Shakespeare's Characters and the Wheel of Fire

Two Approaches to Shakespeare in 20th-Century Criticism

Today I am delighted to bring you a guest post by

John Pistelli

who writes the

Grand Hotel Abyss

Substack. John summarises a tradition of Shakespeare scholarship from Hegel to Bloom, and looks at its counterpart, notably in G. Wilson Knight. Normally there would be a paywall on something like this, but I want this to be open, so it is going out on the free list. Do look at John’s Substack. I enjoyed his new novel Major Arcana very much.

---

In my first year of college, I took a class called Greek Civilization, a comprehensive introduction to Ancient Greece from the Bronze Age through the fall of Athens conducted via the literary record in all the prominent genres: epic and lyric poetry, tragic and comic drama, history and philosophy. One day we were discussing Antigone when a student ventured to the brisk older professor a speculation about the eponymous heroine’s motive, one relying on elements of her background and personal psychology nowhere detailed in the play. It was something vaguely Freudian, as I recall, about her relationship to her father and brother. “That would make sense,” the professor replied with contemptuous sarcasm, “if Antigone were a real person!”

The professor was right: Sophocles, in composing some kind of religious ritual we probably understand less well than we think we do, construed his characters as mythic archetypes with fated destinies, not neighbors about whose troubled family history we might gossip. With allowances for complex cultural history that intervenes in the two millennia between 5th-century B.C. Athens and 16th-century A.D. London, a history that includes the development of Christianity with its emphasis on the examination of conscience, we might say that Sophocles’s successor playwright Shakespeare is the first writer of imaginative literature to invite us to construe his characters as real people, three-dimensional persons with particular private histories and motivations scarcely known even to themselves.

We see this Shakespearean innovation especially when we compare the playwright’s versions of the stories he adapts to their portrayal in his sources. In Holinshed’s Chronicles, Macbeth has a political case against Duncan, who has illegitimately passed him over for the throne; in the earlier History of King Leir, the aged monarch devises the love-test to manipulate Cordelia into marrying the man of his choice; in Plutarch’s Lives, Marc Antony had been a dissolute bon vivant long before he ever set eyes on Cleopatra. But in Shakespeare’s rendition of each tale, the tragic heroes’ rational motives go missing. We are left to speculate why one kills his king, another alienates his best-loved daughter, and the third gives first his empire and then his life up for his mistress. The heroes themselves seem baffled at their own self-thwarting actions, with Macbeth, for example, asking himself,

[W]hy do I yield to that suggestion

Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair

And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,

Against the use of nature?

Goneril’s remark about her father, “He hath ever but slenderly known himself,” might suit all these tragic heroes–not to mention the notoriously befuddling Hamlet, whose self-inquiry in four soliloquies has launched thousands of essays into the source of his delay. Hamlet’s delay even inspired Freud to devise the Oedipus Complex to explain it–imposing again on Sophocles, just like my old classmate, a reading better suited to Shakespeare.

Before Freud, however, came Hegel. As a philosopher of history rather than a psychologist, he showed a keener awareness of cultural change over time. In his Aesthetics, he argued for Greek tragedy–Antigone, not Oedipus the King, was his paradigm case–as the direct expression of ethical conflict. Greek tragedy stages a war between two legitimate ethical forces (family obligation and loyalty to the state in Antigone, for example) that had each grown one-sided and had to destroy each other, the better to demonstrate the need for a higher synthesis. In some tragedies, this synthesis even emerges, as at the conclusion, for instance, of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, where the forces of blood vendetta are allotted a religious place in society, even as the state with its mechanisms of legal redress and due process usurps their function of avenging crime.

No such synthesis tends to happen in Shakespeare, however. Hegel thought Shakespeare the first of the Romantics, the first of the moderns. What Greek civilization held in perfect balance–a balance too perfect, one that didn’t allow for revolutionary change–Shakespeare tears apart. For Hegel, Shakespeare demonstrates the “self-sufficiency of character” so that his characters are “free artists of themselves” rather than standing for ethical agencies beyond themselves. In this way, Shakespeare can do what Sophocles could not: write a convincing tragedy about a mere criminal, a regicide, in the figure of Macbeth. Macbeth wins our sympathy with courage and heroism even in a bad cause as he beckons us to investigate the deep source of his mysterious motive, as Hegel argues:

Macbeth is forced by his character…into the fetters of his ambitious passion. At first he hesitates, then he stretches his hand to seize the crown; he commits a murder in order to secure it, and in order to maintain it storms on through the tale of horror. This regardless tenacity, this identity of the man with himself, and the object which his own personality brings to birth is the source to him of an abiding interest. Nothing makes him budge, neither the respect for the sacredness of kingship, nor the madness of his wife, nor the rout of his vassals, nor destruction as it rushes upon him, neither divine nor human claims—he withdraws from them all into himself and persists.

