Four Shakespearean Period Pieces

Margreta de Grazia

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226785363
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the study of Shakespeare since the eighteenth century, four key concepts have served to situate Shakespeare in history: chronology, periodization, secularization, and anachronism.Yet recent theoretical work has called for their reappraisal. Anachronisms, previously condemned as errors in the order of time, are being hailed as alternatives to that order. Conversely chronology and periods, its mainstays, are now charged with having distorted the past they have been entrusted to represent, and secularization, once considered the driving force of the modern era, no longer holds sway over the past or the present.In light of this reappraisal, can Shakespeare studies continue unshaken? This is the question Four Shakespearean Period Pieces takes up, devoting a chapter to each term: on the rise of anachronism, the chronologizing of the canon, the staging of plays "in period, " and the use of Shakespeare in modernity's secularizing project.To read these chapters is to come away newly alert to how these fraught concepts have served to regulate the canon's afterlife. Margreta de Grazia does not entirely abandon them but deftly works around and against them to offer fresh insights on the reading, editing, and staging of the author at the heart of our literary canon.

1

Shakespeare’s First Anachronism

It is better to recognize the necessity of anachronism as something positive.

G. DIDI-HUBERMAN, “Before the Image, Before Time”

Hector’s citation of Aristotle in Troilus and Cressida is Shakespeare’s first anachronism. Or rather, it is the first instance of something in Shakespeare’s plays being called an anachronism, an error in the order of chronological time. As commentators are still noting, the error is colossal: almost a millennium separates the Trojan hero from the Greek philosopher. But it is only an error by a standard alien to Shakespearean drama: that of world chronology, the highly technical study that introduced the term anachronism into English. By that standard, the play’s dialogue should be keyed to the date of the play’s action in the twelfth century BC. Instead, the dialogue of Troilus and Cressida, like that of all Shakespeare’s plays, references the present of its composition and first performances. Hector did not know of Aristotle; Shakespeare and his audience did. The semantics of Shakespeare’s plays is generally modern, that is, indexed to the time of their writing. If that is the norm, how can any instance of it be taken to be error? The error here is not Shakespeare’s, and it is not chronological: it is the commentators’, and it is categorical. “Aristotle” names not the Greek who lived from 384 to 322 BC but the philosopher who set down the guiding principles, rational and ethical, for action. This is the Aristotle who is absent from the world of Troilus and Cressida, and his absence makes all the difference.

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In the seventeenth-century quarto and folio editions of Troilus and Cressida, Hector invokes Aristotle during the debate over whether the Trojans should return the abducted Helen or continue the fight to keep her. When his two younger brothers, Paris and Troilus, rashly argue for the latter, Hector chides them by invoking Aristotle.1

Hect. Paris and Troylus, you have both said well:

And on the cause and question now in hand,

Have gloz’d, but superficially; not much

Unlike young men, who Aristotle thought

Unfit to heare Morall Philosophie.

Eighteenth-century editors were baffled by Hector’s naming Aristotle. Could Shakespeare possibly have thought that the fourth-century BC Greek philosopher predated the twelfth-century BC Trojan hero?

When Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare’s first eighteenth-century editor, encountered Hector’s citing of Aristotle, he did what he did whenever he noted what he assumed to be a textual error: he tacitly corrected it. He replaced “Aristotle” with a metrically equivalent and chronologically indeterminate “graver Sages.” In his edition, Hector’s two brothers

Have gloss’d, but superficially; not much

Unlike young Men, whom graver Sages think

Unfit to hear moral Philosophy.2

Alexander Pope, Shakespeare’s next editor, follows Rowe’s precedent, footnoting the emendation and justifying it in his preface. He classifies “Hector’s quoting Aristotle” among the folio’s numerous “blunders and illiteracies,” like the ungrammatical Latin of such stage directions as “Actus tertia, Exit Omnes, Enter three Witches solus.” Such errors betray a degree of ignorance beyond Shakespeare’s alleged unfamiliarity with the ancients. Anyone who had “the least tincture of a School or the least conversation with such as had” would have known that Aristotle postdated Hector. Pope instead blames the folio’s publishers, whose “ignorance shines almost in every page.”3

