Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now

Criticism and Theory in the 21st Century

C. DiPietro, H. Grady, C. DiPietro, H. Grady

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137017314
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

These essays address the intersections between Shakespeare, history and the present using a variety of new and established methodological approaches, from phenomenology and ecocriticism to the new economics and aesthetics.

1

Presentism, Anachronism, and Titus Andronicus

Cary DiPietro and Hugh Grady

I

Shakespeare’s plays and poems in their own time reflect a fractious, often violent, and uncertain moment in the shift from feudalism to modernity, a moment that continues to resonate in our own, often violent and precarious moment in late modernity.¹ In the early, extremely violent play Titus Andronicus, this convergence is particularly apparent, and it has become even more so in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. We want to make use of this convergence to exemplify one version of the Presentist criticism discussed in the Foreword by Terence Hawkes and in our Introduction. As we noted, there is no one single kind of Presentism, but rather a multiplicity of possible approaches. In this essay, we offer one example of a specific kind of Presentism, one that acknowledges the importance of scholarly attempts to understand the contexts of the texts that come down to us—while also acknowledging that such historicist efforts nevertheless are always already implicated in the assumptions and values of the “now” within which they are created. The “timelessness” of literature, we have learned, is a façade for our reconstructions of the past at our specific historical moment—and all too often a façade concealing unspoken assumptions from our own time. Thus, it is important instead to see, as the previous generation of critical practice has demonstrated in detail, that all literature arises from specific historical moments and is imprinted with the “timeliness” of its originating era. What Presentism would add to that insight, however, is the equally crucial truth that we encounter these historical works outside of their moment of origin, and they have meaning for us because their very otherness is a challenge to our own thinking, feeling, and values—which, however, constitute the only ground from which we can contemplate them. Any reading of works of the past has to work within this dialectic. There is never a moment of “timelessness”; there is instead a complex negotiation between then and now, and one that has to be continually renegotiated as our “now” changes in the wake of developing history. Thus, contrary to what some of its critics claim, Presentist criticism is deeply implicated in defining a constantly changing interaction between past and present, not seeing them as static and unchanging.

What we are advocating here is a kind of “allegorical” approach, inspired by Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory and the application of it to literary analysis of Richard Halpern.² Two aspects of the allegory as defined by Benjamin are relevant here. The first is its informing quality, productive of an open, unfinished text. As Benjamin puts it, “Allegory has to do, precisely in its destructive furor, with dispelling the illusion that proceeds from all ‘given order,’ whether of art or of life: the illusion of totality or of organic wholeness which transfigures that order and makes it seem endurable. And this is the progressive tendency of allegory.”³ The second is its quality of layered, multiple meanings, meanings that overlay each other, are not identical with each other nor capable of being organically unified with each other, but do not cancel each other out. In the seventeenth-century baroque Trauerspiele from which Benjamin derived much of his theory of allegory, the plays are always set in a specific historical time, different from the historical era in which they were being written. History in these plays, Benjamin wrote, is thus revealed to be in ruins, and the plays are built from these ruins, thus “history has physically merged into the setting” in the form of “ruins.”⁴ “Allegories are,” writes Benjamin, “in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.”⁵ They disclose a world in decay, but they show how the elements of decay can be reborn as new art in a new and different era. Our own readings of the texts of the past share in this allegorical quality. They are ruins for us, fragments of history surviving into our own time. And their meaning shifts as we back into history.

We offer a reading of Shakespeare’s use of anachronisms in Titus Andronicus to explore the relationship between historical difference and critical practice, and also to exemplify one approach among many that might be identified with what has come to be known as the critical movement Presentism. Anachronism presupposes at one level a sameness between past and present, a sameness that is for the historian troubling, a temporal error. What we will argue, by comparison, is that the construction of an analogy between past and present involved in a conscious use of anachronism allows us to reevaluate what we know of the past in present terms. The real error is to assume that through disinterested, empirical analysis of the raw “material” of the past we can come to an ever more objective or true understanding of it. Historicist and materialist scholars no doubt understand this epistemological barrier, yet an assumption about the historical “truth” of the past continues to be a chimera of literary scholarship. The alternative, we will argue, is to acknowledge that we read the past through the lens of our own ideological positions and articulate it from within contemporary discursive paradigms; a conscious, critical anachronism allows us to dialogue pragmatically with a past that we can only reconstruct incompletely and never impartially, but, more importantly, it is through such critical and creative contexts that we can come to understand what is aesthetically powerful about Shakespeare’s plays for us now.

