TY - JOUR
AU - Wynshaw, Elias
AB - Abstract Walter Benjamin's distinction between painting and cinematography forms the basis of an exploration of two constellations of metaphor in Shakespeare's texts: that which exists between speech, penetration and surgical healing, and that between sight, distance and magical healing. The ambivalence of penetration as a force that harms as well as heals is then expanded into a reading of the history of Shakespearean scholarship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is shown that various editors metaphorised their labour as undertaking to heal the Shakespearean ‘corpus’ surgically. The editions of Charles Knight and the psychological criticism of Bradley are then used to show that the nineteenth century saw a movement towards healing the text ‘magically’ rather ‘surgically’. Abstract The Cambridge Quarterly endows a prize for the best dissertation gaining the highest marks in the final Cambridge University English honours examination. The article printed here is the text, complete but excluding some of the critical apparatus, of the Prize Essay for 2015. In his Iconic Essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’, Walter Benjamin makes an observation which, relative to the theoretical canonicity of his ideas on the ‘aura’ introduced in the same piece, has received somewhat sparse critical attention. This observation compares the modus operandi of cinematography with that of painting, and it takes the form of an analogy with two different kinds of healing: namely, that practised by the magician and that practised by the surgeon. ‘The magician’, he writes, ‘maintains the natural distance between himself and the person treated; more precisely, he reduces it slightly by laying on his hand, but increases it greatly by his authority. The surgeon’, by contrast, does exactly the reverse: he greatly diminishes the distance from the patient by penetrating the patient's body, and increases it only slightly by the caution with which his hand moves among the organs. In short: unlike the magician … the surgeon abstains at the decisive moment from confronting his patient person to person; instead, he penetrates the patient by operating. – Magician is to surgeon as painter is to cinematographer. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, whereas the cinematographer penetrates deeply into its tissue. 1 It is, in fact, very easy to undermine Benjamin's comparison: insofar as the camera mechanically penetrates the details of reality, it must also ingest those details. Everything that is ‘grabbed’ by the mechanism must also be taken in; insofar as the camera penetrates, it is penetrated. What Benjamin does get at, however, and what is a far more tenable point, is the erasure of distance that is inherent to both these ways of looking at the camera, particularly in contrast to the distance maintained in the painter's non-mechanical and thus subjective distortion and selection of detail. The passage's application to literary studies is illuminated by a remark from some pages earlier, that, as a result of the invention of the camera, ‘the process of pictorial representation was enormously accelerated, so that it could now keep pace with speech’. 2 The implication is that before the advent of the camera, it was in fact speech that penetrated most deeply into the tissue of reality (or, indeed, encompassed more of it) – and, reciprocally, that the erasure of distance between art and observer which has been accomplished more recently by the camera and the immersive strategies of cinema was once most effectively accomplished by speech and the penetrative strategies of theatrical sound. As Wes Folkerth writes in his contribution to what Smith calls the ‘phenomenology of [early modern] listening’, 3 ‘it was contemporarily believed that unlike sight, which mainly gives knowledge about surfaces and exteriors, sound has the special capacity to provide knowledge about interiors’. 4 Nor is it any more original to remark that sound reaches ‘within’ the subject much more radically than does sight: ‘Objects that I see’, observes Smith, ‘remain situated in geometric space, sounds that I hear reverberate inside me.’ 5 Substituting speech for cinematography in Benjamin's schema alerts one to two latent constellations of associations made in Shakespeare's texts, between speech, penetration, and surgical healing on the one hand and sight, distance, and magical healing on the other. Contemporary theory has established that such oppositions can neither be immanent nor permanent; nonetheless, within a subjectivity that is placed rigorously at a specific place in a specific time, these constellations can help to uncover a historically situated phenomenology such as that of sound and sight in early modern England. But what this essay aims to show in addition is that these constellations of metaphor exist not merely intra-textually to Shakespeare; rather, they ramify continually throughout the history of Shakespeare reception, that is, through the never-ending and overlapping attempts throughout history to come to terms with the Shakespearean corpus. Although in her recent survey of the field Holly Dugan remarks that ‘it is a good time to be a sense-historian’ and that ‘it is almost a cliché to note that early modern playgoers went to “hear” a play’, 6 the conversion of Benjamin's observation to the context of early modern theatre-speech opens an entirely new avenue, namely the application of certain aspects of film theory to a Shakespearean framework. Perhaps the most written-on subject in film theory is the question of the spectator; however, the dominant approach to this field has shifted in roughly the past thirty years. Whereas formerly ‘the dominant model was of a “passive” spectator controlled by the overwhelming mechanisms and physical presence of the film screening, so that they were made vulnerable to the assumed ideological effects of the film experience … the emphasis more recently has been much more on an “active” spectator who …“negotiates” with a film in the act of consuming it’. 