Among those authors that have contributed to “the great works of the Western imagination”, the position of Shakespeare is well known and assured, however much his plays require allowances that need not be granted to other authors, whether they work in drama or in poetry or in novels. Other great works are complete in themselves, benefiting from an exquisite unification of their parts though a generic device of the author’s own choosing. The device of a journey through hell and then purgatory and heaven supplies a unity for the stories Dante, the character, has told to him and the various awful settings in which those often first person narratives take place. Indeed, the device, the architecture of the afterlife, is the most memorable conceit the author Dante leaves us with, far more telling than the stories of major and minor miscreants and the poetry of the description of those people and places. For his part, Chaucer crafts tales that are gems of multilayered meanings and intersections of plot motifs and narrative devices, those arranged in a format, the journey of travelers, which need not strain for unity or overall dramatic structure, even if one can claim that, indeed, there is an arc in “The Canterbury Tales”, moving them, one might say, from concerns of everyday life to matters of the soul. Certainly, Milton is always full of his own Miltonic seriousness, clearly a presence that combines the author’s personality with a form for his artistic presentation. Mark Van Doren found this a weakness. Milton never gave you a breather, was always high minded. Van Doren liked Cervantes for taking time to provide bathroom breaks for his characters. I like the redactors of the Old Testament who never let on to whether their characters (Ruth, David, Joseph) ever themselves caught on to the complexity of their own motivations and their own situations. That is the unity of tone, more important than is the intermittent presence of God, that holds the narrative books of the Old Testament together.
The deficiency in Shakespeare, if that is what we can at least initially call it, is not a lack of the unities to be found in Classical Greek and classical French drama. Shakespeare is just working a different kind of drama, one that allows for many shifts of scene and for large casts of characters. The problem, rather, is that Shakespeare violates rules of dramaturgy that would seem essential for making a play work in any age. Each of the great works falls into one or another problem in its plot construction. T. S. Eliot noted the lack of an “objective correlative” in “Hamlet”, which is a particularly abstract way of saying that Hamlet is brought up to
+the edge of accomplishing his revenge a number of times, always drawn back from it for one reason or other, until the end, when revenge hardly matters anymore, and all these people who have been contending with one another to stay alive are taken off the stage in one fell swoop, no doubt much to the delight of the audience, who must have enjoyed the spectacular finish. That gives some basis for the previous hesitancy. As in an opera, where Wagner can kill off Isolde more than a few times (I lose count) only because it gives Wagner reason for yet another death scene aria, Shakespeare does revenge tragedy up brown by having a number of death scenes in “Hamlet”, including some, like those of Polonius and Ophelia, that are accomplished in the body of the play rather than its final scene. Such playwriting gives satisfaction to groundlings; it is allowed to a great work of the western imagination only because we reread the play in the light of knowing that Shakespeare must have been up to something other than popular entertainment, and so used deaths and feints at death to show his audience—what? The ways death hovers and strikes? The ways the presence of death alters life? Find yourself a meaning.
The same problem of plot is also to be found in “Macbeth” where, once the action is set in motion, there seems no respite and no way to change the course, just as one knows from the first time that Iago appears, or even before, in the unseemly love of a Moor for Desdemona, that no good will comes of this. Everything is projected from the start, which is a deficiency when Hardy does it. Shakespeare, however, is taken to be using this paucity of plot, either in that he elaborates the politics of empire and the complexity of miscegenation as he weaves those through a simple story of jealousy, just the opposite of what Dryden is doing when he trivializes “Antony and Cleopatra”, which is about so many things, such as the intersection of personal and professional life, of political and social cultures, and also the iron rules that hold for love and politics, wherever and whenever they get played out, by making his version of the play, “All For Love”, only about the tagline of the play’s title.
