The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 19.0364 Wednesday, 25 June 2008
From: Cary DiPietro <
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Date: Tuesday, 24 Jun 2008 14:58:44 -0400
Subject: SHAKSPER Roundtable: Shakespeare's Intentions
This week's Roundtable comes without a leading essay. I apologize to
SHAKSPERians for the long gap between the two digests, but I've been waiting to
see whether the discussion would develop in the directions I proposed last time,
and it has not. I interpret the lack of responses generally to be a sign that
interest in the discussion is waning, and that now is the time to wind down
towards a conclusion. I was disappointed in particular to see so few responses
to Cary Mazer's wonderful essay, but this is perhaps evidence of the
incontrovertible truth of his argument!
The digest below includes nine responses in total, three of which have not been
published to SHAKSPER yet. The first of these is a short message from Hugh
Grady. I made the mistake in the last digest of anticipating a leading
contribution to be written by him without confirming in advance whether he was
still able to do so, and regrettably, he was not. He gives us here a small taste
of the essay he might have written, and perhaps will write in the future. The
second is a longer response from David Schalkwyk to several respondents to his
leading essay. The final contribution is my own, on the topic I proposed last
time of intention and pedagogical application. It appears at the end partly
because it's framed as a response to comments by David Schalkwyk, but largely
due to the fact that it's hastily written, under-theorized, and doesn't bear
close scrutiny. I thought the topic would elicit a wider response, and the fact
that it didn't suggests to me that my questions were leading to my own response,
so I provide it here, tentatively.
The next digest will be our last in this edition of the Roundtable. Instead of a
leading essay, I'll provide a brief reflection upon the wide-ranging discussion
we've seen so far, and I invite members of SHAKSPER to do the same. I also
invite SHAKSPERians to reflect and comment upon the format of the Roundtable
itself, what worked and what didn't, perhaps with a view to the third Roundtable
whose topic and guest-moderator are, I hope, soon to be decided.
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Gabriel Egan <
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Date: Thursday, 12 Jun 2008 13:08:19 +0100
Subject: 19.0344 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Shakespeare's Intentions
Comment: Re: SHK 19.0344 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Shakespeare's Intentions
Cary DiPietro writes:
>The first assumption of Egan's writing is that there is a correct or
>un-"mangled" authorial arrangement or formulation of "words"
>that can be known . . .
Indeed, it is, but they are words not "words": there's nothing particularly
tricksy about the concept of a word and no need to mark off this concept as
though it were something we must handle cautiously, like intellectual gelignite.
Let's at least agree that the devil is in the meanings, not the words. (I wonder
if anybody else is, at this point, remembering Michael Palin's cod literary
theorist asking himself "What do I mean by the word 'mean', what do I mean by
the word 'word'?")
An example of the assumption that DiPietro objects to: I insist that there's a
correct and unmangled authorial arrangement or formulation of words that gives a
title to this debate, and it's "Roundtable: Shakespeare's Intentions." An
incorrect and mangled arrangement of the words would be "Roundhead :
Shakespeares' Intentions".
(I mangled the accidentals there too, deliberately. Some people think you can
tell who typed or typeset something by whether or not there's a space before
each colon. D. F. McKenzie's essay "Stretching a point: Or, the case of the
spaced-out comps" (Studies in Bibliography 37 (1984): 106-21) would make one
sceptical about this claim. But 10 minutes searching the British Library
catalogue records for the use of spaces around colons confirms that in some
datasets these habits are indeed regular and that one really can distinguish
typing done by professional cataloguers from typing done by non-cataloguers.)
Those who don't accept the above assertion about the relatively unproblematic
nature of the concept of words, those for whom the devil is even in the "words"
(needing DiPietro's 'scare' quotes), will find themselves unable to hold a
meaningful conversation with those who accept the above and think that the
problems of meaning and intention lie elsewhere.
DiPietro says that I'm
>clearly collapsing the distinction between the arrangement
>or appearance of words in a text and the *critical* meanings
>they bear . . .