7 The criticisms levelled at these earlier conceptions of the passive, purely receptive spectator find a strong corollary in William James's Principles of Psychology , where, in his chapter on ‘Attention’, James takes issue with the approach of such empiricist predecessors as Hume: These writers are bent on showing how the higher faculties of the mind are pure products of ‘experience;’ and experience is supposed to be of something simply given . Attention, implying a degree of reactive spontaneity, would seem to break through the circle of pure receptivity which constitutes ‘experience’, and hence must not be spoken of under penalty of interfering with the smoothness of the tale. 8 Just as the concept of attention is how James proposes that the subject ‘negotiates’ her experience, so it is perhaps through this concept that we might negotiate between the passive and active models of spectatorship. For despite the initial disparagement of his predecessors, James first entertains and then fully argues the position that it is in fact possible for a mind to enter into a state of experience that is, as he would call it, ‘pure receptivity’. He emphasises, however, that such a state is not a given – that it must be achieved by an object that draws the observer's attention irresistibly to it. James is, in fact, almost entirely convinced that attention is a passive phenomenon, and curiously enough he employs the metaphor of theatre to drive home his point: ‘Attention only fixes and retains what [is brought] “before the footlights” of consciousness … In short, voluntary and involuntary attention [elsewhere in the same essay called active and passive attention, respectively] may be essentially the same.’ 9 To put it more directly, James is assuming a determinist stance in order to undermine the binary of active and passive attention. While it may indeed seem that the subject determines the direction of her own attention, this direction is always already determined by the pre-existing dispositions of her mind. In consequence, the creation of the ideal, passive, and theoretical spectator depends on the inability of that spectator to bring any other object within the focus of her attention. In contemporary discourse we often call this the state of absorption, and it may – or indeed may not – occur in the consumption of art. But in Shakespeare's texts – given that the pre-photographic erasure of distance occurred primarily through speech – this absorption, i.e. the ‘passification’ of the spectator, always occurs within the context of listening. The power to transform an active audience into a passive one is a trait attributed, for instance, by the Archbishop of Canterbury to the speech of Henry V: ‘when he speaks, | The air, a chartered libertine, is still, | And the mute wonder lurketh in men's ears | To steal his sweet and honeyed sentences’ (I . i . 47–50). The poetic ‘stillness’ of the air plays into the (admittedly modern) concept of attentive fixation , of being trans- fixed and thus unable to move, unable to act – or, as picked up in the ‘mute wonder’ of the following line, unable to speak. This state of fixation in Shakespeare is consistently referred to as ‘wonder’, a word that is frequently accompanied by descriptions of the wonderer's body being penetrated. T. G. Bishop has written a full-length monograph on wonder in Shakespeare, although his analysis deals exclusively with visual wonder, such as that found in dumb-show masques, and it neglects the distinctly aural sense of the word which carries with it the potential for this absorptive state. 10 Bishop's ‘wonder’ is what in Renaissance dramatic theory is called admiratio , and has especially to do with spectacle; both words alert us to the visuality of the phenomenon as Bishop conceives it. Yet this visual wonder pales in comparison to the wonder of speech, which far more radically collapses the space between the subject and the object of art. The ‘mute wonder’ attributed to Henry, for instance, is imagined as some kind of possessing spirit or creature that enters the listeners' ear canals and controls the activity of their attention. In Henry VIII , the king describes the Duke of Buckingham as a ‘man so complete, | Who was enroll'd ’mongst wonders … we, | Almost with ravish'd listening, could not find | His hour of speech a minute' (I. ii. 120–3). Such compression of subjective time, attributed here to the sort of wonder that comes of listening to eloquent speech, is identified by James as a hallmark of fully passive attention. This is especially in contrast to its opposite, ‘the confused, dazed, scatter-brained state which in French is called distraction , and Zerstreutheit in German’, in which one feels instead ‘a solemn sense of surrender to the empty passing of time’. 11 Henry VIII's report of having stood with ‘ravish'd listening’ to the Duke of Buckingham bears an important resemblance to Macbeth's having ‘stood rapt in the wonder’ of the witches' prophecy. Both speakers avail themselves of the metaphorical sense of self-removal that is inherent to the words ‘rapt’ and ‘ravished’ (both being from the Latin rapere , to seize 12 ). On the one hand, then, lies a model of listening that conceives of the absorbed hearer as being removed from his or her own body; on the other, as in Henry V , lies the invasion of the body by a force which seems to control the hearer with the power of an alternative agency. Both of these metaphors for absorbed listening fit comfortably within the concept of attentive fixation, a word which lies ambiguously between, on the one hand, being attached to or penetrated by the object of attention, and, on the other, attaching to or penetrating it oneself. Both metaphorical models, however, ultimately refer to the same erasure of distance that Benjamin would later attribute to cinematography. Whether one is invaded by the force of speech or whether one attaches oneself to it, both metaphors entail a radical collapse of the distance between hearer and heard. This (inter)penetrative capability of speech is put to use in the service of several metaphorical nexuses throughout Shakespeare's work, not least of which is the use of penetrative sound both to damage and, in a surgical context, to heal the subject. Tanya Pollard has written recently about how, in Hamlet , ears ‘function not only … as a gateway to the mind, but as a troublingly unclosable entrance to the body’. 13 This comment is highly pertinent to a play where Hamlet exclaims (facetiously?) that Laertes' lament over the dead Ophelia seems a ‘phrase of sorrow’ that ‘Conjures the wand'ring stars, and makes them stand | Like wonder-wounded hearers’ (V. i. 231–3; though Pollard does not employ this quote in service of her argument). Still, neither Pollard nor any other critic involved in the relatively new project of describing the ‘phenomenology of [early modern] listening’ has expanded this point into all the loci in Shakespeare's plays where the openness of the ear forms an essential trope and feeds a range of complex metaphors for both harm and healing. The closedness of Shylock's ears in the Merchant of Venice , for instance – that is to say, his very invulnerability to certain kinds of speech – is a verbal means by which the Christians of the play work to constitute his difference: ‘Can no prayers pierce thee?’ Gratiano asks (IV. i. 218). By contrast, the male lovers of Romeo and Juliet and Troilus and Cressida , being wounded or indeed made vulnerable by love (with all the word's connotations of being ‘wound-able’, and perhaps suggesting a kind of feminisation in the form of opening up), find themselves especially susceptible to the inner damage of speech. 14 Romeo places the very utterance of the word ‘banished’ alongside a list of several other (and apparently preferable) means of lethal harm: ‘Hadst thou no poison mix'd’, he asks Friar Laurence (notably an apothecary), ‘no sharp-ground knife, | No sudden mean of death, though ne'er so mean, | But “banished” to kill me? – “banished”?’ (III. iii. 44–6). Similarly, Troilus reproaches Pandarus for, rather than using his words as a curative, adding still more damage to the ‘open ulcer of [Troilus'] heart’ by listing Cressida's manifold virtues: ‘Saying thus, instead of oil and balm | Thou lay'st in every gash that love hath given me | The knife that made it’ (I. i. 78–93). Perhaps the most interesting aspect of a metaphorical nexus, moreover, is that any one of its associations will tend to be reversible. The wound avails itself of the metaphor of the ear just as easily as the ear avails itself of the metaphor of the wound. In Coriolanus , a play that draws much of its expression from the body – the body politic, the injured body – the battle wound is repeatedly evoked as a site of hearing. Martius, hurt after the battle at Corioles, declares, ‘I have some wounds upon me, and they smart | To hear themselves remember'd’ (I. ix. 28–9). Martius conceptualises the verbal spreading of recognition and glory as having the power of inflicting pain on the breaches of his body. And in the next act, speaking as Coriolanus to the assembled Senate, he effectively claims that recognition would have the effect not only of causing additional pain, but of actually keeping his wounds open: ‘I had rather have my wounds to heal again’, he tells the Senate, ‘Than hear say how I got them’ (II. ii. 64–5). The close sonic correspondence between ‘heal’ and ‘hear’ alerts us to their implied opposition: for the wounds to hear is not to let them heal, and in order to heal they must not hear. The adverse sensitivity of Coriolanus' wounds to verbal recognition is densely symbolic of his relationship to honour and fame. While Coriolanus certainly hungers for honour in the abstract, he is revolted at honour's worldly form – that is to say, fame – and at the actual conditions of its propagation. Wounding itself, being honourable, does not faze Coriolanus; what perturbs him is that any new opening in his body will serve as potentially another ‘ear’ to the highly variable and impure speech of others. His idea of self-value in particular derives from his mother Volumnia, who declares that she ‘sprang not more in joy at first hearing he was a man-child than now in first seeing that he had proved himself a man’ (I. iii. 16–17; emphasis added). Coriolanus has taken on himself his mother's desire that he be defined primarily within the visual field, on the mere sight of his wounds rather than on the verbal description. As Stephen Handel writes, ‘Listening is centripetal; it pulls you into the world. Looking is centrifugal; it separates you from the world.’ 15 What Coriolanus desires is the distinction, the separation that comes of honour. But honour, to count for anything, must become fame, and so Coriolanus must be interpellated into the world of reputation – he must allow heard speech to ‘pull him’ into the world. He must, in other words, permit speech to erase the distance between himself and his society. In yet another demonstration of the convertibility of this metaphorical constellation, Coriolanus' wounds are later reimagined by the plebeians not as the speech-receptive opening of the ear but as the speech-generative opening of the mouth: ‘if he show us his wounds and tell us his deeds, we are to put our tongues into those wounds and speak for them’ (II. iii. 5–7). Coriolanus' wounds are like tongueless mouths, unable or unwilling to advocate for their bearer, and as such requiring a team of surrogate tongues to get the job done. There is also perhaps an insinuation of the curative powers of wound-licking, to which Shakespeare refers in Venus and Adonis in the context of a dog whom Venus finds ‘licking of his wound, | Gainst venom'd sores the only sovereign plaster' (ll. 915–16). If this is the case, then it resonates nicely both with the penetrative healing power attributed to speech, and with Coriolanus' habit of referring to the plebeians as ‘curs’: first, when they gather at the very beginning of the play (‘What would you have, you curs’, I. i. 158), and then on his being banished (‘You common cry of curs’, III. iii. 124). For Coriolanus to open his body to the curative tongues of the plebeians, to allow them to ‘put [their] tongues into [his] wounds’, would be to degrade himself from his desired state of full bodily autonomy. Arguably what Coriolanus is seeking, and what his society can never permit him to have, is the power of self-definition, which is impossible to attain insofar as the all-infusing penetration of speech is the very fabric of which all definitions are woven. If speech and the hearing of speech entail a sort of penetration, then what distinguishes the visual field is the maintenance of distance. In Macbeth , where the repeated crime is the illicit, damaging, secretive penetration of the body, the maintenance of this distance becomes a key contrastive signifier in the play's moral universe. Whereas Macbeth abuses the potentially curative powers of penetration for murderous ends, Edward the Confessor is renowned for his ability to heal a subject without needing to violate the body at all. As the Doctor reports, … there are a crew of wretched souls That stay his cure: their malady convinces The great assay of art; but at his touch— Such sanctity hath heaven given his hand— They presently amend. (IV. iii. 143–7) The range of definitions given by the Oxford English Dictionary confirms that the word ‘touch’ – here advertised as the sufficient condition for Edward's healing –signifies a kind of contact that remains non-penetrative (e.g., ‘A