The failures of plot construction in “Macbeth” are also rescued through interpretation. Macbeth, every inch of the way, had choices, and he always made the wrong one, driving himself ever more deeply in blood and a kind of madness, and so providing, once more, an excuse for Shakespearean grande grignol, and so again giving the needs of entertainment priority over the needs of art. There are downsides to running a proprietary company of players. Yet auditors give in to Shakespeare, finding reasons to see what he did in one or another plot as a transformation of the conventional revenge story both in meaning and in structure rather than a failure to find within the old structure a way to represent a new theme about revenge, such as that it is moral rather than physical (that would have to wait for Ibsen, building as he was on what could already be found in Romantic and Victorian poems, novels and closet dramas). Another turn on revenge is that kings who exude their moral superiority (such as Martin Luther King, Jr.) can also be made to die. That one would have to wait for history. The willingness to acquiesce to Shakespearean stage craft in preference to an independently founded judgment of what is pleasing and logical and dramatic, however, is not to be attributed just to Shakespeare scholars who give misguided readings so that they can tie things together to their own satisfaction but also to Shakespeare’s own genius in handling his audience both then and now, some four hundred years later.
The most egregious or, depending on how you look at it, the most successful Shakespearean trompe d’ oeil, allowing for the presentment of dramatic structure when that is hardly the case, is to be found in “King Lear”. The plot makes little dramatic sense. The play opens with a division of territories by the king, whose decision may not be wise but is nevertheless not foolhardy. He is trying to arrange for a smooth succession. It doesn’t work out that way. Then, diminished by what he takes as slights rather than what would be inevitable in his new circumstances, he roams the heath cursing at what has befallen him, accompanied by a fool, and an also bereft blind man, which gives much cause for ironies about who is the fool, who is blind, and who is worst off. Then his kingdom is restored to him for contingent reasons by the efforts, in part, of the faithful daughter he has disowned, and he is reunited with her only when she dies so that he can lament not only his own folly but a world which takes the young from us. All of which is melodrama rather than tragedy because most of the people in the play, Lear most of all, go on and on feeling sorry for themselves about the social conditions in which they live. The King, in retirement, had not had as much room for his knights as he would have liked and was not willing to admit that a separate military establishment is not a safe thing for a successor to allow. Usual interpretations say that only after having made the worst of it is Lear forced to face up to the human condition. But why should he suddenly become philosophical? Non introspective people do not suddenly become that when they have the pins shot out from under them. True, it may not seem right or decent for his children to have treated him in this way. But that still leaves a mighty leap for the reader or auditor to make from one man’s fall to the injustices in life which is gainsaid only because Shakespeare is making the request.
A. C. Bradley and Granville Barker are both right and wrong in their views of whether Shakespeare is driven by stagecraft or by the poetry of the text. Bradley is right to think that the plays, “King Lear” in particular, don’t hold up as theatre, though the reason for that is a failure of dramaturgy rather than of stagecraft. Granville Barker is right to think that Shakespeare somehow pulls it together as a presentation, though that is not because of tag lines that move the plot along as well as integrate it if you follow them. Think, rather, of the tough audience Shakespeare faced, as James Shapiro reminds us. I surmise that the audience was far less attentive than is the one that greats a revival of Shakespeare today. The Globe audience also needed some way to pick up the play wherever they had left off in order to buy something from a hawker or to continue a conversation, to orient themselves to know where they were, some cue that served the same purpose as the scoreboards in baseball games which allow you to pick up the count and the number of outs after you have paid for your hot dog. That cannot be done with a clever aside, no matter how valuable they prove to the person reading the play as a text.
A different one of Shakespeare’s gifts comes into play here. Shakespeare gets around dramatic deficiencies not by using plots simply as an excuse, an overlay, so that he can present a richly textured sense of social life, nor by acquiescing to the melodrama inherent in many or most of his plots, Lear an incentive to the Jews who attended “The Yiddishe Lear” on the Lower East Side running out to send Western Union money orders to their relatives still in Europe, lest they be ungrateful children. Rather, Shakespeare uses his gifts as a master of language. Each part of the play is couched in a type of language that allows the auditor to immediately know whether we are in one kind of scene or another and what in the scene is worth attending to. This is not just a matter of using more elevated or poetic styles when having major protagonists (usually people of noble birth) do the talking. Rather, styles of language serve as crib sheets for the plays because language is used for different purposes on different occasions.
