From Shakespeare to Obama

A Study in Language, Slavery and Place

J. Hart

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137375827
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria en la poesía

From Shakespeare to Obama discusses language, slavery, and place from the Portuguese enslavement of African people, through slavery in Shakespeare's plays, to President Obama's 2012 speech on "modern slavery." Balancing close reading with context, this expansive book offers new insight into questions of otherness, rhetoric, and stereotyping.

Chapter 1

Introduction

This book discusses language and place from Shakespeare to Obama in various elaborations. Well, not exactly. I begin with the Portuguese enslaving and dividing African slaves in the fifteenth century, a moment of personal and cultural trauma for Gomes Eanes de Zurara (also Gomes Eannes de Azurara), for some of the those on site and there at the time as part of his scene, for the writer and for readers, including those of us who read it now in the long shadow cast by slavery and especially the profit and brutality of the African slave trade in the Atlantic basin and beyond.¹ Then I get to William Shakespeare, a master of the personal and private language as well as political and public: so I discuss the sonnets and the history plays. The book ends with Barack Obama and his private and public language, his memoir near the beginning of the twenty-first century and his speech on “modern slavery” in 2012.² The context of Zurara, of the private and the political, the personal feeling and the public religion, provides a framework for Shakespeare and Obama and all those between. The culture of western Europe and the Americas has been enriched by slavery and these areas, if not the world, are haunted by this most distasteful but persistent human institution.³

The Preface, Introduction and the Conclusion, although having some traditional elements of framing, summation and signposting for the book, stand alone in some sense as pre-chapters as well as chapters. In a way that I hope is not misguided, I have let Walter Ralegh haunt the book, and not always in ways that are at first apparent, to author and reader, because I provide small strands of a very complex life of a Renaissance figure, who was important in Europe and the colonization of the Americas. He disrupts the argument with his story and may forge a story-argument in the meantime that is less direct and perhaps even clear, but, I trust, may embody the difficulty of discovery or uncovering in writing and reading in and about the past and the present. So I hope the reader will be with me and heed this caveat lector in good spirits and with generosity.

The book explores, in its own heuristic way, the blurring and overlapping of public and private, how language is private in our minds as we write and read but how it is performed in the act of reading, delivering a speech (a literal speech act) or on stage. Shakespeare’s sonnets and histories and Obama’s memoirs and speech on slavery perform the public–private in the place of language. Time or temporality, as well as acts of love and betrayal, are concerns of Shakespeare’s sonnets and the history plays.⁴ We meet as individuals and as a collective in the private–public linguistic space. The geography of this text is mainly Europe–Africa–the Americas with some Asian dimensions. The book is local and global in a dramatic tension between the personal and the public. But, as I said, the body of the book begins with the Portuguese and Africans in the fifteenth century, more than a century before the birth of Shakespeare.

Zurara was Alfonso V’s keeper of the national archives and chronicler-royal who also benefited from the patronage of Prince Henry the Navigator. Zurara, in the tradition of medieval chroniclers, presented a selective view of Alfonso V as a model of the Christian prince, as Peter Russell has observed.⁵ He had to represent slaves while Henry watched over this separation of families according to some arithmetic for profit based on the religious justification that these slaves would become Christians and so would receive a gift even if they were sold into slavery. They would know Jesus Christ and, through Him, they would be granted eternal salvation. Sir Walter Ralegh, favorite of Elizabeth I and colonizer of the New World, is caught in a similar bind. He is between, a writer and a great figure at court. Although I will not write much about him here, having analyzed some of his work in my earlier works, he is more like Zurara, although not an official chronicler, and someone James I had arrested for his stance against Spain. Ralegh, like Zurara, may have been writing partly with the king’s ear in mind.⁶ Shakespeare’s theatre company had as its patron the Lord Chamberlain and played at court from time to time before the queen, but Shakespeare does not seem to have had a direct patron, despite the dedications of his epyllia or minor epics, those beautiful narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. With the death of Elizabeth in 1603, King James did become the patron of Shakespeare’s acting company, now called the King’s Men. Still, unlike Ralegh, and even Ben Jonson, Shakespeare does not seem to have been under the watchful royal eye or receiving a royal pension or under a death sentence. Obama is more in the line of Julius Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, James I, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill and John Kennedy, who were or wanted to seem to be philosopher-kings or writer-leaders (to state it not so elegantly).