stroke, action, or influence (esp. slight, or momentary)’; ‘A hit, knock, stroke, blow; esp. a very slight blow or stroke’). The hand of Macbeth, however, operates not by touch, but precisely by transgressing the surfaces of the body. In contrast to Macbeth's need for deception, for working beneath the surfaces of things – ‘Let not light see my black and deep desires’; ‘Look like th’ innocent flower | But be the serpent under ‘t’ (I. iv. 53, I. v. 56–7) – the very visibility and respectful distance of Edward's mode of healing distinguishes him as a benevolent king. As Benjamin observes, ‘unlike the magician … the surgeon abstains at the decisive moment from confronting his patient person to person’. If we widen Benjamin's sense of ‘surgeon’ to encompass all those who penetrate the body, for harm or for good, then we begin to sense the potential for deception that is inherent to bodily violation, that is, to those forms of engagement that do not confront the patient person to person. And yet the agent who uses penetration for harm cannot properly be called a ‘surgeon’; for this reason Macbeth is instead termed a ‘butcher’ (V. viii. 71). But the surgeon, in passing through to the body's unseen contents, is effectively crossing the threshold of visibility, beyond which he can no longer be monitored and so prevented from crossing the further threshold from surgery into butchery. In short, all penetration into the body, no matter its stated intentions, raises a profound anxiety about its invisibility – for invisibility may arise from excessive proximity as well as excessive distance. By contrast, even the syntax of the above passage reinforces the frankness, the visibility, of magical healing. The adverb and adverbial phrases (‘presently’ and ‘at his touch’) precede their verb, as if to emphasise the readiness and honesty with which the details of Edward's healing present themselves (the devil, after all, is in the details). Furthermore, ‘h’ (the unvoiced glottal fricative) is a densely represented phoneme in the intervening clause (‘Such sanctity hath heaven given his hand’), and this evokes the quiet calm of undisturbed, healthful breath. When the Doctor exits, Macduff enquires of Malcolm, ‘What's the disease he means?’ Malcolm replies,      Tis call'd the evil: A most miraculous work in this good king; Which often, since my here-remain in England, I have seen him do. How he solicits heaven, Himself best knows: but strangely-visited people, All swol'n and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye, The mere despair of surgery, he cures. (IV. iv. 147–53) The repeated reference to the visual field is difficult to ignore. These patients, who are ‘the mere despair of surgery’ – utterly beyond the curative powers of penetration – are also ‘pitiful to the eye’, and the cure performed by Edward is one that Malcolm has often ‘seen him do’. That is to say, a great deal of verbal work goes into emphasising that Edward's healing may, in contrast to Macbeth's harming, be openly witnessed . Magical healing, as Benjamin's observation makes us aware, is intimately associated with visuality and with the maintenance of distance; and indeed, the name of the disease to be cured – ‘the evil’ – firmly locates this constellation of concepts within what often seems to be the play's ‘almost perfectly Manichean’ moral universe. 16 Whereas magical healing, visibility, and maintenance of distance belong to the ‘good king’ Edward the Confessor – who never even speaks a word – penetration and speech belong to the murderous and ever-soliloquising Macbeth. This example sheds new light on several threads of argument which have been touched on so far but now demand to be filled out. Firstly, advocacy for painting as opposed to photography in twentieth-century discourse often assumes the same outline as the implied goodness of Edward's magical healing over Macbeth's penetration. In this discourse the more palpable subjectivity of the painting takes on a moral importance, as it requires the artist to show herself in the act and product of creation. The photographer, like the surgeon or the butcher or in fact any other penetrator, erases the distance necessary for moral evaluation: there is a point at which something is so close that it can no longer be effectively judged. Thus the photographer, the surgeon, and the butcher are, in a powerful sense, invisible. This moral invisibility would seem to be an element of what Edvard Munch intends when he writes, ‘The camera cannot compete with brush and palette – so long as it cannot be used in heaven and hell.’ 17 Secondly, the idea of the passive spectator that has been borrowed from film theory, synthesised with William James's psychology, and applied to the early modern theatre in the form of the passive auditor, takes on new significance as we see the important connections between passivity and being a patient – both words deriving from the Latin patior , which, among other things, means ‘to suffer’, ‘to undergo’, and ‘to permit’. 18 In other words, the erasure of distance between the surgeon and her own body that a patient must allow in order to be treated, leaving her completely passive to the will of her carer – or, indeed, the erasure of distance unwillingly enforced by such butchers as Macbeth – is the very same metaphorical erasure of distance that generates the passivity of the auditor. The case of Macbeth is exemplary of a radical ambivalence that lies within the concept of penetration, and one which has recurred throughout this discussion. While penetration from the right hands (or indeed mouths) can be a powerful means of cure, it is also the primary means of bodily damage. And furthermore, the erasure of distance that is a necessary element of penetration always entails a sort of invisibility on the part of the healer, so that the one who claims to be healing is also in the ideal position to be harming. This ambivalence manifests itself not merely intratextually to Shakespeare but is a perpetual current in the discourse around reception of his texts – indeed, the body needing to be treated is the text itself, i.e., the Shakespearean ‘corpus’. The tradition of metaphorising the Shakespearean text as body remains as yet without critical comment, although it goes back as far as the preface to the First Folio edition. The folio publishers claim that the text had theretofore been ‘maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of iniurious impostors’, and that the current edition by contrast presented the plays ‘offer'd to your view cur'd, and perfect of their limbes’. 