I was delighted to talk to Rhodri Lewis, author of Shakespeare’s Tragic Art. We discussed Shakespeare’s most under appreciated plays, the best films, how to teach Shakespeare, humanism, personae, Frank Kermode, the future of the humanities, being supervised by John Carey, A.C. Bradley, what we have learned about Francis Bacon, and more. There’s a transcript below and you can also watch the whole conversation on YouTube if you wish. We also covered Rhodri’s love of Pevsner architectural guides.
Here is one extract
Henry Oliver: What is the future of the academic humanities?
Rhodri Lewis: Well, my crystal ball is unfortunately at home and I’m at work. I don’t know.
Henry Oliver: Come on now.
Rhodri Lewis: What I can say, I mean think the academic humanities will continue to survive.
And here is another.
Henry Oliver: Should Bradley be taken more seriously inside the Academy?
Rhodri Lewis: You know, I dislike dictating on what should and shouldn’t…
Henry Oliver: You’re a big professor. If you don’t dictate, who will? Your job is to profess.
Rhodri Lewis: My job is to give intelligent options to my students and give them the wherewithal required to make up their own minds.
Henry Oliver: Oh dear.
Rhodri Lewis: I mean, I think I would certainly say Bradley is one of those we should read and think about. And there I differ, I suppose, from professors of the last two generations
Transcript
Henry Oliver (00:00.702)
Today, I am talking to Rodri Lewis, Professor of English Literature at Princeton University, an expert in the works of William Shakespeare, and the author most recently of Shakespeare’s Tragic Art, a book I recommend to you all. Rhodri, welcome.
Rhodri Lewis (00:16.908)
Henry, thank you so much. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here with you.
Henry Oliver (00:21.362)
What is Shakespeare’s most underappreciated play?
Rhodri Lewis (00:24.974)
What is Shakespeare’s best underappreciated play? What a way to start. Troilus and Cressida. People think it’s a of slightly desiccated intellectual exercise that doesn’t speak to the heart or the feelings. It’s not. It’s an extraordinarily complicated experimental.
sort of semi-tragedy, reflecting on the ways in which we talk to ourselves about the conditions of love and loss and honor and things like that. So that’s my pat answer to that question.
Henry Oliver (01:02.546)
I might nominate All’s Well that ends well on the basis that Troilus at least has a sort of academic following. There are some defenders of it as a great play, whereas All’s Well is a much more unloved, I think, in some ways. What do you think of that?
Rhodri Lewis (01:19.246)
Yeah, I suppose you’re probably right. I I rather like Hall’s Well. think Helena is interesting. But I suppose people mainly talk about it as a text in the history of medicine and treating the famous fistula with this set and the other. And it doesn’t get the attention perhaps it deserves. I mean, as with a lot of Shakespeare’s plays.
Henry Oliver (01:23.25)
Mm.
Henry Oliver (01:32.948)
you
Rhodri Lewis (01:41.538)
people find the so-called problem plays, which Oswell and Troilus are both examples of them, hard to deal with because all these sort of generic guides that we’re used to bringing to bear to try to explain these plays to ourselves don’t really work in those plays. so...
easier to sort of tidy them away and leave them for the graduate students so to speak than to actually get up close and personal with them.
Henry Oliver (02:13.096)
What’s the weakest Shakespeare play?
Rhodri Lewis (02:15.598)
What’s the weakest Shakespeare play? I define weakness. Some of the ones that work least well for me would include Two Gentlemen of Verena and Titus Andronicus, but many people would tell me that I’m extremely unfair and missing the virtuosity of those. He doesn’t have any really, he doesn’t have any shockers.
I’ve probably, if I haven’t seen them all, I’ve read them all several times and I’ve seen most of them. And I think, you know, even when it doesn’t quite work as with something like Titus, you can see a lot of the kind of energies and the techniques that will be brought to bear, you know, with.
with, I suppose one might say, more accomplishment elsewhere, being test driven or test flown or something.
Henry Oliver (03:14.834)
Which films of Shakespeare do you love?
Rhodri Lewis (03:20.654)
Which films do I love? I mean, it’s quite a small list. I I have two, Throne of Blood, which I suppose doesn’t, it’s cheating, but it’s true, Kurosawa, his adaptation of Macbeth. And I suppose I have a rather against my better judgment soft spot, but more than a soft spot, an admiration for the Ian McKellen Richard III.
Henry Oliver (03:23.956)
I mean, you could just say none if that’s the answer.
Rhodri Lewis (03:46.094)
which I think is witty and intelligent and in keeping with the rather disquieting spirit of that play.
Henry Oliver (03:54.185)
I don’t like it when directors impose their schemes on the plays, but I feel like in that case he didn’t over-impose and it sort of blends into the background sufficiently.
Rhodri Lewis (04:05.579)
Yeah, I mean, there’s some pancreas opening is just kind of genius really. I mean, you before the Eurostar, I suppose, and the hotel and all the rest of it, but exactly so. It’s a very sympathetic. And yeah, directors I think often go too far. They feel nervous about what they’ve got before them, don’t really trust themselves to, you know, let it speak. And so they want to put their mark on it. And, you know, you have to be very good to get that right.
Henry Oliver (04:14.835)
Yes, yes.
Rhodri Lewis (04:31.987)
And anyway, I’ll leave that thought there, as I’m not here to, you know, to, you know, opine on that kind of thing.
Henry Oliver (04:36.592)
No, no, no, no. One of the best productions I’ve ever seen was when I had a friend at RADA and they were involved in a measure for measure. And I went along and I said, I’ll come and see it. And I thought, won’t be excellent, but it’ll...
And actually it was brilliant. And I said to them, like, what happened here? This was really good. And they said, well, Jonathan Miller directed it. And he just came in and said, I don’t care about anything else. I just need to make sure you understand the words and say them properly. And this was, of course, the right attitude.
Rhodri Lewis (04:59.085)
You
Rhodri Lewis (05:07.885)
You
Rhodri Lewis (05:12.909)
There’s a certain osmosis you probably get from being in the same studio with Jonathan Miller or something. I don’t know.
Henry Oliver (05:16.564)
Are Shakespeare’s fourth acts a mess?
Rhodri Lewis (05:26.285)
No, I think they’re a mess, but they are complicated and they oftentimes, particularly in the tragedies, seem to throw us off course a little bit. to, I mean, take one of the more famous examples of a funny act for, funny peculiar that is, act for, well there are some laughs too, Hamlet with the gravedigger scene. I mean, yes, it disrupts the tragic flow after Hamlet returns from his sea adventures to, you know.
meet his fate. But at the same time it’s very often seen and I think probably correctly as a sort of...
deepening in a different key of some of the thematic and intellectual and I suppose performative theatrical concerns that the play has taken as its subject so far. So yes, if you are a, you know, as it were, if these people still exist, card carrying neoclassical Aristotelian, this is breaking all the rules because you’re not supposed to have, you know, sextons and other proletarian souls yapping away, especially disrespectfully, to,
other, two other sort of more high-born souls within a tragedy. But I think Shakespeare knew what he was doing and he didn’t just sort of repeatedly lose focus. So yeah, I mean, another way of looking at it might be to say it’s a sort of palate cleanser mid-course or between the intra-course palate cleanser before being, you know, clobbered with the rich sources.
of his final acts, such that we appreciate the sort of rather brutal grandeur that they bring to the table, the stage, rather more clearly. So no, not a mess, but sometimes a little bit hard to conceptualize, and therefore quite often cut in performance, which, know, debatable, but can work, can go wrong.
Henry Oliver (07:30.512)
Is Shakespeare a philosophical pragmatist?
Rhodri Lewis (07:33.903)
Quickly tell me what you mean by pragmatist so that I don’t... I mean, yes and no. I mean, he’s certainly not somebody who...
Henry Oliver (07:40.008)
William James.
Rhodri Lewis (07:51.563)
might qualify, as it were, contra James as an a priori thinker who needs to have a well-established metaphysical system surrounding him before he feels able to offer moral or practical judgments. Do I think he’s as systematic as William James or even Henry to pick a different James? No, I don’t. I think there’s a...
