Shakespeare and the Culture of Romanticism

Joseph M. Ortiz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409455813
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351900799
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

The idea of Shakespearean genius and sublimity is usually understood to be a product of the Romantic period, promulgated by poets such as Coleridge and Byron who promoted Shakespeare as the supreme example of literary genius and creative imagination. However, the picture looks very different when viewed from the perspective of the myriad theater directors, actors, poets, political philosophers, gallery owners, and other professionals in the nineteenth century who turned to Shakespeare to advance their own political, artistic, or commercial interests. Often, as in John Kemble's staging of The Winter's Tale at Drury Lane or John Boydell's marketing of paintings in his Shakespeare Gallery, Shakespeare provided a literal platform on which both artists and entrepreneurs could strive to influence cultural tastes and points of view. At other times, Romantic writers found in Shakespeare's works a set of rhetorical and theatrical tools through which to form their own public personae, both poetic and political. Women writers in particular often adapted Shakespeare to express their own political and social concerns. Taken together, all of these critical and aesthetic responses attest to the remarkable malleability of the Shakespearean corpus in the Romantic period. As the contributors show, Romantic writers of all persuasions"Whig and Tory, male and female, intellectual and commercial"found in Shakespeare a powerful medium through which to claim authority for their particular interests.

Part I
Rethinking the Romantic Critic

Chapter 1
“Small reverence for station”: Walter Savage Landor’s Subversive Shakespeare

David Chandler

Garrick’s celebrated description, “the god of our idolatry,” established the tone for Romantic appreciation of Shakespeare.¹ With the exception of Byron, a problematic case,² the major Romantic writers in Britain were all prepared to declare Shakespeare superhuman, a genius of immeasurable proportions; his “divinity” became a shared article of faith. Thus, to take three examples, to Coleridge “Shakspeare is the Spinozistic Deity, an omnipresent creativeness.”³ To Keats “the Genius of Shakspeare was an in[n]ate universality—wherefore he had the utmost atchievement [sic] of human intellect prostrate beneath his indolent and kingly gaze.”⁴ And to De Quincey Shakespeare was “the sole authentic oracle of truth,” a man who “thought more finely and more extensively than all other poets combined.”⁵ Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864), who grew up in Shakespeare’s Warwickshire, was thoroughly at home in this Bardolatrous environment, and contributed his eloquence to the cause. Thus, to take three examples again, in Landor’s Collected Works there are plenty of statements along the following lines: “all the faults that ever were committed in poetry would be but as air to earth, if we could weigh them against one single thought or image, such as almost every scene exhibits in every drama of this unrivalled genius”; “Glory to thee in the highest, thou confidant of our Creator! who alone hast taught us in every particle of the mind how wonderfully and fearfully we are made”; and “[Shakespeare is] the best poet and the wisest man, whom not only England but God’s whole world has produced.”⁶ Such pronouncements prompted Swinburne to rank Landor, with Coleridge and Charles Lamb, as one of “the three who have written of Shakespeare as never man wrote, nor ever man may write again.”⁷

If Landor only wrote about Shakespeare in this vein, his could be described as a fairly typical Romantic response to the “unrivalled genius,” albeit one armed with an enthusiastic eloquence remarkable even in this culture of overstatement. In fact, though, his attitude to Shakespeare was complicated by the circumstance that, while irresistibly attracted to Romantic Bardolatry, he disliked its tendency to produce an essentially safe, socially conservative version of England’s greatest writer. The Romantics’ godlike Shakespeare may have been thrillingly imaginative, but in his political attitudes he was a firm supporter of the existing institutions of society—a reflection, this, of the Burkean, antirevolutionary strand in English Romanticism. The classic statement of the case is Hartley Coleridge’s, whose 1828 essay “Shakspeare a Tory, and a Gentleman” logically extended many of his father’s local criticisms to comfortably maintain that “a strong evidence of Shakspeare’s Toryism, is the respect with which he always treats established orders, degrees, institutions, and opinions; never seeking to desecrate what time and the world’s consent have sanctified.”⁸ This conservative Shakespeare is found, too, in the work of critics who would clearly have liked to find a more radical spirit in the plays. Thus Hazlitt, in his famous account of Coriolanus, argues that though the play includes arguments both for and against democracy and freedom, yet “Shakespear himself seems to have had a leaning to the arbitrary side of the question.”⁹ (He continues with the fascinating, though little discussed, speculation: “perhaps from some feeling of contempt for his [Shakespeare’s] own origin.”) These readings of the plays were, as will be demonstrated, fully supported by the major biographies of the period, which describe Shakespeare as a thoroughly moral man and good citizen.