In English criticism, Hegel’s successor and evangelist was A. C. Bradley. Bradley was born in 1851 to a father who led the progressive Evangelical Clapham Sect, reformers renowned for their abolitionist advocacy earlier in the 19th century. Bradley arguably secularized this Evangelical reformism when he studied the progressive historical philosophy of Hegel at Balliol College, Oxford, and then when he affiliated with Fabian socialism later in life. His main legacy, however, is not political but literary: the Oxford lectures published in 1904 as Shakespearean Tragedy. There Bradley considers Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth primarily in the light of Hegel’s insight that Shakespeare invests his characters with autonomy. In the first chapter, Bradley writes:

The ‘story’ or ‘action’ of a Shakespearean tragedy does not consist, of course, solely of human actions or deeds; but the deeds are the predominant factor. And these deeds are, for the most part, actions in the full sense of the word; not things done ‘’tween asleep and wake’, but acts or omissions thoroughly expressive of the doer–characteristic deeds. The centre of the tragedy, therefore, may be said with equal truth to lie in action issuing from character, or in character issuing from action.

This emphasis on the centrality of character leads Bradely to speculate on the pasts of Shakespeare’s heroes, to focus his interpretive energy on what must have led up to the tragedy before the play begins. He introduces his interpretation of Hamlet, for example, with this:

Let us first ask ourselves what we can gather from the play, immediately or by inference, concerning Hamlet as he was just before his father’s death.

In an update on Romantic readings of Hamlet by Coleridge and Goethe, Bradley offers us a public-spirited prince possessed of poetic and philosophic idealism derailed into morbidity by his father’s death and its exposure of un-ideal reality. Much as this interpretation differs from Freud’s sexual emphasis, Bradley shares Freud’s method of pragmatically treating the character like a real person with an inner life susceptible to analysis, a method ultimately inspired by Romanticism’s obsession with the inner life, thus the references to Goethe, Hegel, and Coleridge.

The professionalization of literary studies in the academy eventually left Bradley’s approach looking naive, really a type of unprofessional gossip, next to the formalism the New Critics would adopt in the middle of the 20th century and the poststructuralist and historicist studies that would disaggregate “the text” (no longer the work) into its component ideologemes as the century wore on. “Social energy” wrote the plays of Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt would proclaim in the introduction to his Shakespearean Negotiations in 1990, in which case we have no warrant for wondering about secret sources of Hamlet’s despair or Macbeth’s ambition rather than about how early modern society conceptualized the themes of which the text was woven.

It was in this atmosphere that Harold Bloom published Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human in 1998. Bloom began his academic career in the 1950s reviving individualist Romantic poetics against the Christian formalism of New Critics inspired by T. S. Eliot, but he ended it defending this same individualism against what he notoriously called “the School of Resentment,” with its social and political focus (Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, New Historicism, etc.):

Essentially, I seek to extend a tradition of interpretation that includes Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, A. C. Bradley, and Harold Goddard, a tradition that is now mostly out of fashion. Shakespeare's characters are roles for actors, and also they are considerably more than that: their influence upon life has been very nearly as enormous as their effect upon post-Shakespearean literature.

Bloom self-consciously takes this tradition to its extreme, producing less an exegesis of Shakespeare’s plays than a rhapsody on the strongest characters, above all the bottomless Hamlet, Cleopatra, and Bloom’s favorite and double Falstaff. This is at times, as critics have complained, a rhetorical performance in place of an analysis, almost at times amounting to a kind of sometimes Bradly-inspired Shakespeare fan fiction–

Sometimes I amuse myself by surmising the effect, if Shakespeare had confronted Falstaff with Prince Hamlet rather than Prince Hal. But as I have cited earlier, Harold Goddard charmingly says Hamlet is his own Falstaff, and trying to imagine Falstaff as Horatio is dumbfounding.

[...]

Othello is a great soul hopelessly outclassed in intellect and drive by Iago. Hamlet, as A. C. Bradley once observed, would have disposed of lago very readily. In a speech or two, Hamlet would discern Iago for what he was, and then would drive Iago to suicide by lightning parody and mockery. Falstaff and Rosalind would do much the same, Falstaff boisterously and Rosalind gently.

–but it remains valuable for its ability to convey enthusiasm and emotional intensity, especially for younger readers just beginning their relationship to the plays.

A more experienced reader, however, may want a critical guide more capable of taking the plays as a whole, as integral works of art, rather than as sometimes flat backdrops against which character can shine more brightly. The most influential Shakespeare critic of the generation following Bradley, G. Wilson Knight, rejected his precursor’s psychologized method and its Romantic legacy. Knight opted instead for a modernist search for mythic patterns in the human imagination of the same sort that led Joyce to based Ulysses on The Odyssey and Eliot to base The Waste Land on the Grail legend. And whereas Bradley was a socialist interested in political reform, his designs on this world, Knight was a practicing spiritualist–the Vice President of the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain, in fact–seeking a plane far above the merely material.

