This was a great essay! Hawkes seems like kind of a dick! Critics like him privilege every mode of perception besides our own--to them the common reader is the only kind of reader that is always, abjectly wrong. Which is to say, even if Shakespeare didn't mean the text to be interpreted in one way, and his audience was unable to interpret it in that way, surely we, as modern readers, cannot help intuiting some private self inside Shakespeare's characters. Why would our way of perception be any less valid than that of the Elizabethans.
Many thanks! His reply style is often like that. I think critics are correct when they say we can be wrong about literature (we need historical knowledge etc) and I agree with Knights & co about certain points---I even wrote an essay about this, link below---but I agree that they are too "opaque" and feel it to be someone uncritical to take account of the intuitive response. Which is a shame because the intuitive response is so important to literature!
That's another good essay! I agree completely that some readings are not just unproductive, but incorrect, and simply get in the way of the text. For instance, it's very easy to misread the Mahabharata in a sort of neo-Buddhist way as being about the futility of war and conflict and human earthly existence, but the explicit message of the text is the complete opposite. Arjuna doubts whether war is necessary, but then is convinced not only that it is, but that it is our duty.
But I do think that making high-sounding claims about what the original audience of a work would've experienced, or what the intention of the author might've been, also constitutes a bit of a misreading--critics are the worst offenders when it comes to making claims that the text cannot support, and to claim that the text cannot support a reading of Cordelia as someone with a sense of self is, I think, inaccurate.
The truth is we don't know the psychology of the Elizabethan--or even if they had a psychology as we understand the term. All we know is the words they've written, and those words certainly don't contradict the idea that I, as a watcher of King Lear, might imagine Cordelia to be hurt by father's sweeping unfairness. I don't think imagining that fictional characters have psychology is, per se, any form of misreading, at least not when it comes to early modern ones (though perhaps it comes closer to being a misreading when applied to, say, early Greek tragedy, where characters simply don't act in ways that someone with an internal sense of self might act--and indeed, very few readers truly try to "get into the head" of, say, Orestes).
I agree with that, for sure: the historical record gives us a very partial view. And I share you robustly pro-character views! Do look round the archive, many other essays available.
Reading this essay, the following paragraph strikes out and made me think of Harold Bloom on Shakespeare in The Western Canon:
‘To talk about Cordelia’s motivations and thoughts is to talk about something not written, and is thus bad criticism. On this view, the characters of the play are not persons, but are “symbols of a poetic vision.”’
I believe Bloom’s criticism of Shakespeare, which is one of the most thorough if somewhat worshipping criticisms of the poet, is completely antithetical to L. C. Knights. What Bloom finds to be the source of the Shakespearean genius is in the inwardness and transformation accomplished through ‘self-overhearing’ by his characters, Hamlet and Sir John Falstaff being his exemplars. Bloom argues, if I remember correctly, this is genius because Shakespeare creates his characters infused with human traits, traits so exclusive to humans as thinking to oneself as to change from it. The prior character that comes close to the Shakespearean characters in this instance is Wife of Bath from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but even she comes considerably short. I don’t know why Bloom never cite C. L. Knights, or maybe I have not read him enough to that point, but the predictably controversial Bloomian maxim on Shakespeare is precisely the complete opposite of Knights’ radical claim: “Shakespeare invented the human.”
Yes agree v much, Bloom is the antithesis of Knights! he says somewhere in a TV interview that one friend told him, about his Shakespeare book, that he had taken Shakespeare criticism back to A.C. Bradley. Good he said sweep it away, sweep it all away!
This was a great essay! Hawkes seems like kind of a dick! Critics like him privilege every mode of perception besides our own--to them the common reader is the only kind of reader that is always, abjectly wrong. Which is to say, even if Shakespeare didn't mean the text to be interpreted in one way, and his audience was unable to interpret it in that way, surely we, as modern readers, cannot help intuiting some private self inside Shakespeare's characters. Why would our way of perception be any less valid than that of the Elizabethans.
Many thanks! His reply style is often like that. I think critics are correct when they say we can be wrong about literature (we need historical knowledge etc) and I agree with Knights & co about certain points---I even wrote an essay about this, link below---but I agree that they are too "opaque" and feel it to be someone uncritical to take account of the intuitive response. Which is a shame because the intuitive response is so important to literature!
https://www.commonreader.co.uk/p/being-wrong-about-books-how-to-interpret
That's another good essay! I agree completely that some readings are not just unproductive, but incorrect, and simply get in the way of the text. For instance, it's very easy to misread the Mahabharata in a sort of neo-Buddhist way as being about the futility of war and conflict and human earthly existence, but the explicit message of the text is the complete opposite. Arjuna doubts whether war is necessary, but then is convinced not only that it is, but that it is our duty.
But I do think that making high-sounding claims about what the original audience of a work would've experienced, or what the intention of the author might've been, also constitutes a bit of a misreading--critics are the worst offenders when it comes to making claims that the text cannot support, and to claim that the text cannot support a reading of Cordelia as someone with a sense of self is, I think, inaccurate.
The truth is we don't know the psychology of the Elizabethan--or even if they had a psychology as we understand the term. All we know is the words they've written, and those words certainly don't contradict the idea that I, as a watcher of King Lear, might imagine Cordelia to be hurt by father's sweeping unfairness. I don't think imagining that fictional characters have psychology is, per se, any form of misreading, at least not when it comes to early modern ones (though perhaps it comes closer to being a misreading when applied to, say, early Greek tragedy, where characters simply don't act in ways that someone with an internal sense of self might act--and indeed, very few readers truly try to "get into the head" of, say, Orestes).
I agree with that, for sure: the historical record gives us a very partial view. And I share you robustly pro-character views! Do look round the archive, many other essays available.
That was absolutely terrific. Why weren't you my English teacher??
Ah thank you!☺️
Reading this essay, the following paragraph strikes out and made me think of Harold Bloom on Shakespeare in The Western Canon:
‘To talk about Cordelia’s motivations and thoughts is to talk about something not written, and is thus bad criticism. On this view, the characters of the play are not persons, but are “symbols of a poetic vision.”’
I believe Bloom’s criticism of Shakespeare, which is one of the most thorough if somewhat worshipping criticisms of the poet, is completely antithetical to L. C. Knights. What Bloom finds to be the source of the Shakespearean genius is in the inwardness and transformation accomplished through ‘self-overhearing’ by his characters, Hamlet and Sir John Falstaff being his exemplars. Bloom argues, if I remember correctly, this is genius because Shakespeare creates his characters infused with human traits, traits so exclusive to humans as thinking to oneself as to change from it. The prior character that comes close to the Shakespearean characters in this instance is Wife of Bath from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but even she comes considerably short. I don’t know why Bloom never cite C. L. Knights, or maybe I have not read him enough to that point, but the predictably controversial Bloomian maxim on Shakespeare is precisely the complete opposite of Knights’ radical claim: “Shakespeare invented the human.”
This is a terrific one.
Yes agree v much, Bloom is the antithesis of Knights! he says somewhere in a TV interview that one friend told him, about his Shakespeare book, that he had taken Shakespeare criticism back to A.C. Bradley. Good he said sweep it away, sweep it all away!