The depth of Landor’s distaste for this conservative consensus can be measured in his most substantial writing on Shakespeare, the (surprisingly) Bardolatry-free Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare of 1834. This curious work, the full title of which is Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare, Euseby Treen, Joseph Carnaby and Silas Gough, Clerk, before the worshipful Sir Thomas Lucy, Knight, Touching Deer-Stealing on the 19th day of September in the year of Grace 1582. Now first published from Original Papers, is rather hard to characterize. It is, in some respects, a greatly extended—38,000 word—version of the Imaginary Conversations that established Landor’s fame in the 1820s by representing historical figures through wide-ranging dialogues. Unlike the Conversations, however, in the Citation considerable emphasis is placed on the textuality of the work, a supposed relic of the age of Shakespeare, and it is presented complete with an “Editor’s Preface” and notes. In this sense, the Citation is a joke directed at Shakespearean scholars, one that can be connected to William Henry Ireland’s forgeries of Shakespearean documents in the 1790s and, with more precision, to James White’s spoof on Ireland, Falstaff’s Letters (1796), which Landor had been given by Lamb in 1832.¹⁰ Combating the generally conservative shift in the way Shakespeare had come to be understood in the Romantic era, the Citation reinvigorates the traditional stories that had represented Shakespeare as a lusty rogue, a devotee of the pleasures of the flesh, rather than a literary god or superman. The most remarkable of these stories, and the one providing a framing context for the “imaginary conversation” that occupies the main body of Landor’s work, concerned the young Shakespeare stealing deer from Sir Thomas Lucy, and being caught and prosecuted. The Citation purports to be a legal deposition taken at his trial. It appeared at a time when fictions concerning Shakespeare were just starting to become common; indeed Charles A. Somerset’s play, Shakspeare’s Early Days, which dramatizes the deer-poaching legend, had enjoyed some success in 1829, and possibly provided Landor with a few hints.¹¹

The critical neglect of the Citation is remarkable. Samuel Schoenbaum included a few characteristically condescending paragraphs on Landor’s work in the first edition of his Shakespeare’s Lives (1970), but removed them from the revised edition. Maurice J. O’Sullivan commented briefly, but more positively, in his article, “Shakespeare’s Other Lives” (1987), and included an extract in his similarly titled anthology (1997). But in most books and articles on Shakespeare’s reception, and on Romantic readings of Shakespeare, the Citation goes wholly unmentioned. Even Landor specialists have had very little to say about it, and what they have said is nearly scathing: Malcolm Elwin classes it “among the least worthy of Landor’s writings,” while R. H. Super calls it “one of Landor’s greatest failures.”¹² Much of the critical neglect can be attributed to straightforward ignorance of the Citation, but such judgments suggest that those readers who have found their way to the book have found the portrayal of Shakespeare unpalatable. Landor’s radical young Shakespeare still provokes more than his author intended, but it is argued here that he is considerably closer to the Shakespeare many of us find fascinating today than the godlike Bard of much Romantic criticism.

The legend of Shakespeare’s poaching that Landor decided to treat was first made public, and given its standard form, by Nicholas Rowe in 1709:

[Shakespeare] had, by a Misfortune common enough to young Fellows, fallen into ill Company; … some that made a frequent practice of Deer-stealing, engag’d him with them more than once in robbing a Park that belong’d to Sir Thomas Lucy of Cherlecot, near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by that Gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and in order to revenge that ill Usage, he made a Ballad upon him. And tho’ this, probably the first Essay of his Poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter, that it redoubled the Prosecution against him to that degree, that he was oblig’d to leave his Business and Family in Warwickshire, for some time, and shelter himself in London.