The authorship of Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage (1956) has been controversial, and the young Churchill wrote his own work, while the later Churchill had research assistants and a workshop, so the question of authorship becomes vexed.⁷ Joseph Kennedy, John’s father, thought the matter important enough to threaten a law suit. Did Theodore Sorensen really helpt to write it or have anything to do with it? Lincoln and Churchill, the greatest of political speech writers in the language, wrote their own speeches and delivered them, whereas Margaret Thatcher, no mean speaker, did not. Whether Obama writes his own speeches is not a matter much discussed. Thatcher and Obama approved the speeches they delivered despite the matter of authorship. Even Shakespeare seems to have collaborated with John Fletcher and perhaps others (as the Thomas More fragment might suggest if that is really Shakespeare’s hand in the revisions), and there have long been studies, even before computer programs, on the authorship of his plays just as there was in the pioneering study of the Federalist Papers.⁸

There is a spectrum of texts from an order to an epic, from the apparently straightforward imperative to the multidimensional literary texts of Homer, which have such a difficult textual history and the relation of the oral to the written over a long time in ancient Greece and then onward. And these works are secular even if they have religious motifs. Not to mention the textual and cultural and ritual uses of sacred texts. William Blake’s prophetic poems have the symbolic intricacy of a mythology and symbology he is working out in relation to the Bible and earlier figures in his poetic, cultural and natural philosophical (scientific) tradition, so these secular and sacred functions blend intricately.

Topos, topicality, locus and location, setting are all part of poetry from georgics or pastoral poetry to the epic of the nation and the naming of the land, something Virgil, for instance, did so well in both these genres, but they are also topics in rhetoric, something in tropes and schemes.⁹ In poetics and rhetoric, the writer moves the reader with a naming of place, whether the land literally or the space of invention or a topic. Sometimes, as in the topos of inexpressibility, the writer expresses that words cannot express just what he or she has expressed. This is a representation of the impossibility of representation.

The language of place and the place of language is something we shall observe, as readers, interpreters and theorists in the following order in the book, in Zurara, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, William Blake, Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, Barbara Johnson, Umberto Eco, V. G. Vassanji, Barack Obama and others, some much less known. Readers read, but critics put distance between the text and its original reading in their subsequent readings and theorists try to see how the practice of reading can be envisioned in a more general or abstract framework or the ways in which language works for or against itself or both. Often, in introductions, I will give a map of the chapters, but here I think it best to go from Zurara and Shakespeare to Obama in a way that is more heuristic, discovering, I hope, or uncovering, dimensions of language and place along the way, just as here, I have attempted to find in Ralegh a figure for authors, readers, representing and other matters. In Obama, perhaps, we might see how someone who represents his life and that of others in writing attempts to lead a representative government that represents others.

Mimesis is as ideological as it is aesthetic.¹⁰ In other words, in Plato we find that poets should sing for the republic or that Homer should be left off for philosophy as philosophers represent truth and justice in the world while poets lie and imitate reality from three removes. Plato is writing in a dialogue and is a poetic philosopher given to images, narratives and allegories as well as arguments and dialectic. Aristotle gave imitation or mimesis its due in Poetics, and seems interested more in natural slavery and other political questions in Politics.¹¹ The tension in representation, both poetic and political, has many dimensions and seem to overlap; nevertheless, Plato appears more interested in viewing the two together while Aristotle separates them out into his topics, poetics and politics, being a systematic thinker or anatomist.

The main focus of the book is on representation, land and location (actual and metaphorical) from the late Middle Ages and early modern period or Renaissance to the present. The method balances close reading with theory and historical context. The volume moves from placing, setting and representing slaves though discussions of how poetry makes the turn or topos and locus in Shakespeare’s sonnets (mainly through metapoetics and metatheatre or metadrama), dramatic time in Shakespeare’s histories and the place of vision and the visionary in literature and culture; the nature of fiction and history (partly in regard to metafiction); and ends with a discussion of Vassanji and Obama concerning the typology of place between Asia and Africa on the one hand and North America on the other.¹² The body of the book ends with Obama’s speech on human trafficking or slavery in our time.