Henry Oliver (08:11.347)
you
Rhodri Lewis (08:17.998)
It’s not an improvisatory quality as such, but there’s an occasional quality to his thought. It’s not that the thought is there and that he writes plays to try to exemplify it, as William James might write the varieties of religious experience to try to instantiate certain parts of his ideas about the way in which we psychologically and philosophically need kinds of religion, but that he does his thing
thinking through the play. So similar in some respects, yes, I would say, but I’m always a bit cheery of saying that he’s really, well, no one’s ever asked me about William James before, but that he’s really Hegel or Wittgenstein or take your pick of your favorite pop philosopher. It’s unfair to call Wittgenstein or Hegel pop philosophers, but you know what I mean. Yeah.
Henry Oliver (09:05.682)
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Henry Oliver (09:13.108)
Well, they are in one sense. What were your early experiences of reading and watching Shakespeare?
Rhodri Lewis (09:20.046)
I mean, I didn’t really come from a very sort of, sorry mom if you’re watching this, very sort of cultured background. mean, know, perfectly books in the house but no one really read them. So I sort of got into, I thought I was going to be a doctor I think, like lots of people, or maybe a lawyer. And I got into, I went to do A levels, sort of more, sort of, I don’t know, creative.
literary things and I lived in Chester at that time and so there were a couple of theatres, one in Manchester, one in Liverpool, was one just over the border in Wales, Theatre Clwyd, which I’m very often put on Shakespeare productions and so I kind of went to those as often as I could, tried to sort of start from my A-level stuff and then went off to Oxford to read English a little bit later and
As you probably know, the Oxford syllabus doesn’t start with Shakespeare, it starts with the Victorians and the 20th century. So I didn’t really get to Shakespeare until my third year, which turned out to be great because I knew a lot more and I could think a lot more clearly. And it was, you know, it’s one of those sort of, I did him at school and I got this and I wrote a nice essay on King Lear. And you you suddenly find yourself there having a week to spend on a couple of plays. I get it, actually, he’s good, this.
this. Oh, that’s why we’re doing it. It’s not just sort of, you know, jumping through the hoops so that you can get yourself nicely promoted and get a jolly job working for McKinsey or something. is actually, this is different. He’s really, really making us think and in a weird sort of way. I wrote a very long essay on Hamlet and memory. This is 1997, I suppose, which stayed with me and really, I mean,
Henry Oliver (11:11.125)
Indeed.
Rhodri Lewis (11:11.598)
I went and did other things, Francis Bacon, for example, for the intervening 15 years. But when I came back to Shakespeare, don’t know, 2012, 2013, thereabouts, I really took up from that essay and the questions that I’d been unable to answer satisfactorily as a clueless 21-year-old and tried to do it as a clueless 40-year-old instead, with results that may or may not convince, depending on how one feels about these things.
Henry Oliver (11:41.023)
Has the general quality of Shakespearean acting declined in your lifetime?
Rhodri Lewis (11:46.447)
Too much shouting. Too fast. I do I think it’s declined? I wouldn’t. I mean, didn’t. I find it more frustrating, perhaps now, sometimes, because I tend to come to these plays with a slightly clearer sense of what I think should be happening than was once the case. But no, I just think maybe the.
Henry Oliver (11:47.913)
Yes.
and too fast.
Henry Oliver (12:07.135)
Mm.
Rhodri Lewis (12:15.982)
You know, the... I mean, what’s the... I’m trying to... I’m struggling between habits and fashions, and neither word is quite correct. The theatrical conventions through which he is performed at the moment betray, sometimes it seems to me, all the acting conventions through which he’s portrayed. not talk about the theatrical ones right now. Sometimes they’re a little too nervous, a little too anxious that the audience isn’t going to get it.
Henry Oliver (12:26.772)
Yes.
Rhodri Lewis (12:45.262)
and needs, as it were, the equivalent of a nudge and a wink to be reassured that this is stuff that makes sense somehow and that they can bear with it. I’m not a director and I’m not an actor and so I shouldn’t criticize those who are because I don’t really have the skills myself. But yeah, certainly the first Lear I ever saw was Robert Stevens in, I suppose, 1992 or 1993 at the RSC.
And I mean, you know, I suppose the first cut is the deepest and all that kind of stuff, but I’ve never seen anything to rival it. Lear is famously incredibly difficult, but I don’t think anyone could sort of probably qualify or claim Robert Stevens as a representative actor of his generation, that the new generation, you know, can’t match. And he was a weirdo who happened to be old and dying at the time and did an extraordinary heart-wrenching job performing.
a man in a not dissimilar condition. whether that means actors are worse now or not, I don’t know. Probably not.
Henry Oliver (13:52.841)
How should we teach Shakespeare to children?
Rhodri Lewis (13:56.943)
Mmm. Mmm. I mean, it’s really hard because, you know, Shakespeare is so very, very, very grown up. And I mean, I think back to my own experience as a sort of, suppose, more than average-ly bookish and, you know, perfectly smart teenager. And largely, I suspect, like most of my peers, I was learning to repeat with tweaks.
stuff that I’d been taught by my teachers and wasn’t really in a position, and we were just doing Midsummer Night’s Dream for goodness sake, which amazingly completed text in its way, but not King Lear. And I wasn’t able really to get there. So again, I’m no more a teacher of high school students than I am really an actor or a director. So I don’t have strategies, but.
It’s a really fine line to walk between encouraging students to explore what’s there and find out what it might mean and what it might mean to them. And also giving them the wherewithal, giving them the water wings such that they feel when they hit the innumerable hard points that we do hit.
emotional hard points, intellectual hard points that we do hit when reading or watching Shakespeare, that they somehow feel they have what it takes to carry on. So, I mean, it’s a, that’s a very lengthy non-answer, but it’s, I mean, so difficult. mean, it’s great, he’s wonderful. And, you know, the famous lines from the end of the first, the preface of the first folio, where Hemings and Condell say, you know, this is,
Henry Oliver (15:38.911)
Cheers.
Rhodri Lewis (15:49.723)
This has been written and it should be read by everybody from the most able to him who can but spell. And yes, Shakespeare can be interpreted on as many different levels as there are spectators or readers. But even if you’re the, I was teaching a class on this yesterday, was on Macbeth, and one of my second-year-olds asked me, did I really understand what was going on in this speech? I don’t think she was.
trying to catch me out. It was a curious question. I’d say, no, I don’t. And that’s sort of the point. Neither does Macbeth. And so it’s very complicated. And how you give that to 13 or 14-year-olds and enable them to
both enjoy it and write about it in such a way that they can pass an exam in two years’ time, or coursework, suppose, increasingly these days. It’s a hard skill, and I’m glad to be, as it were, higher up the food chain, as I have fewer pedagogic problems to tackle.
Henry Oliver (17:08.287)
Does the taming of the shrew have a happy ending?
Rhodri Lewis (17:11.662)
The ending is There is an opening frame where it is set up as a play within a play for Sly and the foolish thing to expose his various follies and whatever else. am, nobody can be absolutely certain, but I am morally certain that somewhere along the line, we have lost the closing frame.
So I think the play within the play has a confounding ending, but the play itself is broken. And yeah, I think we lack the closing frame.
Henry Oliver (17:50.613)
Does Romeo really love Juliet?
Rhodri Lewis (17:53.423)
Romeo’s teenage boy and you know we’ve all been one such. I mean yes he does really love her to the extent that I suppose one can when desperately in love with the idea of being in love and not being very experienced in the world or with oneself as Romeo certainly is. Juliet’s a different case so yes he does but he never really leaves behind the sort of Petrarchan
idealizations that are the equivalent, as it were, of kind of, you know, 1590s pop music through which, you know, this is how we conceptualize being in love when we haven’t done very much of it ourselves. it’s that wonderful moment where Juliet, I paraphrase very slightly, says, you know, shut up and stop kissing me by the book. Kiss me, kiss me properly. know, she, suppose, you know,
Henry Oliver (18:47.455)
Mmm.
Rhodri Lewis (18:52.152)
Then as now, females mature slightly earlier than males. And she, as it were, gets it, I think. Some of the complexity and the depth of the situation they’re in. I’m not absolutely sure that Romeo does. But yes, I think he is deeply sincere and he means it. But whether it’s really in love in the way that I don’t know.
Rhodri Lewis (19:20.818)
Mmm, you know. Troilus is in love with Cressida. To say something slightly contentious, no I’m not sure because, you know, yeah.
Henry Oliver (19:31.894)
Sure. Was Shakespeare a Catholic?
Rhodri Lewis (19:36.728)
Pfft.
Henry Oliver (19:38.686)
If you can only keep five critical works about Shakespeare, which five do you pick?
