Tom McAlindon. Shakespeare Minus ‘Theory’. London: Ashgate, 2004. xii+198pp. ISBN 0 7546 3981 9.
Tom Clayton
University of Minnesota
tsc@umn.edu
Tom Clayton. "Review of Tom McAlindon, Shakespeare Minus ‘Theory’". Early Modern Literary Studies 14.1/Special Issue 18 (May, 2008) 12.1-13<URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/14-1/revmcali.htm>.
- This good book by a distinguished
scholar is a necessity, not a luxury, for those in
search of exemplary scholarship and criticism, with much to say of value
on the subjects of both Shakespeare and ‘theory’, the former primary, the
latter less a means of understanding than an obstacle to insight, as he convincingly
demonstrates. Shakespeare’s himself again,
here, and the book will reward the reading of anyone interested in what and how
Shakespeare’s plays mean, even if he or she is less interested in how and by
whom they have been made to mismean (= Shakespeare plus ‘theory’),
a topic to which McAlindon gives persistent, lucid, refutative, and corrective
attention, and in which many will be interested. And this antidotal part
(chs. 1-2, 5) is integral to the whole, because much of what has been said and
printed, and presumably often even thought, about Shakespeare in recent decades
has been steeped in theorism; so that seeing Shakespeare steady and seeing him
whole—ever worth the effort, even if ultimately impossible—requires disentangling
of what is relevant from what claims relevance.
- As most readers
of this review know, Tom McAlindon has devoted a long, productive, and
successful professional life to literary scholarship and criticism, concerned
with Shakespeare especially but by no means exclusively; and to the larger
contexts, the lived, social, and intellectual history—as opposed to the fashioned,
or fashionable, ‘history’ of new historicism—that enhance and deepen
understanding of Shakespeare and of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, among
other subjects. This book is in effect something of a summing–up and crowning work,
one in which the author regularly, legitimately, and necessarily invokes a
number of his earlier writings, because they are an important and inextricable
part of the literary history that illuminates its subjects and will persist.
Three notable representatives of the canon are Shakespeare and Decorum (1973), English Renaissance Tragedy (1985), and Shakespeare's Tragic Cosmos
(1991).
- The distinction of the essays is
attested by the journals and books in which seven of the nine appeared originally,
and they fully deserved to be translated into a book—accompanied by two essays
not previously published (chs. 1 & 3), a public service to contemporary scholars
and students of literature generally. As McAlindon notes, ‘Three . . . essays
[1, 2, 5] are critiques of the claims and methods of radical, postmodernist
criticism (new historicism and cultural materialism especially)’ (vii). These
are ‘Taking Stock’: Radical Criticism of Shakespeare’, ‘Testing New
Historicism: [Stephen Greenblatt’s] “Invisible Bullets” Reconsidered’), and
‘Cultural Materialism and the Ethics of Reading; or, the Radicalising of
Jacobean Tragedy’. The remaining six are ‘interpretative studies, all but one
of which involve challenges to radical readings of the plays involved’. Chapter
3, ‘War and Peace in Henry V’, is the longest because McAlindon is ‘here
challenging a traditional as well as radical views of the play’. Chapter 4 is on Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 (‘Perfect Answers: Religious Inquisition,
Falstaffian Wit’), 6 on ‘Shakespearean Tragedy’, 7 on Coriolanus (‘an
Essentialist Tragedy’), 8 on The Tempest (‘The Discourse of Prayer’),
and 9 on Doctor Faustus (wittily ‘Marlowe Plus and Minus “Theory”: the
Case of’). One of his three sound reasons for including Doctor Faustus (two being its concern with ‘theatricality’ and new historicists’ ‘obsession’
with it) is that ‘it highlight’s Marlowe’s (serendipitously) ironic perspective
on a famous scholar’s fatally selective reading of a key text’ (emphasis
added)—an allegory of Theory’s abortive and aborting encounters with literary
texts.
- ‘Minus “Theory”’ is hard to write about
because it speaks so well for itself that one is tempted to quote to back up
every assertion (or, indeed, to quote in lieu)—a practice that the author
himself observes temperately and those he analyzes observe not at all or
misleadingly, presumably because quotation, unless carefully screened, cannot
be prevented from speaking for itself, whereas a work unseen and unheard ‘says’
what the critic says it says. At the same time that McAlindon elicits irresistible
enthusiasm for the kind of Shakespearian study he himself practices, one is
made keenly aware that the practice is far less common than it once was, and
may in fact be doomed altogether. Or is it? The good old days, whatever
and whenever they were, always look better because out of focus, by comparison
especially with the rampant abuses of more recent times, of which one is
forcibly reminded many times a day. But the not-so-old days had their own, if
lesser, limitations. The New Criticism practiced a form of close reading that
was especially attentive to ambiguity, irony, paradox, and figure—and given
especially to analyzing the lyric and other expressively complex works that
lent themselves to the same kind of attention—while they had rather less to say
about the larger orders of meaning, form, and significance, including genre.