Quite the contrary, I'm insisting on that distinction: words aren't the problem,
meanings are.
>As professional scholars -- "critical ganders" to the
>"authorial goose" as Egan calls us (something should
>be said here about the troublingly gendered nature
>of this metaphor) -- and as teachers, our task is to
>pronounce critically on the work of our peers and
>our students.
The metaphor is gendered*, but what's the trouble? The mere fact that it's
gendered, or the particular assignment of genders (author = female, critic =
male)? How about if we reverse the assignment, as in the familiar metaphor of
criticism as 'handmaiden' to the text? If that second one is not troubling and
the first is, DiPietro needs to explain why. If both are troubling because they
are gendered metaphors-if gendered metaphors are the problem -- then we are left
with almost no language in which the hold the discussion. Language is almost all
metaphorical and our metaphors appear to inhabit our thoughts and to arise from
our gendered bodies. On this point, Derrideans and cognitive scientists find
one of their most potentially productive points of contact. Trouble is, they
seldom talk. All this nonsense about "words" puts sensible scientists off.
Gabriel Egan
*Derridean SHAKSPERians will have noticed that the metaphorical expression
"what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander" invokes a metaphor of
gender difference precisely in order to erase that difference. That's why I
selected it for the point about authors and critics: a coherent theory of
intentions must address the fact that we maintain this distinction right up
until the moment we start typing. Once we write our theories we become authors,
and readers have every right to apply our theories to our own writings. It's
quite a good test of a textual theory to see if it can be applied
self-reflexively to a written expression of itself. Hence my proposal for random
corruption of postings: those for whom all editorial correction of error in
Shakespeare's writings is positivist hubris will have a tough time complaining
about what happens to their writing.
[2]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Larry Weiss <
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Date: Thursday, 12 Jun 2008 14:34:59 -0400
Subject: 19.0344 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Shakespeare's Intentions
Comment: Re: SHK 19.0344 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Shakespeare's Intentions
Our moderator has invited me to comment on Gabriel Egan's post:
>An observation for Weiss: Egan suggests a random *textual* corruption,
>but he's clearly collapsing the distinction between the arrangement or
>appearance of words in a text and the *critical* meanings they bear
>(unless, of course, he's drawing an *analogy* between textual corruption
>and critical misunderstanding or misprision, which still collapses the
>difference, in any case).
Cary is surely correct that it is unscientific to offer to test the hypothesis
that we cannot discern what (if anything) an author intended by the words he
used with an experiment that alters the words he used. If I understand Egan's
position correctly, it is that the extreme anti-intentionalist argument is
absurd, even paradoxical. The refutation of the extreme position lies not in an
experiment corrupting an author's text but, rather, in the more-or-less
self-evident proposition that if that text had no intended meaning we would be
composing gibberish, and if its intended meaning could not reliably be discerned
by the reader, exchanges of views such as this one would be impossible. If I
have correctly interpreted Gabriel's argument, his confirmation of that will, I
suppose, constitute a refutation of the extreme anti-intentionalist argument.
This might be somewhat akin to kicking a rock to refute the metaphysical (and
quantum physics) notion that matter lacks solidity.
Of course, Egan's use of sarcasm might obscure some of his meaning. Shame on all
those who use sarcasm to make a point!
[3]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Larry Weiss <
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Date: Thursday, 12 Jun 2008 16:03:38 -0400
Subject: 19.0344 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Shakespeare's Intentions
Comment: Re: SHK 19.0344 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Shakespeare's Intentions
The moderator's request for posts about pedagogical techniques that illustrate
either the importance or irrelevance of authorial intention, even posts with
anecdotal evidence, puts me in mind of an incident that occurred in a college
class I took so many years ago I would rather not date it (I think A.C. Bradley
was a classmate).
The class was a senior year "crap course" on reading Shakespearean language,
which was offered by the Speech and Drama Department. The professor regularly
conducted exercises in which he asked every student in turn to read the same
lines, noting the variety of possible interpretations that can be placed on the
same speech by just altering stresses, beats, inflections and accompanying
gestures. I suspect that this exercise is conducted hundreds of times a day in
acting schools all over the world.