Rhodri Lewis (19:44.723)
god.
Which five do I pick? I pick...
Anne Barton’s book, which I can’t remember the title of, called something like Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play. I pick probably Dr. Johnson, Collected Prefaces.
Henry Oliver (19:58.815)
Yes.
Henry Oliver (20:04.854)
Good.
Rhodri Lewis (20:15.09)
lord. I suppose I’d probably pick AC Bradley because it’s brilliant and even when I disagree with it, which is fairly often, it’s magnificent. I’d pick Frank Cuomo. It’s Shakespeare’s language. Not out of sort filial, pseudo-filial piety as it were, because I’m writing about him now, but because I think it’s an extraordinary model.
Henry Oliver (20:19.232)
Good, yes.
Henry Oliver (20:26.678)
Mm-hmm.
Henry Oliver (20:30.816)
Shakespeare’s language, yes.
Henry Oliver (20:36.64)
You
Rhodri Lewis (20:41.09)
of how to work through the language to some of the other stuff that’s going on, whether behind or beyond or through the language. I’m not quite sure what metaphor to use. How many have I got now? Four? And...
Henry Oliver (20:54.09)
You got four.
Rhodri Lewis (21:02.99)
Stephen Booth’s book, which is called King Lear Macbeth in Definition and Tragedy or something. It’s incredibly inside baseball. It’s incredibly chewy. But it is one of the first books, possibly the first book I’d ever read that began to do
what I try to do in my Shakespeare book, which is to really grapple with the full implications of the idea that tragedy for Shakespeare is a way of bumping up against the limits of what we can reasonably know and believe and take to be fixed. most people would agree with that, as it were, all the way back from Johnson. But they would say that tragedy itself has a
Henry Oliver (21:48.842)
Mm.
Henry Oliver (21:53.355)
Yeah.
Rhodri Lewis (21:58.009)
has a fixed shape and form. Stephen Booth makes the point, which I try to take a fair bit further and say, actually, tragedy is another one of those. Conventional tragedy, as people think it should have been written, is another of those kind of models that we try to impose on things to give ourselves the illusion that stuff coheres and that we can comprehend it. So that. Although it’s not a.
an easy or joyous read. That’s a bit unfair. That’s actually true. It’s true. It’s brilliant, but it’s chewy. It is chewy.
Henry Oliver (22:36.822)
Should Bradley be taken more seriously inside the Academy?
Rhodri Lewis (22:43.796)
You know, I dislike dictating on what should and shouldn’t. mean, Bradley held a field for a re... Well, indeed. Well, I like to give... My job is to give intelligent options to my students and give them the wherewithal required to make up their own minds.
Henry Oliver (22:48.33)
You’re a big professor. If you don’t dictate, who will? Your job is to profess. Oh dear.
Rhodri Lewis (23:07.118)
I mean, I think I would certainly say Bradley is one of those we should read and think about. And there I differ, I suppose, from professors of the last two generations who would say that Bradley is a sort of unreflective idealist, essentialist who ignores the texture of the tragedies in favor of the kind of post-Higalian thought experiments he can conduct beyond them. And I think that’s a mistake because I think Bradley is an incredibly gifted, reader, very attentive to what’s going on, and very... I mean, sometimes I think perhaps goes a little bit quickly from the text to the grand tragic theory and, as it were, misses out the middle bits of the argument. But to ignore that Bradleyan way of doing things and the kinds of questions that Bradley seeks to ask and answer I think is short-changing Shakespeare and those who would seek to enjoy or study him or both.
Henry Oliver (24:18.411)
What do you think about Harold Bloom’s book, Shakespeare, The Invention of the Human?
Rhodri Lewis (24:21.486)
You know, I suppose we all have to draw lines somewhere, don’t we? Look, mean, Bloom did extraordinary missionary work bringing a less necessarily political version of Shakespeare and of literature in general to a broad audience. I think the book is indulgent. I think it is sloppy. I think it projects a certain...
Henry Oliver (24:27.338)
You
Rhodri Lewis (24:50.43)
desiccated romanticism back onto Shakespeare. I think it ignores vast amounts of 16th century literature and classical literature, all of which seem to have quite fully functioning notions of what humanity might comprise and of the difficulties that might go along with it, several of which can be put without much difficulty into dialogue with our variously tortured presence. So, you know.
Having a go at Bloom feels sort of unfair because he can’t punch back. he is a great and impressive figure in his way. I do not think Shakespeare and the invention of the human is a particularly serious piece of criticism.
Henry Oliver (25:37.077)
What insights has the new Oxford edition of the works of Francis Bacon opened up?
Rhodri Lewis (25:42.639)
I thought you were going to the New Oxford edition of William Shakespeare then. OK. What has it opened up? It has shown us Bacon at work. mean, it in this case really is the work of Graham Reese, the most extraordinary parts of what we’ve learned from the Oxford Bacon, the late, great Graham Reese. The volumes have been edited by my friends Alan Stewart and Michael Kearnon.
Henry Oliver (25:46.264)
Certainly not.
Rhodri Lewis (26:09.694)
who’ve done wonderful work on texts that we knew a little bit about already. But what we did was to show us the sort of Bacon’s scientific ideas growing through a series of kind textual encounters with French and Italian thought, usually in Latin. So reconfiguring Bacon as a humanist rather than as somebody in a lab helped us to see his commitment to alchemical thought.
helped us to see the ways in which Bacon is constantly cannibalizing himself as he writes and rewrites and repositions his own work. And it gives us just a much, much clearer sense, speaking just about Bacon the scientist here, of the kind of horizon within which someone like Bacon could have been writing. mean, traditionally Bacon is wheeled out
either as a hero for being the, as it were, the founding father, or fairy godmother, as I sometimes like to say, of modern scientific inquiry, and after it, a modern sort of industrial, the modern scientific industrial complex, or he’s held up as being the orchestrator of the fall on account of that. But.
What they both fail to do is to situate Bacon in his moment as somebody who was a lawyer, a politician, as well as all of these different things. so Graham’s work does that fantastically. The other really great thing we’ve done so far, we’re only about halfway through, and here I have to hold up my hand as I’m one of the people who’ve been very slow with the edition. The other great thing is Alan Stewart’s work on Bacon’s early writings, Bacon before Bacon, as it were.
playing with various religious, various legal, various historical materials. you know, self-fashioning is an overused term that isn’t quite apposite here. But, you know, finding himself out through lots of the things he read, lots of the things he wrote about, lots of the things he corresponded about. you know, most of that was for various good reasons related to the...
Rhodri Lewis (28:28.928)
impenetrability of the archive not really known about. And so the Bacon edition should bring all of that to the fore. And I think at the moment we want to be done within about 10 years, and I certainly do. volume six.
Henry Oliver (28:46.337)
So we have learnt quite a lot about bacon this century.
Rhodri Lewis (28:49.92)
Mm-hmm. We have, yeah, yeah, yeah. And we’ve discovered, well, I suppose Graham’s first volume of The Bacon came out in 96. So it’s just the end of the last century. But yeah, we have. We’ve found new texts. We’ve found new analogs for the texts we’ve had. We’ve found drafts. We’ve found much more about what Bacon thought he was doing.
than we knew beforehand. And at some point, someone’s going to distill all of this stuff and write a big shiny new life, intellectual life of Bacon and why he matters. But we’re probably a little bit away from that yet.
Henry Oliver (29:39.445)
What is his contemporary relevance, particularly to the sort of the science culture divide, the two cultures, however you want to frame it?
Rhodri Lewis (29:48.661)
You mean, mean, you mean contemporary, you mean 21st century. Yeah, yeah. You know, he is a, he’s, I mean, he’s a great exemplar of the fact that the divide is a fake. That it’s an artificial construction. I mean, somebody like Bacon, who definitively was at the cutting edge of trying to, you know, reinvent what he would call philosophical logic, what we would call, you know,
Henry Oliver (29:52.182)
Modern, yeah.
Rhodri Lewis (30:17.314)
the theory of science or the method of science, what it could actually look like, but was similarly engaged with everything from biblical commentary to mythographic inquiry to writing histories of his own country, all of which he saw as being compatible endeavors, different expressions of the human desire to understand and to bring things to a sort of order.
But that were fundamentally compatible and I fervently believe that to be the case and rather regret that lots of the conversations we seem to be having in both the US and the UK about the direction of, well, in particular, higher education but secondary education as well, this seems to be a bridge too far for them. So yeah, bacon.