They were vigorously corrected, complemented, and in effect filled out by the
‘Chicago Aristotelians’, but those came and went in the 1950s without much
disturbing the currents of the mainstream and by many are unknown or no longer
remembered, although Wayne Booth was until recently (2005) and Richard Levin still is with us as members
of the second Chicago generation. And the British counterparts of the New
Critics, good as they were, had their own limitations, Leavis with his
moralizing that could be dogmatic, Empson with his ambiguities that could defy intelligibility
and coherence, for example. But all of these were—and the living
are—unquestionably devoted to literature, scholarship, and reasoning:
not to oracles, not to historicisticizing (sic), not to haut carrièrisme.
All of these are worth not only remembering, but (re)reading, because at their
worst they were attempting to enter into the depths of literature and making it
live for students and non-specialists generally. It is the worse for us and for
our culture that many of their successors are not interested in literature at
all or, in some cases, in anything except giving an ideologically-conformist
performance, mainly for fun and profit, it often seems, since nothing is
propagated by it but attitude and process.
- The sophistries of theorists are deftly and devastatingly
anatomized by McAlindon, and for a rigourous and discerning readership such
theorists could hardly recover without reforming. But where is such a
readership—by the numbers, at least—to be found? It will obviously not have
been educated by the sophists in methods of detecting the fallacies of sophism,
a natural corollary of understanding the resources of literature. One of the
ironies of the ascendancy of ‘literary’, ‘critical’, or just-plain ‘theory’ is
that one may no longer claim to be a theorist without seeming to be either of
the tribe or an imposter, whereas to be a real theorist in the scientific or
philosophical sense is to be not a ‘theorist’. Hence McAlindon makes no
claim to being a theorist, but in his sensitive and scrupulous analyses he is
both philosopher and aesthetician, and shows who and what wears the emperor’s
not-so-new motley. He wears his essentialism with confidence and displays it
with vigour and joy. He makes no apology for believing as Shakespeare did that
many an articulation was of an age but also for all time (as Jonson of course
said of Shakespeare), and that it is disingenuous to say or demented to think
otherwise. We read the Greeks because they live and speak to us, and likewise
the playwrights of the Renaissance—or ‘Early Modern’ period.
- Three orders of scholarship and insight readily available
to support the essentialist, liberal-humanist, literary-critical position of
McAlindon are contemporary biology, social history, and—with application to
theorism—the analysis of bullshit by philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt. The first
two support McAlindon’s position directly, the third seems to characterize
accurately a certain amount of theoristic discourse—although we cannot always
be sure of the motives behind it—of the kind McAlindon analyzes in his own
terms.
- By ‘biology’ I mean not the discourse of the ‘body’ as
extensively exploited for two decades at least, but current scientific
understanding of the (socio)biological bases of human anatomy and behaviour, of
which universalism, however evolving, is an attribute. If anything ever
convincingly gave the lie to anti-essentialism, it is biology. While science
still has a long way to go to explain all of human behaviour, it continues to
make great strides in that direction; and it is now absurd to claim that there
are no human universals and all human behaviour is culturally determined
(according to socio-biologists, cultural behaviour is biologically determined,
and much of it surely is). Of course, the fact that Shakespeare’s plays are
performed and appreciated in translation all over the world is enough to give
the lie to such fatuities, even if the proponents are prepared to claim that
such popularity is due to cultural colonization; some may be, but all cannot
be. Persons who travel among the peoples of other cultures invariably learn
that not only are some practices radically different from culture to culture,
but also that some are the same; among the better are forms of altruism like
hospitality and the kindness of strangers, and these are to be found virtually
everywhere, as part of our shared genetic inheritance; what makes Polyphemos
the absolute inhuman other is not his ocular peculiarity but the guests he has
for dinner.
- And by ‘social history’ I mean that kind that is not
restricted to published books and substantial manuscripts, and narratives of
the prominent lives and events, of the period, but the archival and
archaeological records of the lives of all the people of the period,
real people, about whom a great deal has been brought to light since Lawrence
Stone opened this vein of enquiry and many subsequently rushed to contest—often
supplementing without confounding—his ideas and discoveries; he was the father
of a numerous, distinguished, and invaluable progeny. One of the better
introductions to this goldmine of behaviour analogous to, the source of, and
in some cases very much the same as ‘our own’, is still Keith Wrightson’s English
Society 1580-1680 (1982), reissued in 2003 with a new introduction and
updated bibliography. I suspect that the neglect of this area of enquiry by
many students of literature is due to the relatively fugitive and cloistered
lives of many critics, scholars, and theorists, for whom the lives of
non-academic and common people, even of the ‘middling sort’, are relatively
remote, even when they are living among them. From works of this kind much is
to be learned of importance for understanding the drama—and all other writings,
and the comprehensive life—of the period.
- Philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt’s book On Bullshit is
very relevant to the assessment of many examples of literary theory.[1]
According to him, the bullshitter’s
focus is panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared, so far as required, to fake the context as well. This freedom from the constraints to which the liar must submit does not necessarily mean, of course, that his task is easier than the task of the liar. But the mode of creativity upon which it relies is less analytical and less deliberative than that which is mobilized in lying. It is more expansive and independent, with more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color, and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art, Hence the familiar notion of the ‘bullshit artist’ [52-53] . . . . The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides . . . is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it, This does not mean that his speech is anarchically impulsive, but that the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are [55] . . . . His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose. (56)
- One thinks of
‘New Reductionism’ and ‘Creative Vandalism’, terms invented by two of the
practitioners (43, 104), of which McAlindon says, ‘the first term is preferable
and deserves widespread acceptance. It tacitly acknowledges that political
criticism which sees its end as justifying its means cannot claim to be a form
of serious academic study characterised by consistency of principle, analytical
rigour, and intellectual honesty. Such criticism inevitably slides into the
propagandist mode’ (104). It is noteworthy that when Frankfurt gave his
lecture on this subject at Yale University twenty years ago, ‘one physicist, keen to take a jibe at the
influence of philosopher Jacques Derrida who was popular at Yale at the time,
told Frankfurt it was highly appropriate because "Yale had become the
bullshit capital of the world"’ (Guardian, 12 May 2005). The editor
for philosophy at Princeton University Press, Ian Malcolm, explaining how Frankfurt’s book became a bestseller, said that "There was no one trigger. It was
partly because it had lasted so long. But when I got a couple of reader reports
back about it, it was clear that the issues it raised seem more alive now than
it was before. People related it to the debate in Britain about spin" (Guardian,
12 May 2005).
- There is a
striking implicit tension in this book between the author’s conviction that
what he is about, expounding literature, is of crucial importance to the life
of the individual and collective mind, and his concern that this practice may
not continue for much longer:
The gravely defective methodology employed in “Invisible Bullets” is not confined to Greenblatt’s readings of Shakespeare, nor, of course, to himself alone; some indication of its impact on others has already been given. . . . Its professional acclaim, I believe, justifies some pessimistic reflection on the current state and future prospects of scholarship, criticism, and teaching in the field of English literature. (42-43)
And so it does. Nevertheless, ‘This collection of essays seeks to defend and demonstrate a method of close reading and historical contextualisation of Shakespeare and his contemporaries that it has been customary of late to describe (most often derisively) as traditional and liberal humanist, and which’ is ‘still widely practised’, although it ‘seldom advertises itself as such.’ And the ‘numbers are few’ of those who deplore the ‘marked decline in standards of analysis, interpretation, and argument’ that are the effects partly of theorism. The ‘few’ is inevitably reminiscent of ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers’, and Milton’s ‘fit audience, though few’ together with his beleaguered Abdiel, ‘Among the faithless, faithful only hee’ (Paradise Lost 5.897).
- A strong
implicit theme of McAlindon’s investigations is expressed in Measure for
Measure, where in answer to Escalus’(and Shakespeare’s) leading question, ‘What
news abroad i' th' world?’ the disguised Duke replies, with perennial relevance
to the human condition in most places if not all,
None, but that there is so great a fever on goodness that the dissolution of it must cure it. Novelty is only in request, and it is as dangerous to be aged in any kind of course as it is virtuous to be constant in any undertaking. There is scarce truth enough alive to make societies secure, but security enough to make fellowships accursed. Much upon this riddle runs the wisdom of the world. This news is old enough, yet it is every day's news. [2]
(Shakespeare uses novelty only three times, once each in the so-called Dark Comedies, AWT, MM, and Tro., interestingly enough.)
- The most assiduous—wittily exposed and
condemned—disciple of novelty in Measure is of course Lucio, the
creature of fashion and master of inconstancy, who asks Pompey, under arrest,
‘Is the world as it was, man? Which is the way? Is it sad, and few words? Or
how? The trick of it?’ (3.1.316-18; or 3.2.44-46). Condemnation of following
the shifts and turns of fortune and the world’s way is as Western and
Biblically essentialist—not to mention Shakespearian—as is the valuing of
constancy ‘in any undertaking’. Of the tribe of Lucio arguably are those who
repudiate these attitudes and values as banal, anachronistic, and bourgeois.
They are the many to the one Abdiel.
- The ‘implied authors’ of criticism and theory are perhaps never to be confused with the historical writing persons behind the books and articles, but they differ as much from each other as we not necessarily more real but more material personae do. Reading theory, one often doubts whether the author can possibly believe what he says and cannot but think that he must be a fool if he does and a knave if he doesn’t, to say it. But whatever the various ethoi or characters of cultural materialists, deconstructionists, new historicists, and their kindred –ists, the ethos that seems to stand behind the work of Tom McAlindon is not unlike the Duke’s as described by Escalus in response to the disguised Duke’s question, ‘of what disposition was the Duke?’ Escalus: ‘One that above all other strifes contended especially to know himself’ (3.1.486-89; 3.2.198-200). Sneer at that who will, it has Shakespearian—and real—value with a singular pedigree, since it was found in neon lights over the entrance to the shrine of the Oracle of Delphi over two-and-a-half-millennia ago—and therefore long since obsolete? Or not.
