The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 26.031  Friday, 23 January 2015

 

From:        Hardy Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>

Date:         January 22, 2015 at 9:16:34 PM EST

Subject:    From TLS: Shakespeare’s Playworlds

 

[Editor’s Note: The following appeared in the most recent TLS. I will provide excepts here; and if anyone wishes the entire article and does not have access to TLS, please contact me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. -Hardy]

 

Shakespeare’s Playworlds 

By Goran Stanivukovic 

 

SHAKESPEARE’S POSSIBLE WORLDS 

By Simon Palfrey

392pp. Cambridge University Press. £65 (US $99). 

978 1 107 05827 9 

 

POOR TOM 

By Simon Palfrey

Living ‘King Lear’ 

272pp. University of Chicago Press. £24.50 (US $35). 

978 0 226 15064 2 

 

Characters in King Lear, according to A. C. Bradley, “do not merely inspire in us emotions of unusual strength, but they also stir the intellect to wonder and speculation”. Bradley has often been criticized for treating Shakespeare’s characters as if they were real people, but he rightly reminds us that Shakespeare’s work encourages such intuitive reflections. It is no surprise, then, to see that Bradley is invoked in both Shakespeare’s Possible Worlds and Poor Tom: Living ‘­King Lear’, Simon Palfrey’s complementary exercises in wonder and speculation. 

 

A critic with a penchant for the unnoticed and the unspoken, Palfrey links small verbal units to the larger abstract worlds of philos­ophy and metaphysics, from Aristotle to Giorgio Agamben (the phrase “possible worlds” in the title of the first of these books echoes Agamben, who uses it in Potentialities), in order to conduct experiments in criticism. In both of these recent books, critical, creative and philosophical intimations emerge from Palfrey’s “super close-reading” of words as stagecraft tools and “embodiers of meaning”. “There is no detail unworthy of our attention”, he asserts in Shakespeare’s Possible Worlds, a statement that explains the existence of Poor Tom: a unique book in Shakespeare scholarship. The latter is devoted to a single detail in a single play, Edgar’s Bedlam disguise, taking to an extreme the interest in verbal units evinced by Palfrey in his earlier books, Late Shakespeare: A new world of words (1997) and Doing Shakespeare (2005), as well as Shakespeare in Parts (2007), co-written with Tiffany Stern. 

 

The intuitions of Poor Tom grow out of the systematic approach suggested by Shakespeare’s Possible Worlds, and both books employ Palfrey’s personal jargon of “playworld”, “playlife” and “formaction” – neologisms intended to address how language, stage tools and theatre practice produce meaning in Shakespeare’s work. The philosophical basis of playworld and playlife, for example, lies in Gottfried Leibniz’s notion of monads; for Palfrey, Shakespeare’s playworlds brim with these unrecorded, multitudinous “nodes of life”, which, when registered and written about, become “monadic apprehensions”. 

 

Shakespeare’s possible worlds thus become the possible worlds of a creative form of critical writing. The term “formaction”, meanwhile, is meant to encompass “the active forms of playworlds, their working parts and craft material . . . which do not so much mediate things in the world, as are vital with possible life: cues, scenes, metaphors, rhymes, parts, entrances, lines . . . exits . . . mime shows . . . a present audience”. These are the tools of theatre-making that shape dramatic action and help actors’ gestures shape playworlds, and they are virtually, in Palfrey’s view, alive in themselves: “Cue, . . . you can never escape your own space, your Cue-Space, perfect capsule of a word that can never sleep”. 

 

In Poor Tom, the disguised Edgar generates a playworld single-handedly as he leads his blinded father, the Earl of Gloucester, to the brink of a cliff at Dover, “the murmuring Surge” frothing deep below the father’s feet. In this celebrated scene, Shakespeare’s mind works in many directions at once: 

 

The temptation is death: perhaps as distribution of excess; perhaps as a commitment to feeling; perhaps as knowledge of the last frontier; perhaps as defeat; perhaps as a body that cannot contain all that bursts within; perhaps as a return to the predicative condition of being; or, perhaps, finally, as a release from, or release of, Tom. 

 

[ . . . ]

 

The longer and denser of the two books, Shakespeare’s Possible Worlds, is divided into three parts. “Entering Playworlds” sets the scholarly scene, comparing Shakespeare’s playworlds with those of his fellow playwrights Marlowe, Middleton, Marston and Webster; it also brings in non-dramatic correlatives in Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, and the non-dramatic writing of Sidney and Spenser. (Palfrey also claims that the concept of playworlds could be useful to those interested in questions of authorship; while Middleton’s and Marlowe’s playworlds are abundant, the unpredictability of possibilities in Shakespeare’s playworlds gives him a unique place among his contemporaries.) “Modelling Playworlds” considers Henry IV as the work of an anti-rhetorical Shakespeare who exposes the limits of rhetoric (perhaps not unlike Quentin Skinner’s Forensic Shakespeare; see the TLS, December 12, 2014). “Suffering Playworlds” shows how rhyme, repetition and modal verbs serve as the formactions of suffering and forgetting in The Winter’s Tale, as well as killing boredom in Much Ado About Nothing, repetition in Macbeth, rape in Pericles and death in Othello – themes, respectively, unnoticed, underexplored, well-known, over-examined. The book’s most impressive readings come here. In the scene of his wife’s dying, 

 

Othello has felt Desdemona as her life ebbs away. For all his wildness, Othello’s touch, as befits a professional soldier, is scrupulous as a surgeon’s. He is alert to the smallest fidget, and knows that life can hang upon a twig. He wants a gentle departure, which makes the job harder. And so I repeat: he feels his wife’s graduated exit. 

 

These two “flagrantly anachronistic” books treat Shakespeare criticism as a thought-experiment: “In Shakespeare’s playworlds uniquely – there is no guarantee that we all recognize even roughly the same reality; no guarantee that even if we all see the same thing (say, a drawn curtain) we will all agree about what it is, or about the life it signifies or secretes or denies”. It will be interesting to see what Simon Palfrey’s playworlds of creative criticism might signify for Shakespeare criticism. 

 

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