It is the emendation of “Aristotle” to “graver Sages” that Lewis Theobald targets in his scathing 194-page critique of Pope’s 1725 edition, Shakespeare restored: or, a specimen of the many errors, as well committed, as unamended, by Mr Pope in his late edition of this poet.4 In the appendix, a two-page essay on “transgressions in Time” includes the marginal subheadings “Anachronism consider’d” and “Anachronisms familiar with Shakespeare.”5 This is the first application of anachronism to Shakespeare’s text. The note begins by exposing the error the emendation had concealed: “’Tis certain, indeed, that Aristotle was at least 800 Years subsequent in Time to Hector.” It proceeds to expose a second anachronism, “every whit as absurd,” in the very next line. “Philosophy” itself also postdated Hector: “Pythagoras was the first who invented the Word Philosophy. . . . And he was near 600 Years after the Date of Hector.”6 It was not Shakespeare’s publishers who committed these anachronisms, as Pope had alleged, but Shakespeare himself, as Theobald sets out to prove with a generous sampling of many more instances from his works. His first specimens of temporal offenses are from the plays set in antiquity: a few more from Troilus (Ajax’s nerves are likened to those of Milo, “who was not in Being till 600 Years after that Greek”) as well as from Coriolanus (Galen is named, “who was not born till the second Century of the Christian Æra”).

That Shakespeare should have committed anachronisms in plays set in the ancient past was to be expected. Throughout the seventeenth century, commentators, both biographical and critical, invariably stressed Shakespeare’s limited knowledge of the ancients, the result, it was said, of his low-level provincial education.7 But why should such slips crop up in plays about the past of his own nation, a past he knew well, as was apparent, according to Theobald, in his use of “the English Annals” as sources for his history plays?

Yet, in his King Lear, he has ventur’d to make Edgar talk of the Curfew, a Thing not known in Britain til the Norman Invasion: In his King John he above fifty times mentions Cannons, tho Gunpowder was not invented till above a Century and a half after the Death of that Monarch: and what is yet more singular, (as he could not be a Stranger to the Date of a remarkable Man, who liv’d so near his own Time) twice in the Story of Henry VI. he makes mention of Machiavel.8

These many examples of “Innovation upon Chronology” were not, Theobald insists, inadvertent. Like Hector’s anachronism, they were “the Effect of Poetick Licence in [Shakespeare], rather than Ignorance.” And Shakespeare was not above flaunting his use of this “Licence.” In pagan King Lear, Theobald points out, the Fool, after delivering a “Dogrel Prophecy” chock-full of contemporary references, concludes by drawing attention to his own flagrant prolepsis: “This Prophecy Merlin shall make; for I do live before his time.” Theobald imagines Shakespeare deriding the very prerogative he exploits: “he may be presum’d to sneer at his own Licentiousness.”9

But it is Theobald who is sneering, in his self-appointed responsibility to castigate excesses of poetic liberty. Theobald concludes his long note in Shakespeare restored by offering to provide “ten Times the Number” of anachronisms he has just discussed, and indeed he flags at least that many in the notes to his own 1733 edition of Shakespeare’s plays: “I thought it my Duty, to discover some Anachronisms in our Author.”10 In both his 1726 critique of Pope’s edition as well as in the preface and notes to his own edition, Theobald locates so many anachronisms in both modern and ancient drama that he might have concluded that they were typical of the genre rather than an aberration. He notes their frequency in English playwrights besides Shakespeare both before and after the Restoration. In Beaumont and Fletcher’s tragicomedy The Humorous Lieutenant, one of the successors of Alexander the Great appears with pistol in hand “1500 Years before Fire-arms were ever thought of,” and in Dryden and Lee’s Oedipus, the “Theatre at Athens” is mentioned, though surely those two dramatists had enough “Dramatical Chronology” to know that no theaters existed in the time of Oedipus.11 A translator of Greek drama, Theobald also cites numerous examples from ancient comedy and tragedy, postponing, he explains, the discovery of “the Anachronisms of Aeschylus” until the publication of his own translation of his tragedies.12 Their frequency among the ancient playwrights authorizes their modern successors: “Poets of our own Nation may be justified in these Liberties by Examples of the Antients.”13