I mean, I don’t think Bacon’s going to save the world or persuade any department of education to fundamentally change tack, but I think he does offer us a space and an example of why we should be a little bolder in our thinking about the purposes of education and the content of education.
Henry Oliver (31:31.275)
what have we learned about Shakespeare in that time? Have we learned anything new about him?
Rhodri Lewis (31:37.807)
By Shakespeare, do you mean the man or do you mean the guy we can infer behind the play? I mean, we know much more, some more, about some of the things that Shakespeare has read and thought with. I’ve done a bit of this myself. People like Colin Burrow have done some more. I mean, we appreciate much more that Shakespeare was engaged with, you know, what we...
Henry Oliver (31:43.017)
any of it, all of it.
Henry Oliver (31:55.926)
Mm-hmm.
Rhodri Lewis (32:03.31)
might now call the classical tradition what he would have thought of as his humanist education. And that isn’t just an exercise in the higher name dropping or any of this stuff, Shakespeare trying to show that he read his Virgil or whatever. These were the materials with which he thought and wrote and worked. And so we grasped that much more clearly than I think we did, even maybe in 2000, certainly, about.
20 years earlier than that. There’s been a sort of drip, drip of interesting archival documents which shed slightly more light on his personal life and his background and his business dealings and stuff. I tend not to find that desperately interesting, but biographers take a different view. mean, one really interesting thing, which is a quite recent discovery, is that certainly when I was at college and when I began teaching,
The standard line was that early modern theatres were circular, like the Globe. And the stage was a bit like the Globe replica, is Shakespeare’s Globe in London right now. But in 2012 or 13, give or take, in the 2010s anyway, they were doing excavation in London and they were building some new fancy tower.
Henry Oliver (33:07.159)
Mm-hmm.
Rhodri Lewis (33:27.214)
for whichever financial institution, and they come across the site of the curtain, which was the second biggest theater, which predates the globe. Really big, famous thing, which lost to all sort of knowledge for the last 300 years. And lo and behold, it’s large and rectangular, rather like a modern stage. And you know, I think that matters.
Henry Oliver (33:48.76)
Mm-hmm.
Rhodri Lewis (33:53.759)
I mean, we know so little about the conditions of early modern staging, but something like that. You know, we know it’s not about Shakespeare himself, but it gives us a much clearer sense, or much more complicated sense in this case, of the kinds of spaces that he thought of himself as writing for. So, I mean nothing vast and game-changing, I suppose, in terms of new Shakespearean discoveries, but yeah, enough.
Henry Oliver (34:22.882)
Did Anne Hathaway live with him in London?
Rhodri Lewis (34:26.254)
Pass. I mean maybe sometimes, but probably not very much.
Henry Oliver (34:32.888)
Does he deserve his preeminence on curriculums?
Rhodri Lewis (34:39.912)
know, curriculum’s just a slightly more democratic word for canon, isn’t it? Kind of is. Canon’s just something we teach with. And I think, know, you have to put something on them. Deserve is not a word I would use, as it sort of implies kind of moral right or something. Is he worth his place on those? I would say yes, because...
Henry Oliver (34:45.579)
No.
Rhodri Lewis (35:07.15)
there’s an extraordinary density of linguistic, intellectual and theatrical stuff going on there that is, that as a teenager and as a, you know, well, 40-something, late 40-something, adult gives you, gives you a lot to think with. And this is, these are useful skills to have. On the other hand, as I was saying earlier, you know,
Do I think you can get Shakespeare at 16? Anything is possible, but it’s very hard. And the danger is that you end up alienating. And one hears this all the time. I’ve just been on a book tour for the tragedy book and talking to lots of people in bookshops and in theaters after it, saying, is really cool. Last time I did Shakespeare, it was kind of dutiful and dull because I had to learn about this and repeat that. But the way you talk about it.
Henry Oliver (35:59.033)
you
Rhodri Lewis (36:03.68)
it might be kind of fun. And that’s what we want. And the danger, of course, of putting Shakespeare on any curriculum is that, it’s a bit like doing, I mean, I have a child who’s just coming up to do calculus for the first time. And I could kind of do it when I was 16. But can I do it now? I want to pass my exam and get out of there. And do we want Shakespeare to be like that? Well, I don’t.
Henry Oliver (36:23.083)
Mm-mm.
Rhodri Lewis (36:31.768)
It still teaches you things, as I guess learning calculus does.
Henry Oliver (36:34.872)
Do you think the average American undergraduate student though is doing too much Shakespeare and not enough Renaissance literature more generally or early modern literature more generally?
Rhodri Lewis (36:43.63)
Thank
Rhodri Lewis (36:47.052)
I don’t think they’re doing very much early modern literature. mean, certainly, I mean, mine, Princeton, they don’t have to, but they, it’s, of them do. It’s, and it’s a tricky one. I mean, you know, I teach a survey course here and, you know, we make sure we have one Shakespeare play, but we’ve got three lectures. And that means, you know, we only have one lecture on John Donne, one lecture on Marlowe, and one lecture on George Herbert.
Henry Oliver (36:49.643)
No.
Rhodri Lewis (37:17.43)
each of which could be their own lecture course, very rewardingly. And you have to make some hard choices. Do I think Shakespeare is the outstanding dramatist of his generation? I think yes, without question. So would I want Shakespeare to be read in isolation, as he so often is? And the answer to that is no, because it sort of gives rise to this notion of a sort of disembodied genius who was, you know,
Henry Oliver (37:19.179)
Indeed.
Henry Oliver (37:28.694)
sure.
Rhodri Lewis (37:43.671)
not of an age but for all time and such. obviously the degree to which that is true of Shakespeare. But, but, know, he comes from a particular time and a place. And if we’re trying to understand, you know, some of the very complicated and head spinning and extremely moving things that his plays do, we need to be able to attend to that, I think. And so, so yeah, in an ideal world.
Henry Oliver (37:48.468)
Indeed.
Rhodri Lewis (38:10.88)
I would do three or four courses, but in fact, we have to squeeze it all in.
Henry Oliver (38:15.381)
Indeed. Is there too much attention given to Shakespeare’s classical sources?
Rhodri Lewis (38:23.714)
I mean, you know, no. That’s the answer. mean, is...
Henry Oliver (38:27.019)
Let me rephrase to say, should we be spending more time looking at Shakespeare’s English sources?
Rhodri Lewis (38:34.062)
I think we should be looking at all of Shakespeare’s mean, the source hunting thing goes wrong when that’s where inquiry stops. mean, Shakespeare, whatever else he was, you know, will go to the scaffold on this point, as it were, is a subverter. When he takes a source, he always does something to it, whether that’s classical, whether that’s English, whether that’s Italian, whether that’s French. He’s always, always, always.
Henry Oliver (38:52.793)
Sure. Yes.
Henry Oliver (39:00.545)
And you quote Helen Vendler on that point very nicely. Yes, yes.
Rhodri Lewis (39:02.86)
I do quote Helen Dendler on that point, exactly. So yes, if your inquiries, as frankly they, well not yours, know, if one’s inquiries, as frankly they often do, get stuck on, you know, totting up a pile of sources, be they classical or be they medieval.
Henry Oliver (39:12.354)
You
Henry Oliver (39:22.645)
Or maybe I said the wrong word. What I mean is there’s so much work about the influence of classical literature on Shakespeare. And to me, it seems relatively little work about the influence of medieval English literature and the other vernacular things he would have been reading. Should there be a sort of rebalancing there? You could get the impression that it’s all classical influence.
Rhodri Lewis (39:45.581)
Yeah, I mean, that’s been very much a thing, as we were just talking about, of the last 20 or 30 years. Go back to the 20 or 30 years before that, and there was much more on the medieval heritage, because the medieval was in this sort slightly dreamworld version of history. It was communal. We English were all in it together before modernity came along in the form of Francis Bacon or printing or...
Henry Oliver (39:49.234)
Of course.
Yeah.
