that Shakespeare and Donne wrote as they did because they lived on the ‘unified’ side of that historical ‘dissociation of sensibility’ which had occurred in the mid-seventeenth century and which bequeathed to subsequent English poetry a separation of thought and feeling which only modernism was able to address (Brooks 1947). But, in the midst of all these modernist variations, Shakespeare remained an icon of pre-modernity: a figure of unity and plenitude in stark contrast to a modernity of fragmentation and emptiness.

There were of course many problems with this view of a premodern Shakespeare, and many critics dissented from its orthodoxies throughout the period of its ascendancy. It tended to reduce Shakespeare’s works to the status of antique relics, ignoring their discussion of themes that persisted as living political issues into the twentieth century: power, gender, identity, subjectivity, and the possibility of utopia. However, the pre-modern Shakespeare prevailed for most of the twentieth century for a number of reasons, perhaps the most important being that it allowed for so central a cultural icon as Shakespeare to be renewed and recontextualized. It permitted him to be saved, as it were, from the ageing Romantic associations with which he had been surrounded for much of the nineteenth century.⁴

An early modern/postmodern Shakespeare

Just as the Romantic Shakespeare began to seem old-fashioned and played out in the changed artistic, social, and political environment that created twentieth-century modernism, the pre-modern Shakespeare who succeeded him began to show signs of wear late in the twentieth century. By 1980, as newer critical methodologies, such as those involving feminism, poststructuralism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, began to transform literary studies, he had been largely replaced. The leading versions of the newer critical approaches to Shakespeare studies have been resolutely historical: the term ‘new historicism’ is a popular label for one of them, and a parallel, if less consistently historicist approach developed in Britain, usually called ‘cultural materialism’. Both of these approaches were heavily influenced by French poststructuralist theorists like Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan, by themes selected from Marxist aesthetics, and by feminist and psychoanalytic theory. While their indebtedness to theory gives them a significantly different conceptual basis than that of the older historicism of E. M. W. Tillyard and company, they share with Tillyard the belief that literary texts should be read in historical context. And historicism inevitably requires periodization. The ungainly flow of the events of recorded history demands manageable narrative units for the sake of intelligibility. And so the new historicists, like other historians, have needed to situate Shakespeare in a period. The favoured approach has been to assign his work to an era called ‘the early modern’, a term used by contemporary historians (see the chapter by Douglas Bruster) such as the influential French scholar Philippe Ariès:

There were so many changes in material and spiritual life, in relations between the individual and the state, and in the family that we must treat the early modern period as something autonomous and original, even bearing in mind all that it owed to the Middle Ages (seen of course in a new light). Nor was the early modern era merely a precursor of the modern: it was something unique, neither a continuation of the Middle Ages nor an adumbration of the future.

(Ariès 1989: 2)

The early modern itself has uncertain boundaries. Sometimes it operates as a fashionable substitute for the earlier term Renaissance (conventionally defined for Britain as the era 1500–1642), but sometimes, as in Ariès’s work, it takes on the task of encompassing the three centuries from 1500 to 1800.

It is perhaps worth pausing for a moment to consider periodization and chronologization as practices in the human sciences. They are of course basic to all attempts at a systematic reconstruction of the past, and no history can be written without some explicit or implicit commitment to them. Simply choosing a certain time span to write about constitutes the creation of a period. At the same time, of course, ‘periods’ have no ‘objective’ status. They are conveniences of writing, ways of thinking that help us see connections, or ‘constellations’ as Walter Benjamin termed such artificial but enabling clusters of ideas. To ‘periodize’ a major figure like Shakespeare, then, is clearly both arbitrary and absolutely necessary if we are to try to understand our own relation to him and his texts. But it can never be done once and for all. It is always a provisional exercise, open to contestation and modification. And this is certainly true of today’s widespread use of the term ‘early modern’.