19 These ‘iniurious impostors’ had pretended to be surgeons, had cut into and modified the text with the apparent intention of restoring it to health, but had under this guise ‘maimed’ and ‘deformed’ it. The current edition, by contrast, was the first to claim to be the editorial grail of the authentic, whole, healthy text. In the eighteenth century, in addition to the metaphor of the text-as-body we begin to see a metonymic development which renders the text not merely a body, but, moreover, the body of Shakespeare himself. The figure of speech introduces itself casually at first, then becomes more salient throughout the prefaces of the various eighteenth-century editors. Rowe's 1709 edition, the first of its kind after a series of seventeenth-century folios, contains a preface in which Rowe claims that his mission with respect to Shakespeare's text is to ‘redeem him from the injuries of former Impressions’. 20 Alexander Pope, whose edition followed Rowe's in 1725, also uses this figure of speech, mainly in the service of attacking those editorial predecessors who had damagingly penetrated the author's body-of-text: ‘It is impossible’, he complains, ‘to repair the Injuries already done him.’ 21 He argues, furthermore, for the greater validity of the quarto editions over the First Folio, for in the folio – compiled ‘by Heminge and Condell, in 1623, seven years after his decease’ – one finds the liberal amputation of lines and speeches; and, ‘as it seems, without any other reason than their willingness to shorten some scenes: these men (as it was said of Procrustes) either lopping or stretching an Author to make him just fit for their Stage’. 22 The allusion is telling: Procrustes was a son of Poseidon who invited travellers to stay in his bed, then either shortened or lengthened their bodies in order to make them fit. 23 The seeming benevolence of Procrustes' offer to lie in his bed and be cured of one's exhaustion, only then to be hacked and maimed, resonates with the idea of the editor as one who seems to offer surgical help but employs his penetrative powers for harm. This rhetoric of the text-as-body/body-of-text reaches its height in the renowned preface of Samuel Johnson's edition, which makes constant recourse to the metaphor. In his lengthy panegyric on the work of the editors who have preceded him, the idea of ‘restoring’ the texts or lines to ‘integrity’ occurs twice, 24 and he praises certain of his predecessors as having caused what he considers the ‘least possible violation of the text’. 25 At other times, however, they are framed as having direly abused their powers of violation, of having made themselves butchers rather than surgeons. Alexander Pope, for example, had ‘rejected whatever he disliked, and thought more of amputation than of cure’ 26 (perhaps an inverted echo of Menenius' defence of Coriolanus, ‘O, he's a limb that has but a disease; | Mortal, to cut it off; to cure it, easy’, III. iv. 292–3). ‘Our author’, in Johnson's narrative, then at a certain point ‘fell into the hands of Sir Thomas Hanmer’ – for Johnson an irresistible bit of wordplay, but also evidence that the editor was more and more concretely being conceptualised as a surgeon meant to be looking after an unwell patient. Pointedly, Johnson writes of his own editorial authority as deriving from the same principles that Benjamin attributes to the surgeon. As Johnson writes that ‘something might be attempted by criticism, keeping the middle way between presumption and timidity’, so Benjamin observes that the surgeon ‘increases [his distance] only slightly by the caution with which his hand moves among the organs’. 27 To both, the potential damage of penetration may be mitigated only by the intense skill and care of the practitioner. What, then, are the stakes of this metaphorical nexus? It is not simply an accident of expression; as Lakoff and Johnson have established, such nexuses are always revelatory of deeper habits of perception and comprehension. 28 The figuration of the text as the body of Shakespeare, and indeed of the editor as surgeon, would seem to reveal an impulse to revivify the author and so resolve any doubts as to his intended meaning: for, as Foucault writes, ‘the author serves to neutralize the contradictions that may emerge in a series of texts’. 29 To cure the Shakespearean text, that is, to recover what de Grazia calls ‘the authentic text, the text closest to what Shakespeare put on paper’, 30 is part of a desire to bring back to living vigour the authorial/authoritative voice – this in contradiction of the now orthodox critical view that ‘there never has been, and never can be, an unedited Shakespearean text’, 31 and that, for example, the irreconcilable yet equally valid versions of King Lear alert us to the fact that Shakespeare himself was a ‘deliberate, consistent, and persistent reviser’. 32 Lewis Theobald's Shakespeare Restored (1726), an object of competition (and mockery) for Pope, openly declares its ‘Hopes of restoring to the Publick their greatest Poet in his Original Purity’. 33 The religious undertones of ‘Original Purity’ are not to be discarded as incidental. In this period the Shakespearean text was increasingly seen as requiring the same rigorous methods and attention as the Bible; and, whereas there had been an early modern tradition of conceptualising the body of Christ as a text to be read, the emergence of Shakespeare's works as a viable competitor for the Bible's role as a comprehensive and totalising source of human wisdom may perhaps be seen as having demanded the inversion of this trope into a conceptualisation of the ‘secular Bible’ as the body of Shakespeare. 34 Johnson's call for a careful, respectful, surgical approach to the text was met by Capell's edition in 1768 and Steevens's in 1773, but it is with Malone in 1790 that the development of ‘a methodologically credible and coherent historicizing, contextualizing and above all interpretative reconstruction of Shakespeare's work’ reaches its apex. 35 Nonetheless, the criticisms with which the thoroughness of Malone's edition was met evince a growing trend of seeing all editorial surgeries on the text, no matter how careful, as an affliction on the author's body. ‘Poor Shakespeare’, complained one reviewer in the British Critic , ‘is already almost killed with kindness, overwhelmed and oppressed with notes.’ 