All the same, critical intervention is needed. Ideally, for Theobald, a play’s allusions would observe its historical setting as closely as possible so that “if there was not Chronological Truth, there was at least Chronological Likelihood.” Thus, in the Henry VI plays, he has no objection to the two mentions of Machiavelli because the dates of the Italian politician “are very near the Time of the Action,” the reign of Henry VI. The discrepancy is so slight, he maintains, that it might pass unnoticed by an English audience. But when Hector cites Aristotle or the Fool quotes Merlin, Shakespeare “goes out of his Jurisdiction,” and it is the editor’s duty to catch out these “voluntary Transgressions of Time” and subject them to “the Penalty of the Criticks Laws.”14

After Theobald, Shakespeare’s editors continue to flag anachronisms as if it were their prescribed duty. And Hector’s anachronism remains the prime example. Samuel Johnson asks why commentators should be troubled by the Trojan’s anachronism when it is only one among many: “We need not wonder to find Hector quoting Aristotle, when we see the loves of Theseus and Hippolyta combined with the Gothick mythology of fairies.”15 George Steevens attributes the anachronism to the frequent computational errors found in the romances on which most of the comedies and tragedies were based.16 Edward Capell condemns “Aristotle” as a “violent anachronism” while regretting that the precise source of the error remains unknown.17 For Edmond Malone, Shakespeare’s anachronisms are his own, and they are chronic. As he observes in noting another anachronism in Troilus and Cressida—Ulysses’s comparison of Ajax to “bull-bearing Milo,” the sixth-century BC wrestler—“our author here, as usual, pays no regard to chronology.”18 His indifference extends to modern English history, as Malone points out, in his notes to 1 Henry IV, for example: “Turkies were not brought into England till the time of Henry VIII,” and Shakespeare has “fallen into an anachronism, in furnishing his tavern in Eastcheap with sack in the time of Henry IV,” when sack was not sold in taverns (only in apothecary shops) “till the 33d year of King Henry VIII. 1543.”19 These lapses in the order of time were particularly galling to the editor who, as will be discussed in chapter 2, was obsessed from the start to the finish of his career with chronologizing Shakespeare’s plays. As he repeats in all three of the chronological essays he published, “It is certain that there is nothing in which [Shakespeare] is less accurate, than the computation of time.”20

Editors up through the present have continued the tradition of highlighting the Trojan anachronism. Consider the following glosses in recent editions of Troilus and Cressida:

An obvious (and trivial) anachronism.

Arden 2 (1982)

Shakespeare may not have realized that Aristotle lived after the date of the Trojan War.

Oxford Shakespeare (1982)

The mention of Aristotle in ancient Troy is, of course, an anachronism.

Riverside (1997)

Aristotle (384–22 BC) lived long after the Trojan War (c. early 12th century BC) and Homer (probably ninth BC), and the anachronism offended some early editors of Shakespeare like Rowe, but these dates were imperfectly understood in the Renaissance.

Arden 3 (1998)

An obvious anachronism, since Aristotle lived several centuries after the Trojan War.

New Cambridge Shakespeare (2003)

The ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• 1   Shakespeare’s First Anachronism
• 2   Shakespeare in Chronological Order
• 3   Period Drama in the Age of World Pictures
• 4   Secularity before Revelation
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index