Rhodri Lewis (40:12.268)
you know, the nation state or whatever sort of thing, and began to complicate it. And so Shakespeare’s genius on this model is to be a bridge between this former world, this medieval world of mystery plays and naive belief and superstition and identity and meaning and fixity and community, and to, you know, trace the ways in which that
quite drastically shifts into a sort of more recognisably modern world full of alienated individuals and societies that are unmindful of the well-beings of their constituent parts. And that version of theatrical history or Shakespearean history is obviously at root, comes from Hegel and has filtered through Marx.
the idea of a sort of wonderful idealized past. So yes, a lot of the stuff, that began to look a little bit tired by the 1990s as a way of doing things. And so it’s not as if the emphasis on classical heritage is a response to that. But at some point after that, it became more acceptable and more interesting to talk about some of the ways in which Shakespeare was, for example, playing with but systematically undermining
the heritage of Seneca tragedy or the heritage of someone like Plotus in his comedies, which, you know, if you tried giving a paper on that at an academic conference in 1980, you know, you wouldn’t have got a lot of love, most likely.
Henry Oliver (41:43.833)
Mm.
Henry Oliver (41:57.018)
Sure. No Richard III and no Richard II in your book. Are they not tragedies? Between the lines, yes.
Rhodri Lewis (42:04.398)
Well, they’re there between the lines. I mean, you know, decisions had to be taken and I suppose I went with more or less the first folio. I mean, I do talk a lot in the first chapter about the relationship between history and tragedy and a much more capacious sense of tragedy, which does not involve drama or Aristotle or any of the stuff that we’re used to thinking about, but just means the fall of great men.
Henry Oliver (42:17.976)
Yeah.
Henry Oliver (42:23.673)
Mm-hmm.
Rhodri Lewis (42:34.958)
the so-called Akazibos tradition, the mirror for magistrates. And I think that’s the sense in which certainly Richard III is a tragedy and is described as a tragedy in a couple of places. Richard II is a much more complicated example, particularly because of the way Richard is written in the last act and the way in which the sort of anxious inward-looking intellect is.
is deployed and I confess that I had a decision to make, I suppose. I needed to have one speech where I talked about Shakespeare experimenting for the first time with what would become his fairly standard soliloquy technique. And it was Richard or it was Juliet. And I was up against my word count. And so it’s Juliet in her family crypt. But yeah, mean, there’s loads written, much of it very, very good.
Henry Oliver (43:23.673)
Juliet it was.
Rhodri Lewis (43:32.527)
the interpenetrations, particularly between Richard II, the history plays more generally, and Shakespeare’s tragedies. And mean, one of the points I make over and again in the book, hopefully not to death, is that, you know, the bar generically is very low. I mean, essentially, a tragedy is what Shakespeare says it is, precisely because he’s not wedded to these absolutist ideas of what genre should look like and how it should behave.
Henry Oliver (43:49.015)
Yeah. Yeah.
Henry Oliver (44:02.241)
Is there some sort of synthesis view of Shakespeare available between you and Bradley?
Rhodri Lewis (44:10.318)
I’m gonna have to explain the question a little bit more. I think I know what you mean, but I’m worried that I’ll go off on one.
Henry Oliver (44:15.189)
Your book is sort of written in opposition to Bradley, but as a sort of friendly alternative rather than Bradley was wrong or whatever. But I feel like you do see what it is that Bradley has to offer, even if you don’t fully agree with him. And can we come to a sort of a more complete theory of Shakespeare, as it were, by trying to fit those two apparently opposite, but perhaps complementary ideas together?
Rhodri Lewis (44:20.77)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Rhodri Lewis (44:32.397)
Yeah.
Rhodri Lewis (44:43.33)
Yeah. I mean, think probably Bradley and I agree on lots of the questions, but we don’t really agree on how to go about answering them in some way or another. And I...
Henry Oliver (44:48.397)
Mm-hmm.
Henry Oliver (44:55.469)
but you don’t deny the central importance of character.
Rhodri Lewis (44:59.054)
Gosh no, no, no, no, I I spend a lot of pages worrying at the very problem. I mean I do think probably plot is the one, tragic plot is the one thing that Shakespeare can’t do without. But at the same time it’s not that which interests him. What interests him is the way in which plot and character can be made to interpenetrate. And you can’t do that unless you.
Henry Oliver (45:03.417)
Mmm.
Rhodri Lewis (45:26.932)
makes some really extraordinary innovative moves with the way in which tragic characterisation is supposed to happen and the way in which tragic characters are supposed to speak come to that. And so yes, mean, definitively we are in complete agreement on that. And I do think, you know, you asked me, has there been a synthesis? No, there hasn’t. I mean, I just, I’m not going to claim to have read everything, but I’ve probably read most things written about
tragedies between Bradley in 1904 and when I started writing this book in 2018 or 19 or something, 2019. And I don’t know of it. All sorts of good things written, just to be clear. Some times I’ve mentioned a couple of them already and several others which we could go on about. But no, I don’t. I mean, just because I mean some of the things that have
tended to talk about Shakespeare as somebody preoccupied with questions that, least in some lights, could be described as philosophical, have tended to do a little bit of what Bradley does sometimes, which is to come into it with fairly clear ideas of what philosophy means. And it’s usually a kind of post-Kantean idealism, whether that’s Hegel or whether that’s somebody else.
Henry Oliver (46:52.729)
Sure, sure.
Rhodri Lewis (46:55.186)
and they therefore block their eyes or their ears or their thinking parts to lots of the complications that go on in the plays. My approach, and I don’t know, you know, we all suffer from delusions and I may be under one myself here, my approach was to try to lean into the bits that don’t make sense, that confused me, and to try to, rather than define those away, or to say that, if only I come at this as a, you know.
Henry Oliver (47:12.898)
Thank
Rhodri Lewis (47:25.838)
As a student of Teodor Adorno or Benjamin’s Trauerspiel, I’ll be able to make sense of this, say no, actually, the point is being confounded. So what does that mean? What does it imply? How can we connect that to all the sorts of things that we want to be able to say about the work that tragedy does?
And, you know, I hope I got, I ticked some of those boxes. I don’t think for a second I got all of them. But yeah, so I mean, I’m definitively, I I share in all seriousness, this is not just kind of piety or trying to say something nice, a perspective of some of the things that make tragedy important with Bradley. And I very much regret that
Henry Oliver (48:20.804)
Mm-hmm.
Rhodri Lewis (48:24.876)
You know, for large chunks of the last 50 years, we’ve, we’ve, we, you know, people writing about teaching, reading, performing, directing Shakespeare have sometimes been, you know.
I’m not sure what the right metaphor is for it, but not as attentive to it, not as open to it, not as... Yeah, he is, he is. And that’s foolish. mean, know, it’s a good test of whether somebody really knows what they’re doing. Is there anything good in AC Bradley? And, you know, anyway, if you say no, then run. dear, yes.
Henry Oliver (48:47.096)
Yeah. Well, he’s often just dismissed.
Yeah, it’s crazy.
Henry Oliver (48:58.062)
Ha ha.
Henry Oliver (49:04.558)
How many good ideas had A.C. Bradley, yes. You have various discussions of the humanist idea of personae in your book. How do you think, or do you think, that those ideas could be applied to a play like Henry V?
Rhodri Lewis (49:14.51)
Mm-hmm.
Rhodri Lewis (49:23.47)
It’s a good question. I mean, and I’m now rather forgetting who has done this work, but there is one good book that does it, so I apologize to whoever this is for about to plagiarize their ideas. I Henry himself is a case study in the perfect humanist, in the Henry IV plays, and then going into Henry V. Somebody who, when he’s in the pub,
talks like a ruffian, puts on the persona, the mask of someone who is a good time lad, wide boy, drinking and cavorting and doing different things. When he’s with a woman, he puts on the persona of an attentive courtly lover. When he’s talking to the court, he sounds like a courtier. When he’s talking to his troops, he assumes the mask.
the characteristics of a general. And this is what a humanist says. The doctrine comes from Cicero’s Deofechies on duties, which says that meaning, real meaning and identity comes from being able to adapt yourself to the social circumstances in which you exist. Because we are half social, half intellectual beings. And so our social things are not exterior. They’re also part of us. So they have to shape who and what we are.
And Henry does that perfectly. He is perfect grammar school. He didn’t go to grammar school, as it were, but he is what many products of the 16th century grammar schools would have aspired to become. Somebody who can talk in different languages and compose themselves differently in different places. Crash that into Falstaff, who is this extraordinary larger than life, pseudo-socratic at times.