36 Malone's variorum edition, which attempted to cover all possible objections by collating the notes and debated readings amongst all prior critics, as well adding as his own rigorous textual criticism, had the effect of appearing to damage the text with the constant intrusion of the editorial implement. Surgical penetration, the response to Malone makes clear, is always already deleterious, always already butchery; and the cured text is always already ‘mangled and corrupted’. 37 Notably, T. J. Mathaias in his Pursuits of Literature imagines Shakespeare as the young, fit and healthy Actaeon, perfectly well and whole were it not for the threat of being bitten and devoured by critics, by ‘Black Letter Dogs’ such as Warburton, a ‘dog of most voracious appetite, who snaps at and devours everything digestible or indigestible’. 38 In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century this becomes a typical response to editions of Shakespeare. Just as it becomes clearer and clearer within editorial practice that establishing the ‘authentic’ text of Shakespeare requires extensive intrusions and critical labour, the wider culture begins to see these editions as an adulteration or obfuscation of the authentic text, of the pure Shakespearean corpus. As a further example, Bowdler's sanitised edition, though much derided in our sex-eager age, made the same claim as any other to authenticity: in capital letters he emphasises that ‘IT IS THE INSERTION, AND NOT THE OMISSION OF THE INDECENT SCENES, WHICH FORMS THE INTERRUPTION’. 39 Yet his detractors, on the other hand, complained that Bowdler was just the latest in a line of editors who had ‘subjected’ Shakespeare ‘to a series of more cruel mutilations and operations than any other author … Emendations, curtailments, and corrections (all for his own good,) [ sic ],’ have been multiplied to infinity, by the zeal and care of those who have been suffered to take him in hand. They have purged and castrated him, tattooed and be-plaistered him, and cauterized and phlebotomized him, with all the studied refinement, that the utmost skill of critical barbarity could suggest. 40 In trying to account for why exactly such a faultless mind would put such indecency to paper, Bowdler explains that it was ‘the wretched taste of the age’ that ‘compelled Shakespeare, after he had finished those beautiful plays, to write something of a ludicrous cast, which he inserted to excite a momentary laugh, though at the expense of a permanent injury to the dramas’. 41 As has been shown, Bowdler is far from the first to see the plays as injured; but he may well be the first on record to hold Shakespeare at least partly responsible for this injury. The consequence is a dissociation of the body-of-text from the body of the author. The text is now merely a product of Shakespeare the man, not a metonym for his literal and historical presence. In Bowdler's Letter primacy is given, not as in other editors' explanations, to the text as a body, but to the bodies – the female bodies especially – of those who consume the plays. Shakespeare's plays as Shakespeare left them in manuscript are not fit to be read aloud in ‘a company of virtuous women’ – for they have been ‘calculated to excite impressions offensive to the eye or ear of modesty’, and as such ‘no parent would chuse to submit them, in an uncorrected form, to the eye or ear of a daughter’. 42 Still, it is not the ‘real’ Shakespeare who is responsible for this patent indecency but rather his hand, his body, that was forced by the age he lived in to write scenes that did not reflect the genuine nobility of his spirit. Editorial intervention, Bowdler implies, is necessary in order to align the Shakespearean text with what, instead of the Shakespearean body, is now thought of as the true, the real, and the authentic Shakespeare: that is to say, the Shakespearean mind. Bowdler is merely one interpreter in a growing tradition after the publication of the variora of seeing the Shakespearean text not as a curable, revivifiable metonym for the deceased author, but as a body so irrevocably diseased that it must be bypassed in order to reach the authentic content of Shakespeare. This authentic content, rather than the speech content of the plays, is increasingly conceptualised as the visual content that was in Shakespeare's mind as he composed the lines. An excellent demonstration of this tendency may be found in Charles Knight's Pictorial Shakespeare (1839–42), an illustrated edition which Knight advertises as endeavouring to ‘[represent] the Realities upon which the imagination of the poet must have rested’. 43 ‘We must learn to regard him’, argues Knight in justification of his edition, ‘as he really was, as the most consummate of artists.’ 44 Knight is claiming, in other words, that his edition comes closest to reconstituting the authentic Shakespearean vision, the real narratives that lay behind the imperfect vehicle of speech. The title page of the Pictorial Shakespeare shows Shakespeare ‘seated between the Dramatic Muse and the Genius of Painting’ (Figure 1 ). The Dramatic Muse faces Shakespeare; she speaks to him, she gives him the words of his art; and she hands up the poetic laurels to him, the symbol of his enduring glory. But the Genius of Painting, standing on his right, presents Shakespeare to us with her hands, and his own hand rests on her shoulder for support. The implication is that the Genius of Painting, though wordless and although not strictly the reason for his recognition, forms the deeper font of inspiration for Shakespeare's poetic works. Figure 1. View largeDownload slide Shakespeare ‘seated between the Dramatic Muse and the Genius of Painting’ (anonymous engraving, c .1839). From The Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakspere , p. ii Figure 1. View largeDownload slide Shakespeare ‘seated between the Dramatic Muse and the Genius of Painting’ (anonymous engraving, c .1839). From The Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakspere , p. ii The relation of Knight's new concept of Shakespeare to the constellations of metaphors drawn from Benjamin is an important one. By providing a (misleadingly) clean text and claiming to bring back to life the images that once filled Shakespeare's mind, Knight's edition claims for itself the same virtues that are, in Macbeth , credited to Edward the Confessor. Whereas the previous editors had been a pack of Macbeths, ‘who should against his murderer shut the door | Not bear the knife [themselves]’ (I. vii. 15–16), Knight advertises his project as undertaking a kind of magical healing, a visible and visual cure, respectful of distance and seemingly hesitant of approach, able to restore the patient to health – that is, to his authentic state – without ever needing to penetrate the body. Stuart Sillars has remarked that we might read such eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Shakespeare painting and illustration as a sort of ‘visual criticism’. 