Ah, a summer cold grants me the leisure time to read this wonderful article, a succinct compendium of Shakespeare--and broader theatrical--criticism. I don't mind saying that each POV is here given its due and is compelling on its own. In my analysis, though, be it Hegel or Bradley, Bloom, Knight or Stevens, each perspective, rather than subverting the last, ultimately adds to it in a kind of literary synergy.
Lest we forget, the theatre is a communal activity and by its nature synergystic.
This is a very useful account of ways of approaching Shakespeare. But your starting point appears very wrong, when you say that "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." Chaucer is an obvious predecessor - but you started with Greek tragedy, and one can easily find it there too.
As far as Sophocles' Antigone goes, I think there is a strong case that your professor was wrong, and your Freud-reading fellow-student had a point. Not Freudian necessarily - but there is something deeply weird about Antigone's speech in her final scene, which appears to contradict her entire motivation up to that point. She had been claiming to stand up for divine law in ensuring that a corpse should not be left unburied - but now she constructs a strange theory about having a special relationship with a brother which she would not have with any other relative, which means that she would not have obeyed the divine law in any other case. That sudden shift in her self-justification - doesn't that sound like someone with a private history and motivations scarcely known even to herself?
Or consider her failure to mention her fiance through the entire play, obsessively concerned only with her brother. Or her brutal dismissal of her sister when she belatedly tries to associate herself with Antigone's cause. Or the way she shifts between a proud claim that she wants to stand up publicly for her principles and an attempt to keep total secrecy. I don't see how this is explicable if Sophocles conceived his characters simply as "mythic archetypes with fated destinies" - not to mention that Sophocles probably invented the entire plot and character of Antigone in the first place.
But even if we leave Sophocles aside, what about Euripides? In the Electra Euripides reworks the character from Aeschylus' Choephoroe, having her forced into a marriage with a poor man but endlessly harping on her family history and her need to take vengeance on her mother for her father's murder - and that is clearly something other than an archetype: Euripides is subverting the archetype by placing Electra in a much more commonplace situation. Or if you want a character who clearly is not able to name his own motivations, what about Pentheus in the Bacchae - his sudden desire to see the Bacchants?
And it is far from anachronistic to notice this. Aristophanes (a contemporary of Euripides) in the Frogs critiques Euripides precisely on the grounds that he made heroic characters into ordinary people, the kind of people one could find in any marketplace, and encouraged the audience to relate them to their own lives. Aristophanes certainly conceived of Euripides as creating characters as "neighbors about whose troubled family history we might gossip".
None of this takes away from Shakespeare, who is incomparable. But one does not need to exaggerate the level of his innovation.
Henry, I happened to see this post in Notes. I never received the email, and it’s not showing up to be read in the app. Perhaps it only went out to free subscribers?
The aged professor in the opening paragraph might be better described as sneering than being sarcastic.
"Holy and cold I clipped the wings
Of all sublunary thing."
William Blake
It's a good job for the author, and for Mr. Oliver too, that critics are not held strictly to the text and are encouraged to roam. How many children did Lady Macbeth have may be a fatuous question if the interrogator is seeking a biological answer, but not if he is speculating on the effects of her status as a mother, mentioned nowhere in the text, and on its relation to her husband, to inheritance, and the sanctity of life.
A Freudian interpretation of Antigone is well worth the effort, even if such matters were as formally unknown to Sophocles as they were to Shakespeare whose characters are, notwithstanding, ripe for psychoanalysis.
"How many children did Lady Macbeth have may be a fatuous question if the interrogator is seeking a biological answer, but not if he is speculating on the effects of her status as a mother, mentioned nowhere in the text, and on its relation to her husband, to inheritance, and the sanctity of life."
It is mentioned in the text. In Act I, Scene 7, Lady Macbeth specifically talks about her status as a mother, and relates it to their plan to murder Duncan:
"I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this."
Since the Macbeths clearly have no living children (something commented on later by Macduff), this raised an obvious question - hence Knight's (in)famous essay.
Sophocles didn't know any Gods. He was a human with a human psyche who could write only about characters in the world from his knowledge of other humans, with human psyches. His characters, including his Gods, drip with the drives and needs that are so well investigated and understood using the tools of psychoanalysis.
No behavior, by a God, an alien or a human, that is described in any form of creative writing, is free of the human psyche and therefore not amenable to exploration and explanation using human understanding.
