The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 19.0398 Monday, 14 July 2008
[1] From: Robin Hamilton <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Sunday, 13 Jul 2008 08:03:38 +0100
Subt: Intentionalism
[2] From: Felix de Villiers <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Sunday, 13 Jul 2008 04:46:23 +0200
Subt: SHAKSPER Roundtable: Shakespeare's Intentions
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Robin Hamilton <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Sunday, 13 Jul 2008 08:03:38 +0100
Subject: Intentionalism
This has little to do with Shakespeare but much to do with the utility of the
concept of "intentionalism" in the editorial process.
I'm concerned at the moment with the "authenticity" (deliberate scare quotes) of
broadside song texts, printed in a roughly 150 year period between 1700 and 1850.
Many of these texts can clearly be related to documented historical figures --
Jack Hall (hanged for robbery at Tyburn in 1707), Jack Sheppard (Tyburn, 1724),
Thomas Mount (Rhode Island, 1780) and David Haggart (Tollcross, Edinburgh, 1821).
Other than Sinfu' Davey, I seriously doubt that any of these figures scribed
their own laments.
Of all of them, Jack Hall is in some ways the most intriguing.
He exists in the Old Bailey Records, the Ordinary of Newgate's Accounts,
Alexander Smith's account of_Highwaymen_, and most later versions of The Newgate
Calendar.
Lots of material for an Intentionalist perspective here, you'd think.
{Except the glossary which the editor of the cant section of _Memoirs of the
Right Villainous John Hall, the Late Famous and Notorious Robber. Penn'd from
His Own Mouth Sometime Before His Death. London: printed for J. Baker, 1714_
lifts the vocabulary straight from an earlier printed text.}
Also, of course, Jack or John or Sam Hall achieves immortality via a 1850s comic
song, as "Sam Hall, Damn your eyes."
As far as I can make out, the text which most represents the moment when Jack
Hall was hung in 1707 only exists in a broadside ballad (Pickering, for the Toy
Theatre) dating from the 1830s at the earliest.
... and when it comes to "To the Hundreds of Drury I write," which seems to
pretty much dissociate itself from Jack Sheppard from the start, from the moment
it's printed the day after Sheppard dies, as "Jack Sheppard's Farewell" and
resurfaces as "The Bowman Prig's Farewell" (independent of Sheppard) in Francis
Place -- 1800, reporting songs he'd heard in the 1780, and Thomas Mount, topped
in Rhode Island in the 1780s ...
Even a time machine wouldn't help.
The point I'm tediously making is that there are serious editorial judgements to
be made on a whole range of issues at least mildly relevant to Shakespeare, and
it seems to me that none of them are usefully illuminated by the concept of
"intentionality".
Possibly the worst is a ghost footnote which reaches as far as (at least) Arden3
_As You Like It_, to do with "Peddlar's Greek".
D'oh!
That one at least can be tracked down and put to rest with a stake through the
heart.
{I blame this on as much as anyone else Thomas Dekker, whose joke at the expense
of Thomas Harman's slightly lunatic attempt to justify his coinage of the term
"cursitors" cascades down to the assertion that Cursitors (associated with
drawlatches and roberdsmen) constituted the Second Order of the Old Canting Crew.}
It's orthoglyphs all the way down, and intention simply doesn't figure when it
comes to making practical editorial judgements.
Robin Hamilton
[2]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Felix de Villiers <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Sunday, 13 Jul 2008 04:46:23 +0200
Subject: SHAKSPER Roundtable: Shakespeare's Intentions
For when the work is finished, it has, as it were, an independent life of it's
own, and may deliver a message far other than that which was put in its lips to
say. Oscar Wilde
The aim of this contribution is to move away from what one might call the poet's
external intentions and to pursue the direction of those that or more hidden and
manifest themselves of their own accord. These may be considered under three
closely related headings:
1.. The non-conceptual aspect of art, which diverted intentions may lead to.
2.. Involuntary intentions.
3.. What we may not know about our own culture and the intentions it has
produced in us, and those it fosters in us.
As far as what I call the external the intentions are concerned, some of the
most valuable work that has been done for the Roundtable is summed up in Duncan
Salkeld's recent posting (8 July): "But when examining particular textual
details and their relationships, intention becomes not only a question worth
raising but sometimes essential." In the same letter, referring to Hugh Grady's
posting, he writes that he is hard pushed to see how "the nature of aesthetic
knowledge" could be "non-conceptual." Grady's affirmation, while aiming in the
right direction, is a contradiction in terms, since knowledge is necessarily
conceptual. Perhaps he should have said that the content of art has a non-
conceptual aspect and that art has tried to elude the grasp of conceptual
language, which, throughout history, has been misused for repressive purposes.