One incident especially comes to mind. The text was Portia's line in M/V,IV.i
"Tarry Jew, the law hath yet another hold on you." Student after student read
the line in basically the same way, mostly stressing "another"; and all were
pronounced wrong by the professor. His position was that the stress had to be
placed on "you"; and he had a purely legalistic reason for this: In his view, up
until this line the law had not had any "hold" on Shylock, as it served only as
a defense to his claim -- as lawyers might put it, the law was a shield not a
sword -- and now was the first time a "hold" was to be imposed on Shylock. (This
reading, of course, ignores the fact that Portia had shown that the law had no
"hold" on Antonio either, so "another" is wrong; but that is a little beside the
point.) Finally, in exasperation, one student put a beat after "another" and
read the next three words as "-- Hold on you!" as if Shylock were continuing to
leave the assembly and Portia used this colloquialism to stop him. Risible as
this is, it seems to me that the reading would work in performance.
I suppose that this anecdote can provide fodder for both opposed schools. The
traditionalists can argue that it is patent that Shakespeare intended no such
thing, pointing to the modernity of the colloquialism and the enormous
improbability that the words would have been used in that way in 1596. The
anti-intentionalists could argue, "So, what; it's a play not a dictionary."
[4]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Larry Weiss <
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Date: Thursday, 12 Jun 2008 18:45:12 -0400
Subject: 19.0344 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Shakespeare's Intentions
Comment: Re: SHK 19.0344 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Shakespeare's Intentions
I wonder if there is a moral to be drawn when a reader, director, or author
comes to a conclusion about the author's intentions from a completely incorrect,
even opposite, understanding of the words:
>In a footnote, Weingust reports on his interview with the actor who
>played Salisbury in _King John_ who, at the first performance, was
>surprised to discover that the King addresses him with the familiar
>"you" and not the formal "thou." The actor took this as a sign of
>disrespect, and found that it fueled his anger at the King.
Of course, this actor got the pronouns reversed -- "thou" is familiar and "you"
is polite. Perhaps this supports Cary Mazur's conclusion better than an accurate
understanding by the actor and consequent loss of his character's pique:
>What it finally comes down to, then, is less a matter of what we mean
>by Shakespeare, but what theatrical practitioners mean when they
>claim that they identified something as "Shakespeare's intentions."
>Rather than pointing out the fallacy of their claims and mocking them
>for it, let us instead politely thank them for showing us their cards, even
>as they blithely continue to play the game.
[5]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Duncan Salkeld <
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Date: Friday, 13 Jun 2008 12:57:24 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: 19.0352 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Shakespeare's Intentions
Comment: Re: SHK 19.0352 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Shakespeare's Intentions
David Schalkwyk's thoughtful and well-informed contribution merits a more
considered response than I have given so far or (I regret) am able to give here.
I think there are plenty of areas of agreement between us, and both of us leave
room for manoeuvre in our approaches. I'm not so ready to follow him down Hilary
Putnam's road of 'externalism' when we talk about intention but agree that
intending is a social practice and not solely a personal, private mental affair.
Each of us, I think, sought distance from naive positions on either side of the
issue. I accept that Shakespeare's intentions will always be a matter
of(belated) inference but suggest there are cases where the 'I-word' just has to
be invoked whether we like it or not (by everyone). We might disagree about the
wider purposes or implications of Shakespeare's malapropisms (eg. in speeches by
Dogberry, Elbow or Mistress Quickly), but we would not even begin to disagree
unless we shared an understanding of what literary malapropisms were, that is
authorially determined structures. In such cases, the appeal to intention is not
just heuristic: it is inescapable. My point is that in working out what
Shakespeare's intentions might have been, or were, we make implicit causal
assumptions about his choices, or uncertainties - that of all the options
available to him he settled on one (or didn't). The 'determining' bit is assumed
in the inferring. This is why I think it's helpful (sometimes) to identify
intention as 'a determining and authoritative cause' and similarly to regard
obscurity as ignorance of such a cause.