Henry Oliver (50:57.198)
Yeah
Rhodri Lewis (51:19.118)
You know, he dies famously from the feet up, just like Socrates. Wit, but he can’t adapt. And so when he comes on, when at the end of Henry, Henry IV, part two, the beginning of Henry V, he just carries on being jolly fat, rude man. Can’t make the adjustment. It’s a failure of decorum and of self-control.
and of self-possession and of real identity. And it’s a really interesting moment. Shakespeare is obsessed, I think, with this. I talk about it a lot in the Othello chapter. This sense of identity is something that is inward and integral to ourselves. And identity is something which is based on exterior social signs and honor. And there’s two very, very competing models. Because yes,
Henry Oliver (51:57.243)
Yeah.
Rhodri Lewis (52:19.438)
As it were, by the history books, or by the logic of the history books and by the logic of Ciceronian moral philosophy, Hal is right to disown Falstaff because he can’t play the grown-up game. He just wants to be, you know, unpleasant. And, you know, in some ways he is unpleasant. I mean, there’s an awful scene in Shrewsbury where he mutilates dead bodies just for kicks so he can look like he’s doing this, that, and the other. But at the same time, we love him and we care about him.
Henry Oliver (52:39.14)
Mm.
Henry Oliver (52:42.586)
Mm-hmm.
Rhodri Lewis (52:48.558)
And he is an engaging, warm, compelling personality. Shakespeare, once again, is not giving us an easy answer. He’s saying, well, here’s an interesting moment. We have a perfect humanist prince, who, by the way, is going to die quite soon after his glorious triumph, causing the terrible nonsense that I’ve already done in the Henry VI plays, and eventually much, much more bloodshed. Or we have this...
know, ostensibly immoral, indulgent, sort of epicure, foul-mouthed, witty epicure, who nevertheless is kind of alive and compelling. Two very different ways of looking at it. But yeah, and a good example of the ways in which, you know, the personae in general. And Shakespeare is very uneasy with them, obsessed with them and the doctrine of personae and how they shape so much identity. But I think he is a very sharp critic.
Henry Oliver (53:25.528)
Mm-hmm.
Rhodri Lewis (53:46.702)
of the shortcuts and the dishonesty and the hypocrisy that it enables many people ostensibly committed to a virtuous version of the personae to make their own.
Henry Oliver (54:00.568)
I’m going to read a quotation from Kermode, and it seems to me to be a sort of organizing idea in your book, but you respond to this in any way that you see fit. It’s from a sense of an ending. Literary fictions find out about the world on our behalf, perhaps better than history, perhaps better than theology, largely because they are consciously false.
Rhodri Lewis (54:04.12)
Mm-hmm.
Rhodri Lewis (54:28.076)
Yep. Yes, that’s a good one. That does that does sound like me as it were. Yeah, no, I mean, I think I think perhaps.
Henry Oliver (54:31.45)
It does, yes.
Rhodri Lewis (54:42.164)
In the case of Shakespeare, I he’d go along with that as far as he goes. And I think Shakespeare, I think Kermode, frankly, in many modes, would say that self-consciousness isn’t enough because what you have to do and what I think Shakespeare struggles and ultimately succeeds in doing within the tragedies is offering...
a version of a fiction and of a way of thinking about the conditions of fictionality that enable us to live with, you know, some kind of concept like that. And that’s in a sense why I ended up writing the second book, Shakespeare’s Tragic Art, the one we’ve been talking about. I mean, in 2017, I published a book about Hamlet called Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness.
which makes many of the same arguments, as you might imagine, but just on the same sort of plate. I didn’t really take that problem you’ve just put your finger on there seriously enough. And lots of people said, you’re saying Shakespeare the nihilist, you’re saying Shakespeare Samuel Beckett on a bad day, you’re saying, you you’re laughing truth and virtue and beauty and all the good things we can get out of Shakespeare to scorn. And, you know, as it were, many of people saying this were people I thought of as on my side of the argument.
Henry Oliver (55:40.003)
Yes, yeah.
Henry Oliver (55:53.722)
You
Rhodri Lewis (56:06.51)
And well, something’s gone wrong here. I need to be able to explain a little bit more. And so no, is a, it is, I I ended up at various parts in the book. say it’s a sort of, rather than a consolation or a, what’s another way of looking at it? Rather than some sort of consolatory or transformative thing, it’s a way of invigorating and helping us come to terms with.
Henry Oliver (56:08.955)
Yeah.
Henry Oliver (56:32.858)
Yes.
Rhodri Lewis (56:36.066)
being animals, super smart animals, who have really not got hard and fast answers about why they’re here, what they’re for, what comes next. mean, yes, various different versions of religion offer answers to those questions, and frankly, may be correct for all any of us know. But it’s outside the realm of ordinary.
Henry Oliver (56:46.619)
Mm.
Rhodri Lewis (57:03.608)
verifiable experience. And of course, that’s one of the things that makes religion so interesting and compelling because it sets itself up as outside the ordinary run of experience. Shakespeare, I mean, you asked me about his Catholicism and I said, boof, earlier, which was a sort of particularly vivid non-answer. I don’t know. And what I can tell you is that in the plays, to the extent that we can say they have to do with Shakespeare.
Henry Oliver (57:06.458)
Mm-mm.
Henry Oliver (57:12.187)
Mm.
Rhodri Lewis (57:33.505)
Whenever religion is wheeled out, just like whenever certain philosophical orthodoxies are wheeled out, they are shown to be wanting, unable to answer to some of the dramatic and tragic imperatives that emerge in the play. So yes, I think cur mode is right. That is one of the reasons we care about the tragedies and why we still care.
I’d be fascinated to know what Bradley would say in response to that, because he was a muscular Hegelian Christian who took Shakespeare to be one such, another such. But yeah, the difficulty is finding a way of living with that fiction, finding a way of making that fiction sound like something that isn’t glib or lazy or despairing.
Henry Oliver (58:05.179)
Mm, yes.
Henry Oliver (58:25.881)
Yeah.
Rhodri Lewis (58:30.958)
or something of the sort. you know, to fast forward just a little bit, that’s why I think Shakespeare stops writing tragedies. Because he, by the time he gets to Coriolanus and to Time of Athens, both of which are rather wonderful in their way, if not very uplifting, he’s begun to doubt the ability, his ability, to hold up.
a compensatory, illuminating fiction, as it were, that can somehow make sense of these things. And what matters to him is the ability to do that. And so he starts to write the kinds of plays that do, which is a funny sort of way in which he starts out in Romeo and Juliet writing tragedy as broken comedy. It’s set up as a comedy and then, you know, accidental death, let it go to strain, a plague, stops.
Henry Oliver (59:28.325)
Yeah, yeah.
Rhodri Lewis (59:29.858)
and becomes something else. And he writes, starts writing plays that are broken, broken tragedies.
Henry Oliver (59:38.575)
What else is most important to you in Kermode’s work?
Rhodri Lewis (59:47.161)
To me, let me think about that. I’m about halfway through writing his biography, so I have all kinds of large vaulting answers to that, which I’m going to try to push to one side. And say to me, what is interesting is the degree to which two things are interesting, actually. One, easy. And that is his commitment to, I mean, you know David Hume’s famous essay of essay writing.
Henry Oliver (59:52.922)
Yeah.
Rhodri Lewis (01:00:15.384)
where he talks about the learned and the conversable worlds. Kermode is devoted as very few before or since to having the learned and the conversable worlds in dialogue with one another. He believes that they both enrich the other. And I take that seriously, and I think that’s important. We need to be able to think and write and communicate clearly, for our own sakes, because it actually demands a quality of thinking.
Henry Oliver (01:00:18.277)
Mm-hmm.
Henry Oliver (01:00:29.659)
Mm-mm.
Henry Oliver (01:00:36.304)
Yeah.
Rhodri Lewis (01:00:43.534)
that isn’t always necessary when writing straight academic prose, as it were, which is its own discipline. And I’m not slighting that. It’s just different. So that commitment to the interpenetration, the rich, mutually fertilizing interpenetration between public and academic writing, that’s the easy bit. The harder bit is his, I think,
the degree to which he sees criticism as, if you like, the queen of disciplines, which I mean to say the critic needs to be a historian, a philosopher, a theologian, a theater historian, you know, insert whatever collection of different things you want to come along with here, a linguistic philosopher, a sociolinguist, whole range of different things.
all of which require extreme technical mastery and patience to get the hang of. What Kermode would say, I think, and I agree with him, and I sort of made versions of this claim in most things I’ve written in last 10 years, if anyone’s noticed, is that we need to be able to put those to work. I mean, we were talking earlier on about, you know, as it were, the classical heritage or the medieval heritage, to actually recognize those illusions.