The notion of the early modern is attractive to many because it seems to split the difference between the modernist and premodernist conceptions of Shakespeare, situating him in a transitional historical period, partly modern, partly not, and perhaps distinct, as Ariès argued, from either the pre-modern medieval or the modern proper. In several of the chapters in this book, the usefulness of this term is clearly apparent. Stephen Cohen, for example, shows how Queen Elizabeth I constructed her identity from what now seem partly pre-modern, partly modern concepts; John Drakakis situates The Merchant of Venice and its surrounding culture ‘on the cusp of modernity’; and Charles Whitney demonstrates the incompleteness of modernity in this epoch, justifying a qualifying adjective like ‘early’.

But the idea of a transitional early modern need not and should not be accepted as an uncontested orthodoxy of contemporary criticism. In the remaining sections of this Introduction, and in the chapters that follow, this periodizing of Shakespeare will variously be asserted, questioned, modified, restated, and rejected in a multidimensional inquiry into the relation of Shakespeare’s works to the idea of modernity and its relation to pre- and post-modernity. After all, the idea of ‘modernity’ is already in a certain sense inherent in the idea of ‘early modernity’, especially if we keep in mind the provisional quality of all such periodizations. Even Ariès who, in the quotation above, makes a strong case for seeing the early modern as separate from modernity proper, goes on to define three crucial aspects of life there – advances in literacy, the Protestant Reformation and its aftermath, and the development of the nationstate system – which are clearly continuous with a later fully formed modernity (Ariès 1989: 3–4).

The occasional uncertainty of many contemporary critics concerning how much modernity resides within the early modern is not a result of imprecision. The ‘new’ in the term ‘new historicism’ has been earned by a commitment to poststructuralist premises, which, in Louis Montrose’s much quoted summary, attempt to deal simultaneously both with the historicity of the text and the textuality of history (Montrose 1989: 20). Viewed in this light, history is not a matter of certainties in respect of some objective set of facts that can be faithfully reproduced; it consists of a complex discourse made in and by language and consequently sharing the uncertainties and multiple meanings characteristic of all linguistic forms. In developing these ideas, the newer critics have seemed to many observers (including this one) to share in the practices and concepts of contemporary postmodernism.⁵ Such convergences should not be surprising. Links between techniques for reading the works of the past and those of contemporary forms and techniques of artistic practice are omnipresent in literary and cultural history, as the previous brief sketches of the Romantic and Modernist Shakespearean moments illustrate. In his Shakespeare Among the Moderns, Richard Halpern turned to both T. S. Eliot and Walter Benjamin for help in understanding this phenomenon, which he called ‘historical allegory’ (Halpern 1997: 1–14). The crucial point to note is that because historical interpretation always has a creative dimension, and because there is no way simply to reconstruct ‘the truth’ without interpretation, our histories are always also allegories of the present: they inevitably represent the historian’s situation in the present as well as his/her best attempt objectively to reconstruct the past. In that sense some sort of ‘presentism’ is inevitable and desirable.

Such convergence is at work, for example, when Tillyard and his modernist generation unfailingly posited coherence as a desirable quality of all art works and consequentl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• General editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Shakespeare and modernity
• 2. (Post)modern Elizabeth: Gender, politics, and the emergence of modern subjectivity
• 3. Ante-aesthetics: Towards a theory of early modern audience response
• 4. Shakespeare, modernity and the aesthetic: Art, truth and judgement in The Winter’s Tale
• 5. Measure for Measure and modernity: The problem of the sceptic’s authority
• 6. ‘Jew. Shylock is my name’: Speech prefixes in The Merchant of Venice as symptoms of the early modern
• 7. The Merchant of Venice: ‘Modern’ anti-Semitism and the veil of allegory
• 8. Jewish invader and the soul of state: The Merchant of Venice and science fiction movies
• 9. Shakespeare and the end of history: Period as brand name
• 10. The Hamlet formerly known as Prince
• References
• Index