No criticism of Hardy implied at all, but when I received my contribution
together with Terry's, both were indeed somewhat mangled. Our intentions seem to
have come across pretty well despite it.
[6]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Donald Bloom <
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Date: Friday, 13 Jun 2008 09:33:54 -0500
Subject: 19.0352 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Shakespeare's Intentions
Comment: RE: SHK 19.0352 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Shakespeare's Intentions
With regard to "words," "meanings," "intentions," and other cattle of this color:
In an explanatory note some weeks ago, our long-suffering editor used the title
"Resent Digests." I immediately took the first word to be an imperative verb,
and also immediately found myself puzzled. I could see no reason why I should
resent any of the digests (unless, of course, they had exposed some folly of
mine for all the world to see, or said something snide, or whatever). And it was
very unlikely that Hardy would use an imperative form in a title.
I quickly re-read the title to "Recent Digests," silently emending what I took
to be a typographical error, and assuming that he was offering a collective
comment on posts of the past few days.
But I was wrong. What he was talking about were re-sent digests, ones that he
had to send out over again because of one of those glitches that periodically
infect the digital world. For some reason the hyphen had dropped out.
(Alternatively, Hardy may feel that the hyphen is unnecessary.)
In any case, the title was understandable once I clarified what the actual word
was, a process that I accomplished by reading the rest of the passage and
discarding the two incorrect readings. By acquiring the intended meaning of the
whole note, I could figure out the intended meaning of the puzzling word.
I offer this as a parable. Do with it what you will.
[7]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Hugh Grady <
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The discussion on intention in this Roundtable has been a very full one, but I
have one more topic to add to the mix: the issue of aesthetic meaning in the
discussion of the interpretation of Shakespeare's works. I want to emphasize the
difference between a conventional message, delivered in a concrete social
context from a known speaker to a known audience -- and the communications
situation of an artwork -- let us take the drama as an example -- in which
language is put to fictional, emotive purposes outside of normal social
contexts, by an author or authors whose words are formed within generic and
theatrical traditions not invented by the author and mediated by actors,
directors, and others, to an audience of persons not personally known and
representing a multitude of personal biases, intellectual frameworks, and
familiarities with the story, language, and conventions of the drama.
It should be obvious that the kind of communication in each of these two
disparate instances is quite different.
[8]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: David Schalkwyk <
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My apologies for taking so long to rejoin the conversation. I have been burdened
by a hectic schedule of packing and travelling. Between June and September I
will have visited five different continents and moved my household from Africa
to the USA!
Duncan Salkeld writes very generously of my original posting that "there are
plenty of areas of agreement between us, and both of us leave room for manoeuvre
in our approaches." He goes on to say, "I accept that Shakespeare's intentions
will always be a matter of (belated) inference but suggest there are cases
where the 'I-word' just has to be invoked whether we like it or not (by
everyone)... the appeal to intention is not just heuristic: it is inescapable."
To show just how much we agree, here's an extract from my posting on "Authorial
Intention" on Monday, 17 September 2007: "In my view, much of the trouble with
the debate lies in the ambiguous use of the word 'intention', which seems to be
indispensable in any talk about things that are produced by human beings, but
cannot eradicate the equally unavoidable work of interpretation."
"Indispensable" or "inescapable": they imply the same thing. In that posting,
however, I go on to agree with Hugh Grady that the appeal to intention in
literary interpretation is a red herring. Therein, I think, lies my difference
from Salkeld. Let me elaborate on this difference, which, for the sake of
discussion, I am going to draw quite starkly, perhaps to the point of exaggeration.
Salkeld asks whether if, as I stated, intention is not "the determining and
authoritative cause" of a play's meaning, it could be "a determining and
authoritative cause." I would claim that one either has to say that it is _the_
determining cause (in which case one would be an intentionalist) or that it is
not a determining _cause_ at all (which would not necessarily make one an
anti-intentionalist, though it might). My problem lies with the notion of
intention as a form of causality, which is why I re-cited Derrida's statement
that intentionality will have its place in the world of interpretation for which
he is arguing, but it will not be able to govern and control the entire field.
