Shakespeare and Social Theory

The Play of Great Ideas

Bradd Shore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000429787
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book provides a bridge between Shakespeare studies and classical social theory, opening up readings of Shakespeare to a new audience outside of literary studies and the humanities. Shakespeare has long been known as a "great thinker" and this book reads his plays through the lens of an anthropologist, revealing new connections between Shakespeare's plays and the lives we now lead.

Close readings of a selection of frequently studied plays— Hamlet, The Winter's Tale, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Julius Caesar, and King Lear— engage with the texts in detail while connecting them with some of the biggest questions we all ask ourselves, about love, friendship, ritual, language, human interactions, and the world around us. The plays are examined through various social theories including performance theory, cognitive theory, semiotics, exchange theory, and structuralism. The book concludes with a consideration of how "the new astronomy" of his day and developments in optics changed the very idea of "perspective, " and shaped Shakespeare's approach to embedding social theory in his dramatic texts.

This accessible and engaging book will appeal to those approaching Shakespeare from outside literary studies but will also be valuable to literature students approaching Shakespeare for the first time, or looking for a new angle on the plays.

PART I
Shakespeare’s world

1
To see and not to see

Hamlet’s undiscovered country

DOI: 10.4324/9781003179771-3

Hamlet, Shakespeare’s celebrated revenge tragedy, has been called “a meta-theatrical play,” a four-hour rumination on the complex relationship between theater and life. In its treatment of plot and character as well as in its masterful anticipation and manipulation of its audience’s responses, Hamlet raises basic questions about the human attempt to perform life into meaning in a world that does not easily yield coherent insight. In his fascinating study of Hamlet, To Be and Not to Be, James Calderwood develops this reading of Hamlet as meta-theatrical theater by focusing on the paradox of acting: the enactment of absence as presence in the borderland of the stage where “to be” is also “not to be” (Calderwood 1983). And so, the drama turns out to be as much about Hamlet the play as it is about Hamlet the Prince.

In his plays, Shakespeare repeatedly stages the complex relations between being and acting. A Midsummer Night’s Dream treats the rehearsal of a play by a set of amateur actors as a powerful analog to the making of a marriage (see Chapter 6). Act II of Henry IV, Part I has Falstaff taking on Prince Hal’s father’s role as the Prince rehearses for his impending interview with the old king. In As You Like It, Jaques famously proclaims that “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players,” a histrionic vision of living that many theorists like Erving Goffman (1959, 1982), Victor Turner (1969, 1974, 2001), Kenneth Burke (1945, 1950), and Judith Butler (1990) have sought to develop theoretically.

We shall shortly return to the place of performing in Hamlet since the play treats acting as a significant way in which people attempt to make sense of things. But first, we face the most basic question about Hamlet: what on earth (or not on earth!) is this play about? There have been many conventional answers to the question. The play's proposed themes are all great ones: revenge, succession, fratricide, regicide, agency, incest, guilt, procrastination, love, and adultery. The play is also about the troubled relations between seeming (acting) and authentic being. All of these themes can be found in Hamlet. True enough, and yet…not enough.

Hamlet might credibly be accused of spinning out both too many meanings and not enough meaning. Confronting this paradox of too-much-too-little meaning in Hamlet brought back many memories of my earliest fieldwork as a newly minted anthropologist. I had gone to Samoa in 1972 as a graduate student to study law and social control in a Samoan village noted for its history of social conflict. I lived for a year as the “son” in the family of one of the two senior chiefs of the village and found myself caught up in a real-life murder mystery close to home when my Samoan father was shot dead by the other chief’s son following an argument over a card game. My dissertation and, later, my first book became an ethnography of Samoan village politics framed as a murder mystery (Shore 1982). Starting with the raw events surrounding the murder, I sought to unpack the layers of cultural meaning that illuminated my father’s death so that the murder mystery might be revealed as a cultural mystery. However, the deeper I dug into the murder, the more layers of interpretation emerged. There seemed to be no bottom, no end to interpreting.

Then, there was the problem of how to “act” in the midst of this tragedy and its aftermath. I was playing several parts at once. In this drama, I was a family member, a kind of adopted “son” to the murdered man, but also an anthropologist studying conflict and trying to collect data for my dissertation objectively. Do I give the victim’s son a ride on my motorcycle out of the village as he flees the scene where he had just assaulted his father’s murderer with a bush knife, or do I stand back and take notes on the chaos around me? I chose the former path. But my shock and despair at the murder were mixed with an emerging awareness that I had hit the motherload in the search for good data on conflict. Caught up in a tangle of confused roles, I was unsure of how to act and think and feel about what was going on. I didn’t know how to perform the role of the anthropologist-as-adopted-son in the face of this sort of tragedy.