Ah, a summer cold grants me the leisure time to read this wonderful article, a succinct compendium of Shakespeare--and broader theatrical--criticism. I don't mind saying that each POV is here given its due and is compelling on its own. In my analysis, though, be it Hegel or Bradley, Bloom, Knight or Stevens, each perspective, rather than subverting the last, ultimately adds to it in a kind of literary synergy.
Lest we forget, the theatre is a communal activity and by its nature synergystic.
Only wish this had been longer
Brilliant, thank you.
This is a very useful account of ways of approaching Shakespeare. But your starting point appears very wrong, when you say that "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." Chaucer is an obvious predecessor - but you started with Greek tragedy, and one can easily find it there too.
As far as Sophocles' Antigone goes, I think there is a strong case that your professor was wrong, and your Freud-reading fellow-student had a point. Not Freudian necessarily - but there is something deeply weird about Antigone's speech in her final scene, which appears to contradict her entire motivation up to that point. She had been claiming to stand up for divine law in ensuring that a corpse should not be left unburied - but now she constructs a strange theory about having a special relationship with a brother which she would not have with any other relative, which means that she would not have obeyed the divine law in any other case. That sudden shift in her self-justification - doesn't that sound like someone with a private history and motivations scarcely known even to herself?
Or consider her failure to mention her fiance through the entire play, obsessively concerned only with her brother. Or her brutal dismissal of her sister when she belatedly tries to associate herself with Antigone's cause. Or the way she shifts between a proud claim that she wants to stand up publicly for her principles and an attempt to keep total secrecy. I don't see how this is explicable if Sophocles conceived his characters simply as "mythic archetypes with fated destinies" - not to mention that Sophocles probably invented the entire plot and character of Antigone in the first place.
But even if we leave Sophocles aside, what about Euripides? In the Electra Euripides reworks the character from Aeschylus' Choephoroe, having her forced into a marriage with a poor man but endlessly harping on her family history and her need to take vengeance on her mother for her father's murder - and that is clearly something other than an archetype: Euripides is subverting the archetype by placing Electra in a much more commonplace situation. Or if you want a character who clearly is not able to name his own motivations, what about Pentheus in the Bacchae - his sudden desire to see the Bacchants?
And it is far from anachronistic to notice this. Aristophanes (a contemporary of Euripides) in the Frogs critiques Euripides precisely on the grounds that he made heroic characters into ordinary people, the kind of people one could find in any marketplace, and encouraged the audience to relate them to their own lives. Aristophanes certainly conceived of Euripides as creating characters as "neighbors about whose troubled family history we might gossip".
None of this takes away from Shakespeare, who is incomparable. But one does not need to exaggerate the level of his innovation.
Henry, I happened to see this post in Notes. I never received the email, and it’s not showing up to be read in the app. Perhaps it only went out to free subscribers?
Oh I think you are not signed up to the Shakespeare section?
Okay! I will remedy that. Thank you!
Agh what is going on!?
The aged professor in the opening paragraph might be better described as sneering than being sarcastic.
"Holy and cold I clipped the wings
Of all sublunary thing."
William Blake
It's a good job for the author, and for Mr. Oliver too, that critics are not held strictly to the text and are encouraged to roam. How many children did Lady Macbeth have may be a fatuous question if the interrogator is seeking a biological answer, but not if he is speculating on the effects of her status as a mother, mentioned nowhere in the text, and on its relation to her husband, to inheritance, and the sanctity of life.
A Freudian interpretation of Antigone is well worth the effort, even if such matters were as formally unknown to Sophocles as they were to Shakespeare whose characters are, notwithstanding, ripe for psychoanalysis.
"How many children did Lady Macbeth have may be a fatuous question if the interrogator is seeking a biological answer, but not if he is speculating on the effects of her status as a mother, mentioned nowhere in the text, and on its relation to her husband, to inheritance, and the sanctity of life."
It is mentioned in the text. In Act I, Scene 7, Lady Macbeth specifically talks about her status as a mother, and relates it to their plan to murder Duncan:
"I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this."
Since the Macbeths clearly have no living children (something commented on later by Macduff), this raised an obvious question - hence Knight's (in)famous essay.
To add to this:
Sophocles didn't know any Gods. He was a human with a human psyche who could write only about characters in the world from his knowledge of other humans, with human psyches. His characters, including his Gods, drip with the drives and needs that are so well investigated and understood using the tools of psychoanalysis.
No behavior, by a God, an alien or a human, that is described in any form of creative writing, is free of the human psyche and therefore not amenable to exploration and explanation using human understanding.