Just as some philosophers have a "redundancy" theory of truth ("The cow is in
the field" says the same thing as "It is true that the cow is in the field", so
the phrase "It is true" is not doing any work) I hold a (weak) redundancy theory
of intention.
Let me illustrate this via Steve Urkowitz's contribution. He laments that
despite his attempts to show that it was Shakespeare's intention to write "what
we find in Q1 KING LEAR" through the "marshalling of lots of evidence ... my
basic claims and especially my citation of what I see as authorially introduced
and intended _patterns_ have been dismissed or ignored." We need to ask what
work the appeal to intention is doing in Urkowitz's argument. Does it add
anything to the "marshalling of lots of evidence" and the citation of
"patterns"? Rhetorically, it adds a great deal -- in fact, Urkowitz's whole
argument as he summarizes it depends upon the appeal to authorial intention: if
_Shakespeare_ did not introduce such patterns, then they are not his, and Q1 is
not his play. But how do we know that Shakespeare did indeed introduce them?
Well, by indicating patterns that could only have been produced by an intending
agent. But the rejection of Urkowitz's arguments show that the patterns
themselves do not prove anything definitive about what Shakespeare intended. So
the appeal to intention is redundant except in a purely rhetorical or heuristic
sense. Let me put it this way: no appeal to an author's intention absolves one
of producing any piece of evidence or argument in support of that intention. So
one might as well leave out the appeal to intention and stick to the evidence
that one would have produced anyway.
Cary Mazer's example of Beerbohm Tree's appeal to William Poel's invocation of
Shakespeare's intentions to bolster the contrary position, I think, underscores
my point that the appeal to intention is a (very) useful and powerful rhetorical
or heuristic device, but that it settles nothing. Can all those thousands of
separate companies who believe that they are bringing out what Shakespeare
himself intended in _their specific_ production be right? Nonetheless, I agree
with Cary that there is nothing wrong with using intentionality as a method for
_shaping_ an interpretation. That's why I'm not an anti-intentionalist. What I
would object to is the appeal that thereby one has found the _determining cause_
of the interpretation.
Larry Weiss's distinction between critical and textual intention is a useful way
of clarifying many of these issues. It corresponds roughly to what some refer to
as "categorical" intention: the intention to write something; the intention to
write a play; the intention to write a tragedy; the intention to write a tragedy
for the King's Men; the intention to write "Iudean" rather than "Indian." This
kind of intention is separate from that which may be thought to govern the
meaning of the play, or a speech in it, and some anti-intentionalists with
regard to the latter would happily accept the invocation of the author's
intention with regard to the former. Is this a contradiction? I don't think so.
Because the argument that an author intended to use this word is compatible with
the agency of the author without attributing to him or her the capacity to
control and determine what that word may mean. It's the appeal to intention of
the latter kind, in which intentionality is invoked to govern the whole field of
(possible) meaning, which seems to me to be impermissible or redundant,
precisely because "meanings ain't in the head."
This brings me to a further difference with Salkeld: his distancing himself from
my Putnamian and Wittgensteinian position that meanings are public affairs. I'd
like to see a fresh argument that puts them back in the head without falling
into the position that once they're in there, there is no way for anyone else to
get at them. _Hamlet_ offers a compelling representation of the appeal to an
interior self that "passes outward show." Everyone will recall how Hamlet the
character appeals to an inscrutable inner self that "knows not seems", that is
not exhausted in "actions that a man might play." There is an interesting
paradox here, since the _actor_ who plays the part can hardly be said to have
the concealed but vital interiority that the character claims to have. If we can
understand what the actor says without such an informing, controlling,
vitalizing, or intentionalizing interiority in the person who is actually making
the claim, then it means that language works perfectly adequately without it.