Titus Andronicus, a revenge tragedy composed at some point in the early to mid-1590s, is an excellent example of such aesthetically powerful anachronism, no less because of the resonance it has for us post–9/11. The play’s extreme aesthetics of shock as well as its linkage of racial stereotyping to acts of violence, primarily through the figure of the stage Moor, give the play new meanings for us today. Moreover, Shakespeare himself employs his own kind of anachronism to much the same effect. Although one of his four Roman plays whose fictionalized setting and characters derive indirectly from a number of Latin textual sources, Titus also expresses its moment of historical origin in an early modern Europe in complex interrelations with the Muslim world, thereby expressing as well the ethno-political violence and instability that were part of the early modern European–Islamic interaction. The play thus focuses the Roman characters and Latin textual antecedents through the lens of its many anachronisms, producing often explicit analogies between the classical past the play represents and an Elizabethan present.

Using this notion, then, we offer an alternative reading that, rather than exploring the classical setting through Shakespeare’s use of Latin sources in Seneca and Ovid as a locus for the play’s meaning, emphasizes instead the play’s own historical allegory through its presentation of anachronisms to Elizabethan audiences—and, moreover, anachronisms that correlate that experience of the play with a future present: our own time. In particular, what make this play’s use of terror in its aesthetic appeal seem so contemporary are its references to the complex figure of “the Moor” and our own era’s associations of terrorism with the complex matrix of economic, political, and social realities of today’s Middle East. This association has contributed greatly to the neatly polarized antagonism between Muslim East and Imperialist West, a “clash of civilizations.” This positioning would seem to exemplify a “violent hierarchy” in which one extreme binary difference effectively suppresses our awareness of an inextricable web of differences, an exemplary demonstration of Jacques Derrida’s différance in the construction of the Other.⁶ Terror, as much as it depends on violence or the threat of violence, also depends on a static binary that serves rhetorically to amplify difference, heightening the fear of the Other to terror.

A critical and productive use of anachronism, a deliberate “Presentism,” offers one way of disrupting that “violent hierarchy” between present and past, collapsing the distance between them in a double gesture that both inverts and defamiliarizes. When we think of contemporary acts of terrorism, we feel the unnatural tension and violent emotion that are amplified by our sense of the presence of terror in the present. If Titus Andronicus resonates in our own time, to what degree, then, did Elizabethans share in a similar presence of terror, generated by experiencing not a radical fundamentalist or a political terrorist, but an Orientalized, theatrical Moor staging violence?

II

Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus constitutes a promising text for discussing these issues because its many anachronisms produce often explicit analogies between the classical past the play represents and an Elizabethan present. These analogies exemplify Benjamin’s theory of allegory, in which multiple meanings overlay each other and, though not identical with each other, are nevertheless woven into a “timely” history. The many fragments of classical texts—a quotation of Horace’s Odes in a letter, the use of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a stage prop, an allusion to Livy at the moment of Titus’s murder of Saturninus—are the ruins from which the play is built, “physically merged into the setting” of the play and with meanings that shift with their iteration on the Elizabethan stage. What Benjamin describes as the destructive furor of allegory, its open-endedness resistant to a unified organic order, is realized not only through the play’s pervasive use of anachronism, but by the anarchic violence of its action and its disruption of the Roman mythos. Any desire to recognize in the play a unified idea of “Rome”—as some critics have done, to read the play in the more traditional sense of allegory as an allegorical distillation of the whole Roman Empire⁷—is made impossible by the fragmentary use of multiple classical sources, by the very hybridity of what Titus, when alluding to Livy before his murder of Lavinia, calls a “pattern, precedent and lively warrant” (5.3.43) for his own actions.⁸ The disruption of the Roman mythos is further mirrored by the events of the play, which sees Rome invaded by Goths and re-formed into an uneasy political union with them at the end of Act 5. The disruptive politics of the play’s conflict do for Rome what anachronism does for the play’s presentation of Roman history, taking the fragments and re-forming them into a new work.