And now, returning to Hamlet years later as a seasoned anthropologist vividly brought back the humbling dilemma that faces any anthropologist trying to unravel the mysteries of cultural worlds: the ethnographer’s Hamlet-esque stance as “participant-observer,” attempting to participate in this alien world while professionally disappearing into the background. By entering the world of Hamlet, I understood in a new way the impossibility of producing a final account of any cultural mystery given the fragile relations between what we can see, what we can know, and what actually is. I had come upon an anthropologist’s dreamwork: a play about the proliferating possibilities that lie just beyond our horizon of knowing, and why arriving at a coherent and stable interpretation of things is such a challenge. As a play about its own interpretation, Hamlet runs for over four hours, theatrically encompassing the full circumference of the hermeneutic circle.

The human struggle to wrest meaning out of the events and people in our lives is of great interest to cultural anthropology. Some of us call it the problem of “meaning-construction.” What exactly does it mean to “make meaning” of our lives? How do people do it? Is there “meaning” in the world or just in our minds? Having spent many years exploring meaning-construction in relation to culture and cognition, I turn at this late date in my career back to literature to see what insights into meaning-making Shakespeare’s Hamlet can provide. We begin our Shakespearean odyssey by entering the disquieting hall of mirrors that Shakespeare constructed in his vision of a troubled Denmark. More than any other play, Hamlet conveys the radical interrogative mood that characterizes the Shakespearean play of ideas as he choreographs for Hamlet as well as his audience, the human attempt to find meaning in a world both unsteady and unyielding.

In seeking “the meaning” of Shakespeare’s Danish tragedy, we face a problem: Hamlet is impenetrable. Interpretations keep unfolding and then unraveling so that there seems to be no end to what the play is about. This problem makes any discussion of Hamlet especially challenging. Shakespeare’s longest and most celebrated work is also his least accessible. However, Hamlet is also oddly affecting. Despite all that has been written and said about Hamlet, its curiosity is that we can be so deeply absorbed by a play whose point remains elusive. Hamlet is not entirely unintelligible. We almost get it. It is just meaningful enough to keep us watching and guessing, at once in conclusion and inconclusion.

The play thrusts the audience into the midst of trouble from the opening scene, and we struggle to find our footing. Part of the problem with Hamlet is that its action is dis-placed. From the start, it is not clear from where Hamlet—both the play and the dead King—is speaking to us. Reading or watching Hamlet, I have often felt I was not encountering the real play. Self-consciously theatrical, Hamlet tempts us to contemplate the possibility that we are watching a replacement, a rehearsal perhaps, of a parallel Hamlet set just out of view in the wings. Hamlet seems to be more off-staged than staged. Though set in Denmark, the play’s real home is somewhere else (which turns out to be true). The play opens on the parapets of Elsinore Castle at the changing of the guard. Its opening words (“Who’s there?/Nay, Answer me. Stand and unfold yourself”) allude to an unseen world that refuses full disclosure. Even as performance, the play’s action is impelled by forces beyond the stage’s temporal and spatial frames rather than by the characters or events at hand. From his first words, Hamlet is an enigma. Even as we get to know Hamlet better as the play unfolds, the full scope of his problem remains clear neither to the audience nor to the King and Queen, nor to Hamlet himself. By the play’s end, the butchered corpses of its central figures scattered about the stage and a new order unexpectedly breaking in from the outside, the meaning of it all still seems to be left only half-disclosed.

T.S. Eliot warned us about Hamlet. In his 1921 essay “Hamlet and His Problems,” Eliot called the play “intractable,” a failed work rather than the masterpiece it has been proclaimed.

Of the intractability there can be no doubt. So far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure. In several ways the play is puzzling, and disquieting as is none of the others. Of all the plays it is the longest and possibly the one on which Shakespeare spent most pains; and yet he has left in it superfluous and inconsistent scenes which even hasty revision should have noticed.

(Eliot 1921: 90)

Eliot brilliantly noted that Hamlet was Shakespeare’s attempt ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Reading Shakespeare through anthropology
• Part I: Shakespeare’s world
• Part II: Four plays
• Part III: Shakespeare’s craft
• Bibliography
• Index