It's like Wittgenstein's "beetle in the box": it's redundant (_Philosophical
Investigations_, para. 293). Furthermore, when Hamlet encounters the player,
whose speech is filled with passion, he reflects on the "monstrosity" of the
fact that the actor has no inward cause for such emotion. Yet, when Hamlet tries
to express what HE, who does apparently have such interior cause, should be able
to say and do, he is disgusted that all he can produce is an example of BAD
acting: in search of his interior self he turns into the worst kind of ham. I
repeat Wittgenstein's comment that "the best examples for a sentence with a
particular meaning is a quotation for a play. And whoever asks a person in a
play [the actor] what he's experiencing when he's speaking?" (Ludwig
Wittgenstein, _Last Writings_, Vol 1, ed. G.H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990), para. 38).*
Finally, Cary offers the following challenge: "can you define or describe a
methodological approach to literary criticism (and some definition of or
elaboration upon that term seems necessary) that has practical pedagogical
applications and does not have some recourse, on some level, to authorial
intention?" This is in fact a challenge to start the whole discussion again. If
we hold the circular Knapp and Michaels definition that all meaning is
necessarily intentional, then the answer must be "no." But if the challenge
includes a pedagogical procedure that attends to all that we normally look at in
our teaching of Shakespeare: editorial processes, genre, close reading of
passages, performance history, the performative force of speech, historical
context and so on, then for the past thirty years I have never invoked what
Shakespeare intended, except when a student has objected in the middle of a
discussion of a passage, "But surely Shakespeare could never have intended all
that! Aren't we just reading it all into the words?" No student has ever been
satisfied when a fellow has suggested that Shakespeare did and must have
intended it all. I have asked, if Shakespeare couldn't have intended "all that",
what exactly we would retract, to leave us with a sufficiently limited
interpretation that would satisfy our intuition of what Shakespeare could have
meant. There is never an adequate answer to this question. And then, when I have
suggested that what was going on in Shakespeare's head while he was writing is
beside the point -- that all we have are some extraordinary words, produced by a
man called Shakespeare, but that their meaning is a matter of publicly
accessible rules and possibilities, the objectors have generally been satisfied.
Note that I consistently appeal to Shakespeare's biography in this process. I am
skeptical about certain kinds of appeal to intentionality, but I think biography
as a genuine source of evidence has had a particularly hard time over the past
fifty years, not least because it has been CONFUSED with an appeal to the
author's controlling intentions.
So, in one corner we have William Shakespeare, the genius who must have poured
everything that his texts could mean into them from his vast store of intentions
which ultimately "passes show." And on the other, his theatre, the "actions that
a man might play," in which meaning is a matter of performance and
re-performance in ever-changing contexts. My money is on the theatre.
*For a full elaboration of this argument about interiority in _Hamlet_, see
chapter 3 of my _Speech and Performance in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Plays_
(CUP, 2002).
[9]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Cary DiPietro <
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I recently challenged participants in the Roundtable to define or describe a
pedagogical approach to literary criticism that does not in some way rely upon
or return to the problem of intention, to which David Schalkwyk has responded:
"This is in fact a challenge to start the whole discussion again." Though my
goal is not to return us to the point where we began, I can understand why he
would respond this way, and why, from his perspective, his response to the
challenge would require merely a restatement of his position; David demonstrates
in his following hypothetical anecdote that his theory and pedagogical practice
are entirely consistent with one another. I wish I could say the same. I wish I
could persuade my students just as easily to the idea "that all we have are some
extraordinary words, produced by a man called Shakespeare, but that their
meaning is a matter of publicly accessible rules and possibilities." My students
are disinclined to abandon the romanticist fantasy of literary genius the study
of Shakespeare promises. That Shakespeare is the greatest writer in the English
language, a writer of unparalleled insight into the human condition, that his
plays contain deep spiritual meanings, that he invented the human, no less--this
is the mythology they are fed through the high school curriculum, the marketing
media and, perhaps most conspicuously, the global cultural apparatus that holds
Shakespeare up as an archetypal model of English-language genius. Many of my
students, coming from post-colonial diaspora, are equally wary or critical of
Shakespeare's ascendancy in the global cultural sphere. But make no mistake, his
presence is keenly felt: Shakespeare presides, he hovers, bearing down with the
weight of four hundred-year-old intentions on my classroom.
