The New Yorker‘s Adam Gopnik is one of my favorite writers out there. His latest review, on display here, is a perfect example why. Granted, the topic (Shakespeare) is near and dear to my heart – but it’s the WAY he writes, his style, what he reveals, and how he reveals it.
First off – I have GOT to read the book being reviewed: Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World. It’s now on my Wish List. Not that that’s a hint or anything.
I needed to be convinced to want to read this book, basically because I dislike postmodern criticism so much it makes my teeth itch – so I usually stay away from more recent critics. Gopnik convinced me.
Gopnik does a great analysis of what is wrong with much criticism these days – I found myself nodding enthusastically as I read this:
The point, as Greenblatt emphatically argues, is not to strip away the reimagining, as if the life sources were more important than the metamorphoses but, rather, to enhance a sense of wonder at Shakespeares creation . . . that took elements from the wasted life of Robert Greene and used them to fashion the greatest comic character in English literature. One need not accept the identification to value the discovery. Biographical criticism may be a practice without certainties, but it is not a game without rules. Each time we come closer to Shakespeares life, we escape from the aridity of formal criticism or the cheap generalities of social history into a recognizable world of real experience. When A. L. Rowse insists that Emilia Bassano Lanier, the tempestuous, adulterous, musical, poetic wife of a court musician, was the original Dark Lady of the Sonnets, we can buy it or not, as we please. But the very existence of a woman like Emilia demonstrates that the clichéd images of Elizabethan women, as subservient wives or unruly whores, are too grossly tuned to capture the reality of Shakespeares world. Whether she is the Dark Lady or not, Emilia is a dark lady. Good biographical criticism dissolves determinisms, and replaces them not with gossipy puzzle-solution certainties but with glimpses of life as it is lived, and art as it is made. Criticism is always a map of possibilities, roads taken, neglected, and cut fresh, and the map of art is never more vivid than when the possibilities of a period are incarnated as the people in a life.
God. YES. “Good biographical criticism dissolves determinisms” … Isn’t that the truth?
Also: “as if the life sources were more important than the metamorphoses” – In a nutshell, that’s most of my problem with current lit crit. I prefer the “rough magic” of the art – and theories on how the “metamorphoses” came about … rather than the obsessing on the “life sources” of the artist.
Sylvia Plath’s poems have suffered from that kind of too-literal biographical analysis.
Don’t ONLY look at biographical details. Don’t just look at the timeline of a person’s life! You’ve got to try to get into their subconscious mind, too!
Gopnik discusses Greenblatt’s conclusions, in regards to Shakespeare’s influences, and where certain characters may have come from. Again: MAY have come from. Greenblatt’s guess at the origin of Falstaff is positively thrilling.
One other part of the article which I thoroughly DUG is the section on the soliloquies in Hamlet – what sets them apart from all soliloquies written before, the evolutionary leap taken by the playwright. Thrilling stuff.
What makes Hamlet different from Shakespeares previous work is the way it brings out a complete inner life. Before Hamlet, soliloquy is mostly just exposition of motive. (Why am I acting this way? Well you may ask. Im doing it because . . .as in Richard III.) With Hamlet, as Greenblatt very neatly puts it, we get an intense representation of inwardness called forth by a new technique of radical excision. … Shakespeare, by compressing the plot into a matter of days, making Hamlet full-grown, and having the murder a secret known only to Hamlet, through the Ghost, makes Hamlets show of madness not just superfluous but truly self-destructiveit does nothing but draw suspicious attention to him. In any case, Shakespeares Hamlet is half-crazy and suicidal before he even sees the Ghost, and most of his soliloquies, instead of furthering our understanding of the action, are at direct cross-purposes to it. (Hamlet knows very well that a traveller has returned from that bourne from which no traveller returns.) What Hamlet says replaces the clear exposition of motive with a kind of chattering, compulsive, image-chasing interior monologue of dreads and desires.
And the following observation too (which is why I love Gopnik so much):
The questions forced on every screenwriterwhere is the characters motive? what does he want?are exactly the questions Shakespeare ignored. (When Hollywood melodrama does touch the edge of the tragic, it is nearly always through the removal of motive: Why does Michael ruin his own values and dearest hopes by shooting the policeman and Sollozzo? Why does Gittes pursue Noah? All that keeps Citizen Kane from tragedy is Rosebud.) With Shakespeare, the inner life is no longer a condition of narrative but one of existence. They are, therefore they think.
Now criticism like THIS exhilarates me. I hadn’t ever thought of it in quite that way – the “removal of motive”, and how effective that can be. It is why we continue to discuss certain films years after they were made. We know WHAT Rosebud is, but we still don’t know WHY. Etc. etc.
Wow, Red.
Now I gotta tell ya. I really dig the stuff you write and this site is a daily stop. I appreciate your eclecticity (word?) and your passion. I learn every time I stop by. Truly.
This post however, completely lost me. I hae never had that happen before. My eyes glazed over, I think I might have started to drool and I completely missed the point. The fact that you are obviously so excited by it makes me feel like I missed something important, but I tried again and confirmed it. I really missed it.
Not your fault of course. Kudo’s to you and your varied sources of input and passion. I salute you from the ignorant sidelines with a flourish and deeply hope all your varied pigeons come home to roost with fresh tidbits and tales of faraway lands!
I’m probably being really unclear. I write really fast.