Henry Oliver (01:01:59.803)
Yes.
Rhodri Lewis (01:02:07.904)
in Shakespeare or anyone else takes, you know, many, many dull hours in the library. Not to mince words, because otherwise you just don’t have the stuff. However, it is only basic literacy. The game is being able to make that do work for you. And that’s what I mean about criticism being the queen of disciplines. You have to have all this stuff to your hands, but you only, you need to have, you know, maybe all of it, but you’re only going to need that bit and that bit and that bit.
to illustrate the passage of Paradise Lost or The Ring in the Book or The Prime of Miss Jeanne Brody that has come to your attention. And Kermode is, I mean, he really...
I mean, one of the things, I mean, he obviously always pretends that, oh yeah, I was just coming along and I stumbled into something and I just wrote this book and oh well, this just popped out. But, you know, looking at his archive, which is here in Princeton, you see him really working hard in the 40s and 50s. All, you know, like the duck under the water, know, spreads a Torah up on top. All clear, all lovely, all conversational, but really grafting to get the basis from which.
Henry Oliver (01:02:58.339)
Hahaha
Rhodri Lewis (01:03:20.942)
some of those apparently easy, effortless judgments can be uttered. I think, know, God knows I don’t have that myself, but it’s something I think we have slightly lost track of. We, people teaching and writing about English literature, not just English literature, literature in general over the course of the last 30 or 40 years. And so, yeah, that matters to me.
if only as a kind of example to which I like to think of myself as aiming, but I’m very rarely managing to reach.
Henry Oliver (01:03:59.11)
Are you up for a few general quickfire questions to close? What’s your favorite Iris Murdoch novel?
Rhodri Lewis (01:04:02.83)
Why not?
Rhodri Lewis (01:04:07.982)
My favorite Iris Murdoch novel, The Bell.
Henry Oliver (01:04:11.811)
And why?
Rhodri Lewis (01:04:18.254)
I’ve probably only read about four, for one reason, which isn’t a particularly good answer. Why? Yes. But I don’t remember anything crucial about the book. What I would say is that I don’t always find the philosophical problems that Murdoch puts into her characters’ mares to be particularly plausible. I do. This novel worked for me.
Henry Oliver (01:04:24.507)
Well, it’s good because it’s truthful.
Rhodri Lewis (01:04:47.854)
I would also put as a side note, I revere Iris Murdoch as a novelist, as an essayist. think her essays speak to me all the time. Exactly so. mean, think it’s magnificent stuff. But the novels occasionally, yeah.
Henry Oliver (01:04:54.339)
Yes, Against dryness and so forth, yes. Yeah. Yes, she’s talked about as a philosopher and a novelist, but actually she’s a great critic. Yes. Yeah, that’s good answer. What do you think of Northrop Fry?
Rhodri Lewis (01:05:06.986)
She may be the C the C. I’m going to delete the bell and say the C the C. That’s probably my favorite.
Rhodri Lewis (01:05:15.446)
What do I think of Northrop Fry? I think Fry has, you know, really good, I’ve forgotten who makes this joke about Wagner, but you know, has fascinating 10 minutes but terrible hours. And I think Fry is a bit like that. I don’t always admire, agree with or admire some of the grand sort of synthetic schematizations.
Henry Oliver (01:05:17.787)
you
Rhodri Lewis (01:05:44.418)
But when he’s up close, he notices things. And I think anyone can learn stuff from that.
Henry Oliver (01:05:47.162)
Yeah.
Henry Oliver (01:05:52.861)
I love his book about the romances. think that’s a really great book. Yeah, really great book. What was it like having your doctoral thesis examined by John Carey?
Rhodri Lewis (01:05:56.546)
That I haven’t read actually, I should. Okay, okay.
Rhodri Lewis (01:06:08.402)
I wonder whether he’s going to watch this. OK. What can I say? mean, John was chairing the Booker Prize judges that year and had rushed up from London for a meeting for my viva. I mean, you know, he was wonderful. And he was bored rigid by the thing. But you know, was nevertheless very attentive and all the rest of it. And concluded, this is why I’m wondering whether he was going to watch this, concludes by saying, will Mr. Lewis?
I think it will make a very fine monograph. Just not one I think I’m going to need to weed.
And thank you, thank you. Can I go now?
Henry Oliver (01:06:51.952)
Why has Marx had quite so much influence on literary academia and Smith so little?
Rhodri Lewis (01:06:59.182)
Well, I mean, there’s a whole range of sociocultural arguments one might give there, but I think Marx offers systems, and particularly since, I mean, particularly really since literary study kind of first went political in the aftermath of World War II. I’m thinking of Raymond Williams, I’m thinking of...
Richard Hoggart, I’m thinking of, well, Eagleton’s a little bit later. I suppose they’re filtering through from Frankfurt as well. The sort of universalizing, unified system is always slightly more appealing to a certain mindset than what Smith offers, which is much more contingent.
much more dependent on the particular play of individual response and such like. But, you know, there are all sorts of, you know, as I was saying about Northrop Fry, I mean, you know, even the most card-carrying, unreflective, deregist Marxist very often has interesting things to say, went up against a text. So one has to sort of, you know, careful not to throw out the with the bathwater.
But yeah, no, because I think Smith is less amenable to universalizing and political agitation of one kind or another of a sort that begins to come online in the late 50s, early 60s. And by the time we get to the mid 80s is more or less the convention.
Henry Oliver (01:08:43.354)
What did literary theory get right and what did it get wrong?
Rhodri Lewis (01:08:48.814)
I mean, literary theory is such a big beast that it’s a hard one to nail down. I mean, I... Yeah.
Henry Oliver (01:08:56.634)
Well it is and it isn’t. mean there are textbooks of literary theory and we all know that it means Terry Eagleton, Foucault, all that jazz.
Rhodri Lewis (01:09:01.302)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, what I can say is what I have found useful, I think. And I, and I do think, for example, sort of early Roland Barthes on structures of texts, elaborating Claude Lévi-Strauss, that kind of thing, really interesting on the patterns that animate, you know, everything, obviously from sort of romance and epic all the way through to the novel and such, like really, really interesting stuff. I think.
Henry Oliver (01:09:07.995)
Yeah.
Rhodri Lewis (01:09:30.114)
that an awareness of the socially contingent nature of many things that had been thought of as universal and sort of more or less Foucaultian tendency, but one could easily pick up on others, is incredibly illuminating and does good sort of disinfecting work around some of the stuff. It goes wrong for me.
Henry Oliver (01:09:55.313)
Mm.
Rhodri Lewis (01:09:59.407)
And in a sense, you’re going to expect me to say this, because it’s going to elaborate what I was just saying about Kermode. It goes wrong for me when it stops being able to do the work of criticism. When, as it were, being a sort of somebody who can discourse fluidly on various theoretical topics without actually being able to...
put those to work in explicating or explaining the meaning of or analyzing or anything like that. The kinds of things that interest me, which is to say literary criticism and literary history, tends to get in the way. Theory wars get heftily overblown. I think most people my age, and I’m now no longer young by any means, we who were at Oxford and Cambridge and wherever else in the
Henry Oliver (01:10:31.686)
Yes, yes.
Rhodri Lewis (01:10:54.764)
in the mid late 90s, we already thought of ourselves as post theory, but not in a sort of hostile way. was, you know, we use it when it’s useful and we ignore it when it isn’t. And, you know, other people, bless them, can go and and talk about it at length over there in that seminar. But that’s not what, that’s not interesting. It’s not important. One of the things that did puzzle me as a sort of fact of literary history, I look forward to reading someone’s book about it in a decade or whenever, is the turn back to theory after the financial crash.
Henry Oliver (01:11:24.045)
Mmm.
Rhodri Lewis (01:11:24.366)
crash in 08, 09, theory stopped being something that was vaguely embarrassing, only pursued by the absolute fanatics, and came back mainstream. And it’s still sort of there. And it’s interesting. But again, I.
I am with it only as far as it’s a useful tool, and it can be a very useful tool when it supplants that which interests me.
Henry Oliver (01:11:55.527)
How should we think differently about the literary 1950s?
Rhodri Lewis (01:12:00.719)
How do we think about the literary 1950s? That’s not a... I mean, I suppose when we think about it... And I wrote this chapter last year and I was not sure I had any real thoughts about the literary 1950s. If I did, it was largely about the movement and about the angry young men. And the movement being the sort of, you know, plain speech, Philip Larkin, all that sort of thing.