The play’s representation of a classical past thus showcases the irreducibility of the present; and so it constitutes an instance, albeit in a creative aesthetic context, of Shakespeare’s own Presentism. Indeed, it is Shakespeare’s creative amalgamation of neoclassical humanism and Latin sources that brings the past into view through a historical context particular to the play’s Renaissance audience. So too are our own contemporary encounters with the play, as well as the past it represents, subject to shifting historical contexts. Once again, Titus Andronicus is also an exemplary case study of such shifting contextual paradigms inasmuch as its place in the Shakespeare canon has shifted dramatically in recent years. Where once it was considered an embarrassment, an instance in which the neoclassical evaluation of Shakespeare as a barbarian victim of a barbarous age still applied, today the play has emerged as a much-discussed text with surprisingly deep cultural resonances and aesthetic integrity. Because the play’s once-scandalous extreme violence is suddenly both politically relevant and aesthetically powerful—in performance, on film,⁹ and in the study—it is a prime example of one of the fundamental principles on which Presentist critical theory is based: that the meaning and significance of texts is never static or “timeless,” that both shift as the play is inscribed and reinscribed in the series of historical and cultural contexts provided by the aging of the work and its relocation in different cultural contexts. It also provides an important example of how “historical context” itself—the supposed binary opposite of “Presentist criticism”—is something that shifts radically as our present history leads us to view the past with new understandings, with different interpretive lenses, with different senses of what is important and relevant, and what is not.

To read the play in terms of the disruptive politics of its conflict is necessarily to read it through a Presentist lens and, more specifically, through the violence and turbulence of global politics post–9/11. As an instance of a Benjaminian allegory that violently disrupts the illusion and organic wholeness of history, the play offers a timely critique of the destructive binary between civilized Occident and barbaric Orient on which its plot and characters are built. The play’s horrifying representations of violence on stage combined with its rhetorically ornamented descriptions of off-stage violence—from ritual human sacrifice and filicide, to rape, dismemberment, decapitation, and cannibalism—are thus, in a Presentist sense, contiguous with the many representations of violence that circulate in contemporary mass media¹⁰: one thinks of the well-known, grainy digital images of Abu Ghraib detainees, for example; or the staged video murders of kidnapped foreign nationals in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, committed in response to the intervention of the American military complex post–9/11 in Islamic states. Indeed, the similarities between the play’s and more contemporary representations of violence are striking: theatrical uses of costume and disguise, scripted declarations of revenge, and the performance of otherwise unimaginable acts of violence, horrifying tableaux of torture, murder, and dismemberment. The play more or less begins with its own ritualized revenge killing: the slaying of Alarbus, eldest son of the captured Goth Queen, Tamora. After Alarbus is led off stage by Titus’s sons to be executed, Tamora, having pleaded with Titus to spare her son, exclaims “O cruel, irreligious piety” (1.1.133), an oxymoron that we might readily use to describe contemporary, religiously motivated violence.¹¹

The idea of nonidentical but contiguous histories overlaying one another in our reading of historically situated texts requires a kind of temporal double-consciousness, a concurrency between present and past that is, by another name, anachronism. Nicholas Moschovakis has argued that anachronism provokes a “reevaluation in present terms of subjects otherwise regarded as past.” He quotes Clifford Ronan to argue that anachronism transforms “the Then” into “a Now that urgently must be dealt with.”¹² To be sure, presence has become highly suspect in the wake of Derrida, who of course critiques the idea of metaphysical presence in part by showing how any use of a sign at a single moment of time implicates it simultaneously in both the past and the future. When Derrida quotes Hamlet’s “The time is out of joint,” he also describes the sense of lateness that inheres in present experience, the sense that the present always comes after something before it, just as our experience of Shakespeare is always already shaped by a moment of intention or origination that has passed.¹³ Derrida later uses the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword: “A Bigger Splash”
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Presentism, Anachronism, and Titus Andronicus
• 2 The Presentist Threat to Editions of Shakespeare
• 3 Shakespeare Dwelling: Pericles and the Affordances of Action
• 4 Performing Place in The Tempest
• 5 Green Economics and the English Renaissance: From Capital to the Commons
• 6 “Consuming means, soon preys upon itself”: Political Expedience and Environmental Degradation in Richard II
• 7 “What light through yonder window speaks?”: The Nature Theater of Oklahoma Romeo and Juliet and the Cult(ure) of Shakespeare
• 8 Reification, Mourning, and the Aesthetic in Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter’s Tale
• 9 The Hour is Unknown: Julius Caesar, et cetera
• Index