45 This observation awakens an awareness of a remarkable similarity in the rhetoric that surrounds Shakespeare illustration and the psychological criticism of the nineteenth century – for these modes of engaging with Shakespeare's texts thought of themselves as engaging in very much the same project, that is, of mining these texts for their originating visual content. In the introduction to his Lectures on Shakespearean Tragedy , A. C. Bradley announces his intention as being to help his hearers or readers ‘learn to apprehend the action and some of the personages of each with a somewhat greater truth and intensity, so that they may assume in our imaginations a shape a little less unlike the shape they wore in the imagination of their creator’. 46 His ultimate stated aim is ‘to realize fully and exactly the inner movements which produced these words and no other, at each particular moment’. 47 Just as important, however, is Bradley's statement as to what he promises not to do. ‘I shall leave untouched’, he emphasises, ‘or merely glanced at, questions regarding his life and character, the development of his genius and art, the genuineness, sources, texts, inter-relations of his various works.’ 48 All the actual historical, biographical, and textual circumstances form a body of knowledge (or knowledge-body) that Bradley, as a magical healer-critic, does not need to penetrate in order to restore the authentic Shakespearean vision to health. Like Edward the Confessor, whose ability to heal comes at a touch and is innate and inexplicable in origin – ‘Such sanctity hath heaven given his hand’ – Bradley's criticism depends only upon ‘close familiarity with the plays’ and ‘native strength and justice of perception’. 49 And just as Edward the Confessor's natural powers allow him to cure those who are ‘the mere despair of surgery,’ whose ‘malady convinces | The great assay of art’, Bradley is claiming that this naturally given, non-penetrative approach to criticism is the same, that may ‘make many an unscholarly lover of Shakespeare a far better critic than many a Shakespeare scholar’. 50 The magician, the painter, and the psychological critic, we begin to sense, are able to keep their distance precisely because the ability to engage in such a fashion is innate. The surgeon, the cinematographer, and the textual editor depend not merely upon penetration into their respective tissues, but upon a vast number of preliminary penetrations into a vast number of other knowledge-bodies: biographical or textual context, the workings of the anatomy, the technology of the camera. Each of these penetrations serves merely to detract from the more holistic engagement that would result from an approach that does not depend on ‘abstain[ing] at the decisive moment from confronting the patient person to person’ – or, for that matter, person to text, or person to poet. Psychological criticism stems from a resistance to the manifold forms of dissection and reduction which constitute, and always have constituted, certain forms of critical practice. That is to say, the shift of focus from the body-text to the supposedly underlying mind-text in the history of engagement with Shakespeare arguably represents a desire to engage with a whole, irreducible object as it naturally appears to the subject – for unlike the parts of the body, the mind's phenomena resist being meaningfully dissected or reduced, made mechanical or even approached mechanically. To put it in the terms of modern theoretical discourse, the mind much more than the body is difficult to ‘thing’, 51 or to defamiliarise, 52 or generally to reframe out of its fully human context into a position of potential abuse. I conclude with a summary and with some further considerations on the current state of Shakespeare studies. An awareness of the penetrative powers attributed to speech in the pre-photographic era illuminates several aspects of its role in Shakespearean phenomenology. Not least among these is the ability of speech seemingly to erase the distance between the speaker and the hearer, leading to a state of attentive absorption which in the post-photographic era has been attributed to the immersive strategies of cinema exhibition. Within Shakespeare's texts (e.g. The Merchant of Venice , Romeo and Juliet , Troilus and Cressida ) this penetrative capability is also put into the service of a wide range of metaphors concerning wounding as well as surgical healing. To a character such as Coriolanus, the metaphorising of speech as a force that may enter and damage the body becomes expressive of an anxiety about the necessity of language in defining the individual. In Macbeth , by contrast, Edward the Confessor is noted for his ability to cure magically rather than surgically, that is, without inflicting any breaches on the body; this in turn becomes expressive of a moral schema that stands Macbeth's willingness to violate in stark opposition to the maintenance of visible distance inherent to Edward's mode of healing. The example contained in Macbeth foregrounds the ambivalent nature of surgical healing, and indeed of all violation. In crossing the boundary between the exterior and interior of the patient's body, the surgeon renders himself invisible, and in the act of helping also places himself in the perfect position to do harm. This ambivalence becomes key to the editorial reception of Shakespeare's texts, in which the Shakespearean corpus is increasingly conceptualised as the diseased body of the historical person William Shakespeare. Concurrently, the editor is seen as the surgical healer of the text, at least until such a time in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century when the excessive intrusions of editorial labour seem to mar rather than improve the authorial corpus. The nineteenth century sees several approaches to Shakespeare which aim to circumvent the diseased body-of-text, including Knight's Pictorial Shakespeare and Bradley's psychological criticism. These new approaches see the text merely as one form in which the true Shakespearean text expresses itself, and in a certain respect they advertise themselves as working towards the originating, visual content of his works. The rhetoric that surrounds this project bears important resemblances to both Benjamin's and Shakespeare's