“King Lear”, as many have noted, can be broken into parts. Language is the key to the different moods of the different parts. The first part of “King Lear” uses language for its transactional qualities: it is the way to pursue negotiations. That means that people will alter their courses of behavior if the answers they receive are different from the ones they might expect. The king informs his daughters of his plans and expects replies that are appropriate to the occasion. When, famously, Cordelia does not comply by declaring her love, her father gives her a chance to recant, or else he will feel he has to respond to her language in some way other than he had intended. All this happens in an instant, so it is not enough to note, as Granville Barker does, that the conversation is extended through repetition. Yes, that does extend the dramatic moment so that both reader and audience can savor it. What it also does is take note of how important words are; that words are kinds of actions that show whose side you are on and which can be duplicitous or too honest or all of the other foibles that language as transaction can lead us into. The bastard Edgar is just like two of Lear’s daughters in that he knows how to lie and mislead and give off clues that he is honest so as to cover up his lies. Set so early in the play, the audience is made additionally aware of what had happened at court: words can be used to do something other than speak the truth; they can be used to unsettle and change the mind and behavior of those to whom the words are addressed.
One purpose of language, then, is politics. It is about how to get your way. Nothing else matters. And into this trap, Cordelia fell. She was seriously out of step, and not only with what was expected of her. She was out of step with what is to be expected of language when it is understood as primarily political: when it wins a suitor or an inheritance as that is backed up by real power, her sisters knowing that their words can be dispensed with as soon as they lay claim to the property that has been deeded to them. Cordelia insists on telling the whole truth rather than some partial truth, which would have been the case if she had said, like her sisters, that she did not know the words whereby she could speak of her love of her father. Let the implications drop as they may.
But, no, Cordelia has to do what she has not been asked to do, which is to make observations about the nature of language and not just use it in the recognizable way this section of the play treats as the only way language can be used. She says she loves Lear as it is her duty to love him, no more and no less, and buttresses this with the observation that her love will of course become segmented when she marries and so not all of her love is due to her father. Cordelia is right in her analysis in that love is always conditioned on the circumstances of love and particularly the duty owed to those one loves. Love is always conditional. But she is wrong that the declaration of love has no purpose. It reinforces a sentiment that love is something other than conditional. You don’t have to rub somebody’s face in the analytic truth when you are being asked to make a ritualized performance. Everybody knows that. You have to only believe for the moment, and not even then, that when you tell a woman you are courting that she is the most beautiful woman in the world you are saying that because it is the thing to say not because it is literally true.
Why Cordelia is so obdurate, insists on being so contrary to the flow of what is happening at the moment, is a bigger mystery than why Lear flies off the handle and denounces her. He has his excuse. It is the infirmity of his age. What is her excuse? It is the nature of her character to be a truth teller, never mind the circumstances, or maybe that a pampered favorite daughter takes liberties that less favored daughters would not. Maybe the suitor who takes her on with no dowry knows her to be a rare gem, or maybe it is just that language can puncture the reality which it constructs ever so easily, Cordelia doing nothing different with her truth telling than Iago is doing with his lying.