In his Wheel of Fire of 1930, Knight argues that the Victorian character-centered approach to Shakespearean tragedy as typified by Bradley will tend to vindicate Tolstoy’s complaint about the plays’ unreality and lack of consistent motive. The very gaps in motivation Shakespeare introduces into his sources, which inspired the science of psychoanalysis, cannot satisfy modern audiences habituated to the legible characterization of the realist novel. For Knight, we must recognize Shakespeare’s mature plays as a body of symbolic dramatic-poetic myth:

[W]e should regard each play as a visionary whole, close-knit in personification, atmospheric suggestion, and direct poetic symbolism: three modes of transmission, equal in their importance. Too often the first of these alone receives attention…

Knight conceived of the mature plays as forming a mythic cycle about the recovery of the soul from a disgust toward life–

The plays from Julius Caesar (about 1599) to The Tempest (about 1611) when properly understood fall into a significant sequence. This I have called ‘the Shakespeare Progress’. Therefore in detailed analysis of any one play it may sometimes be helpful to have regard to its place in the sequence, provided always that the thought of this sequence be used to illuminate, and in no sense be allowed to distort, the view of the play under analysis. Particular notice should be given to what I have called the ‘hate-theme’, which is turbulent throughout most of these plays: an especial modern of cynicism toward love, disgust at the physical body and dismay at the thought of death; a revulsion from human life caused by a clear sight of its limitations–more especially limitations imposed by time.

–an interpretation reflected in the book’s most famous essay, “The Embassy of Death: An Essay on Hamlet.” Here Knight inverts Bradley’s Romantic reading of the prince by contrasting his soul-sickness with the essential health of the Danish court: Claudius is a thoughtful king, committed to resolving international conflict through diplomacy rather than war; Polonius and Laertes are sensible to warn Ophelia away from the unstable Prince; Ophelia and Gertrude are innocent victims of Hamlet’s cruelty. Knight allows Hamlet’s greater accuracy of perception, since only the tragic protagonist’s initial revulsion can set him on the path to a cure the late romances will effect, but Knight’s reading requires a sense of the dramatic whole, not just the central character’s personality, to be persuasive. It even persuaded T. S. Eliot himself. In the book’s foreword, he conceded of Knight’s essays that they made him see Shakespeare as a poet more like Dante than he had imagined, one backed by a coherent metaphysic.

Knight, like Bradley, found a successor at the end of the 20th century. In 1992, the poet Ted Hughes published his controversial Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, a massive reading of almost the same dramatic cycle as Knight’s–though Hughes starts with As You Like It rather than Julius Caesar–with an eye toward Shakespeare’s use of tragedy and romance as ritual dramas like those of Ancient Greece to heal an England riven by religious wars and and an emergent Puritan-Enlightenment nexus that alienate the people from the worship of the Mother Goddess enshrined by medieval Catholicism (and, behind her, the likes of Venus and Isis).

To be dense with realistic understanding of secular man, as Shakespeare’s tragedies are, isn’t enough to earn them a place beside the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, where one does instinctively set them. Presumably they qualify for that fraternity because they operate, as I have said, on the mythic plane, and embody a vision of sacred man, or of falling and fallen man in a sacred universe. Or of rational man confronting and challenging a sacred universe. In both the Greek world and Shakespeare’s, the archaic reign of the Great Goddess was being put down, finally and decisively, by a pragmatic, sceptical, moralizing, desacralizing spirit: in Greece by the spirit of Socrates, and in England by the spirit of the ascendant, Puritan God of individual conscience, the Age of Reason cloaked in the Reformation. [...] Maybe this is how the Complete Works come be (whatever else they may be) modern England’s creation story, our sacred book, closer to us than the Bible.

As with Bloom’s book of the same period, Hughes’s work may be too idiosyncratic to count as responsible literary criticism; like Bloom’s book, however, it communicates an infectious urgency and enthusiasm in the reading of Shakespeare generally unmatched in more orthodox scholarship.

Whether one most appreciates the character-centered approach of Bradley and Bloom or the reading oriented toward mythic form in Knight and Hughes, whether one thinks it’s the height of foolishness or the height of wisdom to treat dramatic characters as real people or to treat theatrical myth as religious scripture, Shakespeare’s “infinite variety” can sustain it all. One feature shared in common among Bradley, Knight, Hughes, and Bloom is an intuitive, emotional, and even personal apprehension of the text, without which perhaps no scholarly knowledge can ever amount to wisdom. As Camille Paglia put it in the essay on Shakespeare in her own controversial end-of-the-millennium critical compendium, Sexual Personae, “ Rationalists have their place, but their limited assumptions and methods must be kept out of the arts. Interpretation of poem, dream, or person requires intuition and divination, not science.”