The non-conceptual aspect of art is immediately evident in music and painting;
poetry relies on conceptual language but tries to transform it by aesthetic
means: context, word patterns, rhythm rhymes, images, assonance and
alliteration, and other techniques. But all these arts are created by conceptual
beings and must necessarily be understood by them, even if a residue of
enigmatic content will always escape us.
T.W.Adorno, in his Aesthetic Philosophy writes: "The more art as an object is
subjectively remoulded and freed from its mere intentions, the more articulately
it serves as the model of a non-conceptual language that eludes signification."
Here Adorno has his eye on modern art, but his observation is closely related to
his view of aesthetics in general, in which art eludes the grasp of 'mere
intentions.' One of his favourite expressions is that the work must go "where it
wants to go of it's own accord." This phrase comes in Klangfiguren, which also
deals with the contemporary music of his time, but the idea arises in all his
considerations of traditional art, which distances itself from normalised
conceptuality as in the transformation of the latter in a lyrical poem. (see
Noten zur Literatur).
Adorno's remark about art eluding 'mere intentions' leads us to a consideration
of a more intelligible but nevertheless still enigmatic evasions of normal
conceptuality. In creating art there is always and intense struggle between our
rational selves and the material we work on, which has a natural tendency to go
its own way, following the dictates of an alter ego which consumes our external
intentions. Charlotte Bronte, reviewing "Wuthering Heights", wondered whether it
was right to create beings like Heathcliff and she answers, saying, "I scarcely
think it is." But then she goes onto to declare that there are moments when all
our intentions are thrown aside and "be the work grim or glorious, dread or
divine, you have little choice left but quiescent adoption." Who would not think
of Shakespeare in those words?
He leads us through a devious labyrinth of intentions gone astray. In the foul
depths to which Macbeth and his Lady sink, there are glimmers of a lost humanity
which the other characters don't posses. A strangled humanity mutters Macbeth's
words:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out. Out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player.
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
What extraordinary inspiration put these words into the mouth of Macbeth, beyond
all conceivable intention, in this monster of a man, and yet so aesthetically
just? The three repetitions of 'to-morrow,' are in themselves nothing, but
express, in their context, an ineffable poignancy, hard to explain. Here the
other self, the lyrical psyche, has come out trumps. And continues to do so line
by line.
And then there are cultural and historical intentions nurtured in us of which we
are not aware. I doubt whether Shakespeare knew that he was a Mannerist. I agree
entirely with Arnold Hauser, who classifies him as a renascence man, a realist,
yes, but for the most part a Mannerist. He breaks all domestic boundaries. One
might at first think, in his plays, yes, but not so much in his Sonnets. But
they are exemplary of his Mannerism. This is evident in the lyrical 'I' that
abases itself to the point of madness, suicide, death. That was surely one of
his unintentional intentions, which leads us again down stray paths and hidden
intentions in the Sonnets. Shakespeare demolishes the conceptual I as a
dominating instance, in poetry, if not in life, in which we have to survive
somehow with our more or less hardened egos. There are still people who try to
extract -from the spuriously normal world - the would-be happy family man out of
the Sonnets, a man who is nowhere to be found in them. The one Sonnet that
refers to such a family is mythologized immediately by its concord with music.
If the young man had gone straight ahead and produced the duplicate son, the
Sonnets would have lost their reason for being, the aesthetic veil would have
been torn. As it is the imaginary son becomes a mythical figure in the Sonnets,
in one of them he is addressed as "your golden time." And yet, and yet, I do
believe that Shakespeare would like to have torn the aesthetic veil. There are
examples in Beethoven and Mahler of desperate attempts to do so. So much in
Shakespeare rebels against the magic of the aesthetic mirror. Prospero gives up
magic hoping for the best. Macbeth, in the speech quoted above, seems to face a
black impenetrable wall and, in their negativity, his words belong to one of the
most passionate appeals for humanity that I have read. It is here perhaps that
one finds Shakespeare's innermost intention. But he cannot break the spell as
long as he remains in the realm of fiction.
A note: I have nothing against happy families and only wish there were more of
them. Art moves on a different plane.
Works cited:
T.W. Adorno, Noten zur Literatur 1, Suhrkamp 1973
T.W. Adorno, Klangfiguren, Suhrkamp 1963
T.W. Adorno, Aesthetische Theorie, Suhrkamp, 1974
Arnold Hauser, Storia sociale dell'arte, Einaudi, 1987, second volume.
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, Dent, 1963, the Introduction
Oscar Wilde in The Critic as Artist.
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