It is at this Time, and upon this Accident, that he is said to have made his first Acquaintance in the Play-house.¹³

Told thus, the story was repeated over and over again in the eighteenth century, the liveliest episode in the accepted biography of Shakespeare. In his posthumous “Life of William Shakspeare” (1821), however, Edmond Malone rejected the legend with an overwhelming range of evidence. The most damaging aspect of his case was very simple: there was no park to steal from, ergo no deer to steal. Malone’s scholarship was superb; his motivation more suspect. His biography of Shakespeare tends to whitewash its subject, just as he had, quite literally, organized the whitewashing of the bust of Shakespeare in Stratford Church. Malone wanted Shakespeare to be respectable, noble, pure. He turned his fierce intelligence on traditional stories that made Shakespeare seem less than these things, and of course such stories, by definition, were not designed to withstand the withering cross-examination that Malone, with his legal training, was able to bring to bear on them. The issues involved in the deer-stealing legend are made clear enough when Malone portentously introduces his discussion as “of the utmost moment.” “[I]f it be a mere fiction,” he solemnly declares, “it is the bounden duty of the historian … minutely and explicitly to refute an unfounded calumny.” Later, he describes the traditional account of the deer stealing and subsequent prosecution as “degrading circumstances.”¹⁴ James Boswell the younger, Malone’s friend and sympathetic editor, made explicit what Malone had largely left implicit when he added the thought that it was a “subject of congratulation” that Malone had “shown, by an examination of the legendary tales which have so long been current respecting Shakspeare’s early years, that they are wholly groundless; and that the greatest genius which his country has produced, maintained, from his youth upwards, that respectability of character which unquestionably belonged to him in after life.”¹⁵ De Quincey took the same line, condemning the traditional story as a “slanderous and idle tale,” an “outrageous calumny upon Shakespeare’s memory.”¹⁶ William Harvey, who wrote the first biography of Shakespeare subsequent to Malone’s, was not wholly convinced that there had been no poaching, but still echoed the sentiment: “For the sake of the poet’s memory, we trust that the deer-stealing story is fabulous.”¹⁷

When Malone had dismissed the “legendary tales” surrounding “Shakespeare’s early years” it became clear that virtually nothing was actually known about them—certainly nothing that would serve to give Shakespeare a distinctive character. But this served the purposes of Romantic idealization, as Malone himself made clear:

Were our poet’s early history accurately known, it would unquestionably furnish us with many proofs … of his acuteness, facility, and fluency; of the playfulness of his fancy, and his love of pleasantry and humour; of his curiosity, discernment, candour, and liberality; of all those qualities, in a word, which afterwards rendered him the admiration of the age in which he lived.¹⁸

Landor was too much a rebel, too skeptical of authority and bourgeois morality, to be comfortable with such a sanitized image of the “respectable” genius. In writing the Citation he had a number of targets, but the most important is Malone. The Citation gives imaginative life to the story the great scholar had taken most pains to refute, and which he considered most offensive to Shakespeare’s memory. In his “Editor’s Preface” Landor writes, teasingly, “The malignant may doubt, or pretend to doubt, the authenticity of the Examination here published. Let us, who are not malignant, be cautious of adding anything to the noisome mass of incredulity that surrounds us.”¹⁹ In the context of presenting the public with “Original Papers” connected with Shakespeare, Landor was probably deliberately evoking the Ireland forgeries, and Malone’s exposure of them, in the 1790s. But the comment has a more general application: Malone’s fundamental approach to all the stories in the Shakespearean mythos was, as Schoenbaum’s was later, to “doubt, or pretend to doubt” them. Schoenbaum’s complaint, that Landor relied on “folk notions of Shakespeare,” ignoring the “facts” Malone had brought to light, almost comically misses the point.²⁰ More recently, in any case, such “folk notions” have been powerfu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Rethinking the Romantic Critic
• Part II Shakespeare and the Making of the Romantic Poet
• Part III The Romantic Stage
• Part IV Harnessing the Renaissance: Markets, Religion, Politics
• Bibliography
• Index