For the most part, with a few exceptions, the book is linear in time, but partly circular in its frame or theme. It begins and ends with slaves, these people who built the modern world on their backs, whose unsung and untold labor needs all the more telling even in its echoes or traces. This telling is especially true of those slaves who are divided in Zurara’s fifteenth-century narrative of Prince Henry, the town and the slaves. Their songs and their story, like much in oral culture, do not come down to us individually; in an age of individualism, literacy and writing in such an age are often seen as tragic when it may be a different transmission of culture and community, a little like Homer and the epics of the Balkans. For such a culture as ours, it is important to try to recover the plurality of stories, and to see how different humans lived in their time and environment. Zurara’s story of Africa, of freedom and slavery, and Obama’s narrative of Africa, America and African Americans, of liberty and contemporary global slavery, are a circle and not. They circle back and moves forward. History may echo but does not repeat itself exactly: behind events some of the same motivations and structures may exist but they manifest themselves in new contexts, languages and idioms recently born, as creoles, for instance, attest.

In the analysis of the relation between author and reader (audience) and language, which are central aspects of the book, I discuss questions of otherness, authority, recognition, comparison, poetics, rhetoric and stereotyping: these are all addressed in examinations of early, modern and contemporary texts. The book explores practical and theoretical areas and should appeal to those interested in literature, theory, culture and history. In what follows next, I start with the representation of slaves and the slave trade with Zurara in the fifteenth century and begin the journey to Obama and his representation of the same theme in the twenty-first century. There may be progress in life, but this comparative study also shows that the French saying may be right: “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” Recurrence is not repetition but is repetition with a difference: the sameness is, perhaps, deep at the core of things, although essence seems to be something not given much credence in the past 60 years in literary and cultural theory. Zurara’s narrative will show us the pain of time in a given place and how human emotion breaks through a text and cannot be put back whence it came. His story breaks the human heart with a human cry.

Chapter 2

Representing Slaves

By representing slaves, I may mean that I am slavish in my imitation or am to representation and misrepresentation, but I would not want to use the word “slave” lightly as there is as existential pain and ugliness to someone not being free and being compelled to submit to or enrich another and to work and toil and do other things against one’s will or best interests. So I really mean that this chapter looks at how certain texts and situations place or represent slaves, slavery and the slave trade. The arc of the chapter is from the late Middle Ages to the present and gives a context for Shakespeare and Obama, the two bookends for the entire study. It tries to include, even if only briefly, a relation of slaves that touches on various states in Europe, Africa and the Americas within the context of European expansion, which includes the European empires as well as Russia and the United States. Like the book, the chapter has to be very selective by nature and suggest rather than exhaust. After all, place, representation and slaves are encyclopedic topics that no chapter or book, no matter how long, could exhaust. Having written on all these topics in poetry, history, criticism and theory in earlier work, I shall try here to provide another configuration that might suggest something about language and world from Shakespeare to Obama. The sense of verbal texture that mediates the world, history, poetry, philosophy, politics and other topics is something that I hope to explore a little in this chapter and in the book at large.

The topos is a place as well as a way of making an argument, as the Greeks suggested, or a location and a locus, as the Romans expressed it. Mimesis or imitation can be lyrical, dramatic or narrative and has a poetic and rhetorical element that can be aesthetic or ethical, in which the good, the true and the beautiful can be subverted, refracted or sought. The story of representing or placing slaves and others is often one of violence and death, one that gets told and is considered in the expansion of western Europe. Texts matter, and language has an impact even when it seems it does not. Texts embody a drama of meaning in which the contradictory and ambivalent forces within the work meet those of the re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Representing Slaves
• 3 Shakespeare’s Sonnets
• 4 Dramatic Time in Shakespeare’s History
• 5 Walter Ralegh, England, America and the World
• 6 Vision
• 7 Theory
• 8 Eco, Story and History
• 9 Vassanji, Africa and America
• 10 Obama, America and Africa
• 11 Obama and Slavery
• 12 Conclusion
• Notes
• Index