accounts of magical healing. Many of the current debates in Shakespeare studies seem to echo the antipathy between the self-declaredly non-intrusive methods of psychological criticism and the self-declaredly careful surgeries undertaken by the likes of Malone. This essay has its own, mostly unconscious, biases – which will, as always, take the form of practices – and so will its readers. But few would dispute that the surgeon has become the dominant figure not merely in Shakespeare studies but in literary studies more generally: for proof of this one need merely take note that ‘penetrating’ and ‘incisive’ remain some of the highest compliments a reviewer can bestow on an academic volume. This inspires an ambivalence and anxiety which are commensurate with the danger, and also with the rewards of this particular kind of surgery. For although the carefully dissective practices of modern criticism have deepened our readings substantially, one cannot help but wonder if the magic of the literary encounter will always depend upon a certain maintenance of distance. 1 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version’, in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media , ed. Michael W. Jennings et al., trans. Edmund Jephcot et al. (Cambridge, Mass. 2008) pp. 19–55: 35. 2 Ibid., pp. 20–1. 3 Bruce Smith , The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago 1999) p. 8. 4 Wes Folkerth, The Sound of Shakespeare (New York 2002) p. 75. 5 Smith, Acoustic World , p. 10. 6 Holly Dugan, ‘Shakespeare and the Senses’, Literature Compass , 6 (2009) pp. 726–40: 731. 7 Patrick Phillips, ‘Spectator, Audience and Response’, in Jill Nelmes (ed.), Introduction to Film Studies , 5th edn. (London 2012) pp. 113–41: 116. 8 William James, ‘Attention’, in The Principles of Psychology , 2 vols. (1890; New York 1996) i. 402–58: 402. 9 James, Principles of Psychology , p. 450. 10 See T. G. Bishop, Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder (Cambridge 1996). 11 James, Principles of Psychology , p. 404. 12 Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (eds.), A Latin Dictionary (Oxford 1879; repr. 1962). 13 Tanya Pollard, ‘Vulnerable Ears: Hamlet and Poisonous Theatre’, in Drugs and Theatre in Early Modern England (Oxford 2005) pp. 123–43: 123. 14 For the feminisation of wounding, see Coppelia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds and Women (Abingdon 1997) pp. 17–18. 15 Stephen Handel, Listening: An Introduction to the Perception of Auditory Events (Cambridge, Mass. 1989) p. vi. 16 E. Pearlman, ‘ Macbeth on Film: Politics’, Shakespeare Survey , 39 (1986) pp. 67–74: 70. 17 Cited in Diane Kirkpatrick, ‘Religious Photography in the Victorian Age’, in Michael Patrick O'Connor and David Noel Freedman (eds.), Backgrounds for the Bible (Winona Lake 1987) pp. 321–36: 321. 18 Lewis and Short, Latin Dictionary. 19 John Heminge and Henry Condell, ‘To the great Variety of Readers’, The First Folio of Shakespeare , prepared by Charlton Hinman (New York 1968) p. 7. 20 Nicholas Rowe, The Works of Mr. William Shakespear , 6 vols. (London 1709) vol. i, sig. A2 t ; emphasis added. 21 Alexander Pope, ‘Preface to Shakespeare’, ed. Jack Lynch, para. 34 of 35, https://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/pope-shakespeare.html (accessed 8 Jan. 2015). 22 Pope, ‘Preface’, paras. 21, 23. 23 Edward Tripp, ‘Procrustes’, in The Meridian Handbook of Classical Mythology (New York 1970) p. 498. 24 The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson , ed. Arthur Sherbo, 14 vols. (New Haven 1968) vii. 59–114: 94, 107. 25 Ibid., p. 97. 26 Ibid., p. 94. 27 Johnson, ‘Preface’, p. 106. 28 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago 1980). 29 Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, in Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984 , ed. Paul Rainbow, trans. Robert Hurley et al., 3 vols. (London 2000–2) vol. ii, ed. James D. Faubion, p. 215. 30 Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford 1990) p. 5. 31 Jonathan Goldberg, ‘Textual Properties’, Shakespeare Quarterly , 37 (1986) pp. 213–17: 214. 32 Grace Ioppolo, Revising Shakespeare (Cambridge, Mass. 1991) p. 5. 33 Lewis Theobald, Shakespeare Restored (1726) (New York 1974) p. 75. 34 For an account of the early modern phenomenon, see Femke Molekamp, ‘Regarding the Passion: Aemilia Lanyer, Constance Aston Fowler, and Elizabeth Delaval’, in Women and The Bible in Early Modern England: Religious Reading and Writing (Oxford 2013) pp. 185–217. 35 Marcus Walsh, ‘Edmond Malone’, in Claude Rawson (ed.), Great Shakespeareans , 16 vols. (London 2010) i. 160–99: 163. 36 ‘The Plays of Lear and Cymbeline, by William Shakespeare’, The British Critic , 6 (1795) pp. 299–301: 300. 37 Benjamin Heath, A Revisal of Shakespear's Text (London 1765) p. vi. 38 T. J. Mathaias, The Pursuits of Literature (London 1798) pp. 135, 95. 39 Thomas Bowdler, A Letter to the Editor of the British Critic, Occasioned by the Censure Pronounced in that Work on ‘Johnson, Pope, Bowdler, Warburton, Theobald, Steevens, Reed, Malone, et hoc genus omne, all that herd of these and Meibomiuses of the British School’ (London 1823) p. 22. 40 T. Caldecott, ‘Hamlet, and As You Like It; a Specimen of a New Edition of Shakespeare’, The British Critic , 17 (1822) pp. 372–80: 372. 41 Bowdler, Letter , p. 23. 42 Ibid., pp. 13, 17, 15. 43 The Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakspere, ed. Charles Knight, 8 vols. (London 1839–42) ii. 67. 44 Ibid., i. 13. 45 Stuart Sillars, Illustrated Shakespeare, 1709–1875 (Cambridge 2008) p. 10. 46 A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth , 2nd edn. (London 1932) p. 1. 47 Ibid., p. 2. 48 Ibid., p. 1. 49 Ibid., p. 2. 50 Ibid. 51 Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry , 28 (2001) pp. 1–22. 52 Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Device’, in Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Champaign, Ill. 1990) pp. 1–14. © The Author, 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Cambridge Quarterly. All rights reserved. For permissions please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - Surgeon and Magician: Speech, Sight, and the Shakespearean Corpus
JF - The Cambridge Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/camqtly/bfv022
DA - 2015-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/surgeon-and-magician-speech-sight-and-the-shakespearean-corpus-3BBbTb0v8S
SP - 354
EP - 372
VL - 44
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
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