ABSTRACT
Fundamental to the essays in this book are the following intentions: to concentrate on what I judge to be the play’s intended meanings; to take due account of the entire text in the process of interpretation; to attend where profitable to aspects of historical context other than the political; to enhance appreciation of the dramatist’s conscious art; and to encourage readers to empathise with his perspectives on character, action, and life. Clearly, then, these essays will not have contributed to the great march forward celebrated by John Drakakis as he surveys the years between Alternative Shakespeares (1985) and Alternative Shakespeares, Volume 2 (1997), landmark collections of critical essays which typify the radical or postmodernist criticism (deconstructionist, Marxist, new historicist, cultural materialist) that has dominated Shakespeare studies since about 1980.2
As my stated intentions indicate, I have a number of objections to radical criticism of Shakespeare. First of these is the fact that it disallows in the student the sense of wonder, excitement, and admiration which his plays inspired in me from my own undergraduate days to ‘the pupil age of this present twelve o’clock’. The radical attitude to Shakespeare (characteristically and slightingly dubbed ‘the Bard’) varies from suspicion to condescension and even outright hostility, reflecting a determination not to be daunted by his great reputation or seduced by ‘the aesthetic dimension’. It sees him primarily as a social thinker submerged in his own historical moment and not as a great artist whose imagination and craft gave enduring life to his characters and their experiences. His art, both tragic and comic, is effectively ignored, and if passing reference is made to it, it is usually to characterise it as a dangerous distraction. Thus one of the beliefs to which radical criticism is opposed, says Terence Hawkes, is that Shakespeare ‘is entertaining. He makes us laugh and cry like billy-oh, and can command our rapt attention like no other writer.’ In fact, adds Hawkes, his plays should not be thought of in terms of ‘anything as forbidding as Art’; we should reflect rather on the ‘collective role’ of the audience responding to the plays ‘as in a modern football stadium’, viewing them not as art but ‘as part of an ensemble of spectacular entertainment . . . one which included bear-baiting, brothels, the
stocks, the pillory, the exhibition of the mentally disturbed, public beheading and evisceration, and royal processions. These competed – on equal terms – with the theatre for an audience.’3 The origins of this line of argument are political and go back to the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, when Louis Kampf, President of the Modern Language Association of America, endorsed the newly fashionable view that art is elitist, claiming that ‘the very category of art has become one more instrument for making class distinctions’.4 ‘The fountains [at the Lincoln Center]’, he said, ‘should be dried with calcium chloride, the statuary pissed on, the walls smeared with shit.’5