Henry Oliver (01:12:03.376)
Well, indeed.
Henry Oliver (01:12:23.516)
Sure, Yes, yes, yeah.
Rhodri Lewis (01:12:30.025)
It’s much more experimental, it’s much more intellectual, it’s much more clued in to continental, particularly French, literary trends than we think of as a sort of glorious isolation, shift away from modernism to something else. And it’s much more in dialogue with the actual long tradition of modernism itself, sort of an offshoot of it. mean, Kermode’s first book, Romantic Image, written in 1950, well...
Henry Oliver (01:12:53.254)
Hmm.
Rhodri Lewis (01:12:58.188)
written in 55 but published in 57, sort of makes this point rather brilliantly, elliptically at times, but brilliantly, that in fact, all this kind of supposedly plain-spoken stuff is in fact really a descendant not just of the Romantics, but of the of late Romantic, not just of the Modernists, but of the late Romantic symbolists of the late 19th century.
Henry Oliver (01:13:20.123)
Right. Right.
Rhodri Lewis (01:13:22.624)
Oscar Wilde and Malamé and all those sorts of things which were normally tied up with modernists and so seeing the 50s as less of a break and more of a hinge with some of the more experimental things that will start to happen in both critical and creative writing from the mid 60s onwards I think is probably helpful and certainly that’s how I’ve come to see it and where it figures.
Henry Oliver (01:13:33.627)
Mmm.
Rhodri Lewis (01:13:51.838)
in the particular arc of my guy, Frank Kermode.
Henry Oliver (01:13:57.133)
If artificial intelligence continues to develop in such a way that we come to think of it as observing us as if we are living in a sort of theatrum mundi, how do you think that will affect the way we make art?
Rhodri Lewis (01:14:08.086)
Mm-hmm.
Rhodri Lewis (01:14:15.596)
Well, I don’t know. I am an AI skeptic at some level, but it’s not difficult to imagine a world in which what you just described comes to pass. It will be interesting. I mean, whether it would be...
whether AI would in fact be doing that observing, whether it would be any different to, for instance, versions of the medieval world which saw everything as being surveilled intently and intensely by God and his angels.
Henry Oliver (01:14:54.653)
Mm.
Rhodri Lewis (01:14:56.086)
I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. mean, you know, so much of it, I mean, it’s so easy to sort of fall down dystopian wormholes and maybe they’ll come to pass, I don’t know. But, you know, in a world in which we are also all the time struggling to generate enough power.
as in electricity, while maintaining an environment. The amount of power required to fuel this kind of AI super state, super state’s the wrong phrase, but AI, know, intra divinity. I don’t know. But it’s not a happy thought, I find.
Henry Oliver (01:15:33.349)
I know what you mean.
Mm-hmm.
Henry Oliver (01:15:45.947)
What is the future of the academic humanities?
Rhodri Lewis (01:15:50.287)
Well, my crystal ball is unfortunately at home and I’m at work. I don’t know.
Henry Oliver (01:15:56.829)
Come on now.
Rhodri Lewis (01:16:20.3)
What I can say, I mean think the academic humanities will continue to survive. I think the academic humanities grew exponentially in the decades after World War II and were always going to shrink somewhat. I think the shrinking has accelerated in the course of the last couple of decades. Because governments in all parts of the world, but certainly in the US and UK, have lost sight of what education is for. I think it doesn’t help that so many humanist departments have turned themselves into sort of all but entirely departments of sort of ways in which to theorise political activity of one kind or another, and I think that’s fine.
And that’s why we have political science departments, because it’s important and interesting thought. But it’s not the same as history. It’s not the same as literary criticism. It’s not the same as different things. And I think if you put all those different things together, you get the sort of perfect storm that sometimes we seem to have now, although I have to say that I live in a lovely little well-funded island here in Princeton. And we do not suffer in the way that I know.
Many of the colleagues in different parts of the US and UK suffer. So I have to kind of extrapolate some of the crisis because I can’t observe it up close and personal. So that’s how we got where we are. I think there is a future. I think it’s a happy future. I think it’s one in which we in departments of literature and departments of history and departments of classics, we use the extraordinary materials we have.
as a space in which to allow and encourage students to ask fundamental questions about, you know, what it’s all about, what does it mean, what’s it for, what is it to live the good life, those sorts of things. And everything should be on the table. Everything should be on the table. I am, I suppose, a free speech fundamentalist in that respect. And...
I think if we do that, and I think, in fact, that’s where we’re tending at the moment, I think it’ll be more or less, you know, they will continue. They will not be the seed beds of revolution, as perhaps was once hoped in the 60s and 70s. They will not be the seed beds of a conservative backlash, as is perhaps hoped in certain parts of the world right now, but they will continue being a place where people hopefully learn about themselves, learn how to think, and go out into the world with some sense of the kinds of things that matter and how to assess them.
Henry Oliver (01:18:58.429)
what is the biggest difference between Oxford and Princeton.
Rhodri Lewis (01:19:03.598)
No tutorials. So I teach lectures here and classes of about 10 to 15. So I have to lecture much more. mean, lecturing in Oxford is something, you know, it’s not quite a hobby, but it’s something you do on the side. Maybe you do eight a year or something. And you know, I do 24 a semester here. And so you have to learn how to do that properly. And it is different, actually.
Henry Oliver (01:19:32.668)
Yes.
Rhodri Lewis (01:19:32.888)
Hope I’ve got there now. And yeah, you have to be able to structure things in a class environment that enables everyone to come along with you. The other really different thing is that in Oxford, in American money, you just teach English majors or literature majors of one kind or another. Here, I teach whoever signs up for my class. And oftentimes, and I was worried about that, I thought, goodness, how am I?
Henry Oliver (01:19:52.782)
Mm, mm.
Rhodri Lewis (01:20:01.943)
to get this engineer through Spencer or Milton or something. But you probably know what I’m going to say next. They’ve been great. They don’t know any of the shortcuts. And they actually read it and ask really big questions. And when they don’t get it, they say, this is weird. They’re not embarrassed about it in a way that an English major might be. So that’s been great. I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve really enjoyed it. But it’s different. And I do miss the intensity.
Henry Oliver (01:20:11.633)
Yes indeed, yes.
Henry Oliver (01:20:21.085)
Yes, yes.
Good.
Rhodri Lewis (01:20:30.222)
the really good tutorial where you can drill down and really get at something. There isn’t really the space for that, but it’s a very different degree. So the AB here is very different to a concentrated BA in Oxford.
Henry Oliver (01:20:45.605)
Last question. You have a very large collection of Pevsner architectural guides. What is it? It’s on your Twitter page.
Rhodri Lewis (01:20:52.12)
How do you know this? Really? OK. I do have a very large collection of Pleasant architectural college.
Henry Oliver (01:20:57.465)
Yeah. Which are the best ones and what do you like about them?
Rhodri Lewis (01:21:03.08)
God. I can tell you what I like about them best. What I like about them is that they are an extraordinary way of reminding oneself of the created quality of the landscape, both urban and rural, throughout the British Isles. are many, many generations that have, well, palimpsest, to use the society pretentious term, overlays that beneath.
pretty much everything one looks at, and the thought and the craft and the artistry that go into some of the most humble and straightforward buildings. My favorite ones, I mean, they sort of map onto the parts of the country I like best, so it’s a little unfair. One I read recently, I had to go to the Isle of Man to do Kermode research, so I...
being the good little soul I am, got the Isle of Man, Pevsner, and off I trotted. And it was fabulous, because it’s a whole bunch of of Neolithic, then Viking, then Irish, then English, then Scottish. Incredible, incredible. I mean, I’ve forgotten who wrote it, so hats off, whoever you are. But it was truly extraordinary, a good reminder of what...
just how difficult it is to write those Pevsner books. And I also love the fact that, as with so much else about the culture of Britain, really, it’s something brought about by German emigres. Niklaus Pevsner comes here, and what am I going to do in this weird little godforsaken island? Well, I’m going to help them appreciate themselves and the fact that they have this extraordinary architectural heritage. And it’s kind of cool.
Henry Oliver (01:22:24.135)
yeah.
Henry Oliver (01:22:48.197)
Rhodri Lewis, thank you very much.
Rhodri Lewis (01:22:50.265)
Thank you, Henry. Absolute pleasure.