I’m such a Shakespeare fan – that most of the “criticism” or analysis of his work annoys me, grates me. Gopnik touches on it in his review:
“You can’t make Taming of the Shrew a feminist play, because it isn’t. But you can make Kate and interesting and articulate woman, because she is.”
Too much criticism these days is trying to impose our own various “isms” onto these plays – or the critics focus too much on redressing grievances based on our modern-day concerns – deconstructing the “text”, blah blah blah – and it’s unreadable stuff.
Greenblatt’s book appears to be a horse of a different color.
And I love how Gopnik illuminates the evolution of the soliloquy – as used by Shakespeare.
His early plays: the soliloquy was meant to reveal motivations. The character turns and says, “Here is why I am doing what I am doing.”
But then comes Hamlet. Hamlet is working out his own issues, feelings, demons – by talking them out with the audience.
“To be or not to be
That is the question …”
And so on. This is not a man who turns to us and says, “So. Here is why I must revenge my father’s death.”
He turns to us and says, “I am tormented by dreams about revenging my father’s death … I am tormented by own dark imaginings … Here is what it is like to be me.”
An ENORMOUS leap for playwrighting – and for the understanding of human psychology. It thrills me.
In the same way that Ibsen and Chekhov thrill me. The two of them took a similar leaps in evolution with their plays.
Okay. I’ll stop now.
No, Please Continue!
Never stop on someone else’s account or feel uncomfortable about your passion. It is yours to ignite in others eyes.
If I am getting the gist of what you are talking about here, your talking about about critics taking Shakespeare out of the context of his times and judging the plays on modern “P.C.” standards. A type of anthropomorphism almost. projecting yourself or your characteristics onto something not meant to have them.
Yes?
Oh, and I also don’t like the obnoxious CERTAINTY of so much lit crit.
“Here is what this poem means…” and then they babble about the biography of the author.
That’s what I mean when I say much of the analysis of Sylvia Plath’s poems have been ruined by that kind of interpretation. So she killed herself, so what – if you didn’t know about her suicide, what would the poem itself say???
Kaptin Marko:
To your question: YES.
Shakespeare is bigger and grander and more universal than all of those theories – and I don’t like the attempt to make him small and relevant. If you get my drift.
Or it’s not that I don’t think Shakespeare should be studied – not at all. But sometimes it’s nice when a critic is able to just sit back and be a FAN, too. Most critics have forgotten how to just say, “Damn, that’s some fine writing there.”
Michael Schmidt, who is a book editor and a fan of poetry, wrote one of my favorite books on the subject of poetry called “Lives of the Poets” – and the critical analysis is as good as you’ll find anywhere else, but it’s all done through the filter of being a FAN of all of these poets, not a stuffy critic trying to illuminate the un-washed masses.
Aha!
The unwashed masses bit gives you away!
You must hate condescending intellectual know it alls who are most probably vapid and vacuous and would never survive outside of academia, much less your neighborhood streets!
As an unwashed mass, please allow me to say, thanks for not being condescending and not trying to put all the explanations in a neat little box for us.
And to think I had trouble with this one…..
I think sometimes, nowadays, critics are really only writing for one another. And so their language is stuffy, and impenetrable to anyone not in their clique.
Critics used to be hugely important, and well-known – some of the best writers around.
That trend has faded, sadly.
Wow. When we agree, we really agree. I despise the current trend of psychoanalyzing every action of every character in books, plays, movies, etc. I wrote a short story several years ago. After reading it, a good friend’s wife said, “I don’t get why so-and-so did such-and-such a thing.” I said, “Because that’s what he did that day.” She never did understand “the motivation” for my character’s actions. I tried to explain that the story was really all about the dialog, and she said, “Yeah, why do they talk all the time.” Even as a youngster, I loved 2001: A Space Odyessy because it was difficult, if not impossible, to really know what was happening in the movie. Because of that, there was real magic in the movie’s mysteries. I can’t take it when some “expert” tries to tell me “exactly” what Salinger meant by Seymour Glass’s suicide, or some other such tripe.
What is truly important in those classic stories or plays is what is NOT said.
At least I think so.
People will never get tired of talking about James Joyce’s The Dead. Yeah, I could give you plot-points, and I could tell you why he wrote such and such, and about his wife Nora, etc…. but when you get right down to it, there is a dark mystery at the heart of that story, the mystery of human existence …
Just ACCEPT it. It’s fine to talk about it, but don’t pretend that you KNOW. Don’t pretend that the mystery is solved, because that’s missing the whole point.
And, DBW … I love you for mentioning Seymour Glass.
Perfect Day for Bananafish is so haunting because … we’ll never really know.
And stuff happens like that in life all the time
“Greenblatt’s guess at the origin of Falstaff is positively thrilling.” – but I hope he’s wrong! The theory I find most attractive is that Falstaff is based on Sir John Fastolf of Caister Castle in Norfolk (a wonderful castle – built of brick so it is useless as a defensive fortress – it was purely Sir John showing off!).
Dearest: I simply don’t read any literary criticism of drama anymore, but I do continue to read litcrit in poetry and fiction. The real interpreters of drama today are the directors and actors who present the play to us–then it is still of interest to see what the theater critic has to say about that particular production. Your movie comments have my interest because it is your review of that particular production, not a review of the ‘text’. love, dad
Dad –
That is most definitely true. I love to read Elia Kazan’s thoughts on Tennessee Williams, for example. It’s as good an analysis as you will get!!