This is the larger challenge from which this particular Roundtable challenge
emerges, the application of theoretically sophisticated and nuanced positions to
the practice of teaching, and what, at least in my own teaching, sometimes feels
like a kind of double standard or hypocrisy. Indeed, I find that I've become
since the start of this Roundtable acutely aware of the numerous ways I invoke
or appeal to Shakespeare's authorship as a determining cause for the meaning of
the plays, and how that appeal often, though usually inadvertently, turns upon
my use of the word "intention" or its derivatives. For example, a student wrote
to me recently to get feedback on questions she had prepared for an oral
presentation on _The Merchant of Venice_. The student was proposing to isolate
two separate passages from Act 4 in which Shylock invokes scripture in his
rhetorical justification for exacting the bond, the question for the class:
"What does Shakespeare want us to take away from these two passages?" My
response: "Shakespeare didn't intend for us to read these passages in isolation
to derive an isolated meaning from them. You might rephrase the question to
something like: 'How does Shylock's use of biblical precedents or doctrinal
positions persuade or fail to persuade his audience in the courtroom? How does
it affect the theatre audience's perception of him, whether in a positive or
negative way?'."
The questions I offer in lieu of her own imply the corrections that need to be
made of my first fallacious sentence, that Shakespeare was a theatre artist,
that the plays were constructed to produce certain responses in the context of
performance, and that these responses occur irregardless of their intentional
construction. Not only was Shakespeare apparently unconcerned with the effect
his plays would have upon reading communities, it was likely inconceivable that
quarto publication in his lifetime would lead to the long-term preservation of
versions of his manuscripts, and that the literary meaning of these manuscripts,
a concept equally alien for Shakespeare (at least in a hermeneutic sense), would
be debated by generations of scholars and readers. Shakespeare's writerly
intentions, whatever they may happen to have been, are entirely incommensurate
with the appropriative cultural practices--the ways that we read, interpret,
even perform the plays--that have evolved since. So why invoke intention? Is
this merely a heuristic device, or a rhetorical sleight of hand? No, clearly
not: I'm appealing to intention as a determining cause in order to refine the
scope and direction of the student's prepared questions, and in doing so, I'm
legitimating my role as a teacher of Shakespeare. But let me propose a few
reasons why this appeal to intention might, in some cases, be pedagogically
desirable, and perhaps even inevitable within the current boundaries of English
literature as a professional discipline.
I should begin by noting that understanding or decoding "what Shakespeare wrote"
is not a course objective. As with most early modern courses offered in the
post-secondary curriculum in North America, the emphasis is predominantly
historical. The two key learning outcomes are to acquire a detailed knowledge of
certain plays and to develop a critical understanding of the role of the drama
in shaping, in the case of this particular course, early modern English
attitudes to and perceptions of race, gender and religion. There are clearly
certain "new critical" assumptions that lie behind my student's approach to her
task; that plays can be read "spatially" (that is, scenes or episodes taken out
of context or order) to uncover, typically, themes and motifs, an authorial
message connoted in the subtext. This is what I would consider an intentional
reading practice because it presumes both the wholeness of the work, as well as,
whether acknowledged or not, the wholeness of intention behind the work. And as
an instructor of the course, my task is to train her to think more
symptomatically about the historically specific conditions that give rise to the
text. Rather than assuming the wholeness of the work, such symptomatic reading
seeks to identify gaps or fissures (Alan Sinfield calls them "faultlines") that
evidence wider meanings and that are potentially inconsistent with the unifying
vision of restricted textual meanings.