Shakespeare’s use of language as transactional is not limited to “King Lear”. Indeed, one can say that is the tenor of most of “Julius Caesar”, his most political and politically complex play. Every character reads intentions in the words of the others about what they might really be up to and how events are unfolding and are made to unfold at the same time by saying one thing rather than another. Describing Caesar as a tyrant is to describe what is happening, note that it is obvious enough that one can speak of it, at least among friends, and to ask what should be done about it, the answer being apparent even if unvoiced. That a woman must be as pure as Caesar’s wife becomes an aphorism because it is both an instruction and an observation about Caesar’s wife. Marc Anthony is aware that whatever he says will be understood as taking sides and so might seal his fate. His brilliance comes from saying what he wants to say in a way that both describes the occasion and places him where he wants to be within it: the final judgment on Caesar and, eventually, of those who conspired against him. Only toward the end of the play, when all the dirty deeds are done, and Brutus contemplates his fate, do we have a character stand aside from his actions and use language to describe the meaning of his past action and the nature of the human condition.
This transition to something beyond politics takes place at a much earlier point in “King Lear”than it does in “Julius Caesar”. The audience knows and is reminded in the first part of “Lear” that they should attend to the hugger-mugger of statecraft; the audience knows and is reminded in the second part of “Lear”, which takes up the bulk of the play, to think and brood on the human condition and so on what is natural and unnatural in the ways humans relate to one another as well as in the relation of mankind to nature, which is the kind of creature mankind is. Here the language is poetic; the diction is that of “Job” and the speeches evoke metaphors of how a storm or any other act of nature reflects what Lear has learned about his own and about all of the audience’s lives. You know you are into the heavy stuff even if you have been out for a hot dog. And, then, the audience knows and is reminded by the lyrical poetry that is characteristic of the third part of “Lear” to think about human feelings for themselves, as expression of the soul, of inchoate yearnings and fulfillments, and so of the meaning of a kind of salvation through love.
It is possible to say, as well, that these three modes of language subsume one another as well as supplant one another in sequence. Lear’s love of Cordelia, as evidenced by her words or lack of the proper ones in the first act, is subsumed by Lear’s recognition of the loneliness of the human condition in the second part, which wipes out the trivialities of presiding over his inheritance, trying to arrange the future from when he is perhaps not beyond the grave but at least tottering towards it, and then consummated (if that is the right word) in his expression of his need and lose of her in the third section, which shows that the loss is both personal and inevitable, and yet capable of earning a response, even as we are brought home to the fact that politics persists within the layers of later language by the fact that we feel some satisfaction that Regan has been displaced by Cordelia’s husband, though this is a minor satisfaction given what we have now experienced about the setting of human life and the emotions which set us apart from that setting and yet tie us to it. One comes away from “King Lear” emotionally drained because one has been drowned three times, each time in a deeper kind of wisdom, each one too much to bear: the wisdom of politics, of nature in all its dimensions, and of human feeling.
“King Lear”, as a tragedy, is neither about what had to be nor about human flaws (W. H. Auden’s distinction between Greek and Christian tragedy to the contrary). It is about the enormity of things transcending our ability to appreciate them, always shouting out that there is more to be understood, whether in politics, or nature or in our own feelings and ambitions. It is therefore a work of the modern imagination, Harold Bloom is quite correct in saying that Shakespeare invents the modern imagination, though for the wrong reason: it is not because Shakespeare invented personality. That Shakespeare definitely did not do, in that there were others who understood this, including the ancients, and because Shakespeare was particularly beholden to a set of character types commonly used in Elizabethan drama. Rather, Shakespeare invented the modern consciousness by portraying the human appetite as insatiable, which violated the classical notion that insatiability was always a sign of mental instability or of an evil trait. Rather, there is no end to the love people want or the power they want or the understanding they want. Spinoza put it this way in what amounts to an answer to Aristotle’s doctrine of the golden mean: there is no limit to joy, which is the object of all life. Shakespeare shares that sentiment and applies it to every other emotion, their morality to be judged by a different measure, as we still struggle to wonder whether the insatiable greed of capitalism or the desire to do good by changing human nature through genetic engineering and the like or a democratic politics which always seems to be in excess in one direction or another-- arrogance or stupidity or lack of direction or unreasonable ambition—will turn out to be a good thing.