One could argue that, by appealing to intention, I'm speaking to my student in a
language she can understand, even as I model for her a critical perspective
informed by the comparatively recent interventions of historicism, critical race
theory, gender studies, and so on. But I'm also speaking to her within and
against the grain of an institutional framework that, in the first instance,
privileges single creative authorship as the determining cause of literary
meaning. It is, of course, possible to speak of authorship and reading as
historically determined social and cultural phenomena without emphasizing such
values as genius and imagination, but the institutional priority given to such
canonical figures reinforces for students wider cultural assumptions about
literary genius that students inevitably bring with them to a course devoted to
Shakespeare. As a teacher of Shakespeare working within a conventional
departmental curriculum, is it my task merely to disabuse students of such
value-laden assumptions?
Similar assumptions about literary value lie discretely behind David Schalkwyk's
carefully qualified description of the plays as "some extraordinary words,
produced by a man called Shakespeare, [whose] meaning is a matter of publicly
accessible rules and possibilities." If we borrow, as he does, a position from
Wittgenstein that meanings are public affairs, then we would also have to allow
that such descriptors as "extraordinary" are also publicly determined, that
there is nothing innately extraordinary about these words that have descended to
us beyond the value we assign to certain conventions employed by Shakespeare in
his writing, and that the cult of his genius is therefore based on *nothing
more* than the surreptitious desire of institutional bodies (education, theatre,
publishing, archiving) to consolidate their authority by constructing,
perpetuating and privileging various kinds of literary "knowledge." Such
absolutism makes me uncomfortable, and not least because I make my living by
disseminating such forms of knowledge.
As Duncan Salkeld observes, something has to be privileged in any given case,
and by privileging Shakespeare's authorship as a determining cause of certain
kinds of literary meaning, even in strictly qualified ways, I risk teaching my
students to attend to and appreciate the imaginative and psychological force of
distinctly literary forms of writing, even as we historicize and deconstruct
them. It may be true to argue that meanings "just ain't in the head," but that's
where they begin, and I find I'm increasingly drawn to the idea of a possible
continuity in this experience of literature, a continuity between literary
authorship as a psychological and social phenomenon, and what we do in the here
and now when we read or perform or invest ourselves in these texts. This is what
I mean when I speak of a phenomenology of the text (though "phenomenology" as a
term leads us to the impasse between Husserl and Derrida and their subsequent
advocates); that is, an investigation of the structures of experience that are
written in to the text, structures determined by a range of phenomena including
but not limited to creative authorship, and that partially determine how we
experience the text now in any given cultural sphere.
Some of the most exciting work of this nature is being done in the field of
trauma studies, much of it centred upon Holocaust narratives (see, for example,
Caruth 1995, 1996; and La Capra). The often controversial power of trauma
narratives speaks directly to the role that such psychological phenomena as
memory and subjectivity play in the process of storytelling. As victims of
trauma tell their stories, and as their experiences are told by others,
recreated or re-imagined, experience is translated into narrative; and even if
such narratives are demonstrably constructed, shown to depend upon the
unreliable processes of memory, the subjectivity of individual experience, and
the fictionalizing of narrative, these narratives are no less powerful as
contemporary social experiences. Trauma narratives demonstrate acutely the
praxis between the psychology of individual experience and the social experience
of storytelling, and they raise questions about what such storytelling does for
narrative communities, whether it serves as a repository for collective, social
memory, or whether it has some greater therapeutic or psycho-social value.
I'm not prepared to attempt an answer to these questions here, but I raise this
example briefly to make the point that there may yet be some scope for
addressing questions about the psychology of the author as a determining cause
of, if not a hermetic meaning, then an aesthetic experience situated both within
and across time. Moreover, this aestheticist or phenomenological appeal to the
experience of literature might not only answer the presentist call to arms, but
might be a way reconciling the professional crisis in the teaching of English
brought on by, among other things, a Derridean deconstruction of intention.
Works Cited
Caruth, Cathy (ed.). _Trauma: Explorations in Memory_. Baltimore, Maryland:
Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.
Caruth, Cathy. _Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History_. Baltimore,
Maryland: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.
La Capra, Dominick. _Writing History, Writing Trauma_. Baltimore, Maryland:
Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.
_______________________________________________________________
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Hardy M. Cook,
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