Shakespeare and the Demands of Kingship

Idling through Harold Goddard's admirable essays on Shakespeare, I happened on one I don't think I had read before: his discussion of King John, Grant that KJ might be a lesser Shakespearean effort; still, even the least of Shakespeare is better than the best of almost anybody else. And Goddard, as always, has something interesting to contribute.  The play, Goddard asserts, "is built around a theme that Shakespeare never thereafter lost sight of.  The theme is close to the heart of nearly all the other History Plays, both English and Roman; it is essential to Hamlet; it culminates in King Lear; it echoes through  The Tempest."

What  theme?  For the moment, Goddard ducks the issue: "this is not the place to back up these assertions in detail."  But I think he get his point. The theme, I suspect he might say, is the nature of kingship, and in particular the implications of placing the crown into the hands of a man who is Not Up to the Job.  John himself, of course--"like a bewildered  child in the night," as Goddard says. But also Henry VI, central to (if hardly the protagonist of) the three plays that may mark the beginning of Shakespeare's career.  And also a more interesting man in a better play: Richard II, per Goddard, "the most subtle psychological analysis that Shakespeare had made up to this point."  The remarkable fact is that Richard, unlike Henry or John, is not a cipher as a human being.  Richard is a poet, a man of arresting imagination, but  he never learns how to escape his own imagination to grasp the realities of power.

It's almost a commonplace to see Richard as a prefiguring of Hamlet, and I think Goddard insight offers the key:   Gielgud called Hamlet "a great ruh-nay-sance prince," and he is all of that.  But he shies away from kingship and brings unspeakable misfortune down on the heads of himself and so many others.

Here I want to press beyond Goddard. In some superb lectures, Peter Saccio argues that the Henry IV plays are studies in the nature of kingship.  Young  Prince Hal finds himself presented with various models of kingship: young Harry Percy, impulsive and a man of action but unable to control his own passions; Falstaff, the the great cosmic sink of pleasure and irresponsibility--and Hal's own father, Henry IV, effective enough to grasp a crown but still querulous and insecure.  Hal rejects them all;  indeed it is not much of a stretch to say that both Harry and Falstaff die at Hal's hand.  He fashions a model of kingship all his own--perhaps the only fully convincing kingship in all of Shakespeare.

We can go further: in Antony and Cleopatra, we see Antony bathed in lust and luxury; we may forget that he came within a hair's breadth of the throne; we may forget it, but the man who bested him did not.  It is Octavian, soon to be unchallenged emperor in his own right, who remembers Antony in his moment of steadfastness and resilience:

Thou didst drink
The stale of horses and the gilded puddle
Which beasts would cough at. ...
Yea, like the stag, when snow the pasture sheets,
The barks of trees thou browsèd.

And everybody who did Shakespeare in high school will remember that Antony could beguile a crowd in a style of which his peer Brutus was utterly incapable.

And I think Goddard is right to include Lear: vulnerable, petulant, bewildered Lear who doesn't seem to understand the relationship between the realities of power and the trappings. Which may be enough to bring us back to Richard II and, also to his gardener, the man charged with keeping order in his kingly estate:

O, what pity is it,
That he who had not so trimm'd and dress'd his land
As we this garden!   ...
Had he done so, himself  had borne the crown,
Which waste of idle hours hath quite thrown down.

[Almost alone among common folk kn Shakespeare, this yokel speaks in blank verse.]  Shakespeare cares about kingship, and the responsibilities of rule, and the terrible consequences of men who are not up to to the job.  Comparisons with current events are left as an exercise to the student.

Goddard's Shakespeare

I think I'm in love.  I've long been a fan of "introductions to Shakespeare"--particularly the really great ones like Mark Van Doren and W. H. Auden. I could add Russell Fraser's work, a set of introductions in the form of a biography.   Tony Tanner, which I just discovered lately, is good, albeit not in the same class.  There are others that have their virtues. But somehow I missed until now what may be the most remarkable of all: The Meaning of Shakespeare, by Harold C. Goddard (link, link) once an English professor at Swarthmore.  The book--two volumes--is a kind of summum bonum, the best of his life-work, published only posthumously (and with a title the author did not choose) by the University of Chicago Press.

It comes well blurbed.  Here is Harold Bloom, perhaps the best known introducer of Shakespeare currently working: "This superb commentary upon all of Shakespeare's plays has been an inspiration for me for half a century, and I never tire of recommending it passionately to my own students." Grant that Bloom is by nature a great enthuser; still there is nothing in my experience so far (I've had a copy in hand only a few days) to suggest that he overdoes it. Everything about the book--everything I've read so far--suggests somebody who offers a lifetime of sympathetic engagement with the text.

Goddard perhaps counts as Fraser in mirror: Fraser writes introductions via a life. Goddard sees the life in the plays. This isn't to accuse either of vulgar point-to-point associations: "Shakespeare writes about Italians; therefore, Shakespeare must have been Italian." No" we are working here with the insight of Keats (Goddard at v. 1, p. 15)" "Shakespeare led a life of allegory: his works are the comments on it." Goddard expands upon the point:

 That sentence of Keats's is by general consent one of the profoundest ever uttered about Shakespeare. But there is no such general consent as to what it means. What did Keats have in mind? Something very close, I imagine, to what Sir Thomas Browne did when he exclaimed: "Now for my life, it is a miracle of thirty years, which to relate were not a History, but a piece of Poetry, and would sound to common ears like a Fable." If there is anything in this conjecture, Keats's sentence implies two things: first, that Shakespeare's life had the organic character of a work of art; and, second, that his works are less ends in themselves than a by-product of his living and hence a kind of unconscious record of his life. If so, they should be then not separately but as parts of a whole.

In the same vein, commenting on Henry IV:

There is something like critical agreement that Shakespeare's three greatest achievements in character portrayal are Falstaff, Hamlet, and Cleopatra, to whom Iago is sometimes added as a diabolical fourth. Now Falstaff, Hamlet, and Cleopatra, different as they re in a hundred ways, have this in common: they are all endowed with imagination, and especially with dramatic and histrionic power, to something like the highest degree. Each is a genius of play. (Even Iago is in his perverted way.) In a word, they all are in this respect like their creator, a kind of proof that even Shakespeare could draw people better who resembled himself than he could others. Who would not like to have had Shakespeare as a teacher?

Vol. I, 210.  Who indeed. Or, failing that, Harold C. Goddard.

Goddard on Tempest, Etc.

I've now acquired the second of the two volumes of Harold C. Goddard's commentary on Shakespeare (cf. link).  I have made it my bedtime reading and in this role, I can testify that it is at least as splendid as Goodnight Moon.  This second volume--I assume they were composed together as a set--has the same critical acuity, the same easy mastery, the same capacity to surprise, even on familiar territory, that mark this again as a classic in Shakespeare studies.

One of the many virtues of this set is Goddard's capacity not merely to understand individual plays, but to draw comparisons and contrasts between various points in Shakespeare's career.  He remarks, for example, that "in no other play of Shakespeare's are there so many premonitions of later ones as in The Two Gentlemen of Verona."  I guess I had kind of known that although I certainly couldn't have developed the point as insightfully as Goddard does.

But I don't think I had grasped how, if Two Gents looks forward in Shakespeare's career, then Twelfth Night looks back.  "It is as if  Shakespeare," Goddard observes, "for his last unadulterated comedy, summoned he ghosts of a dozen characters and situations with which he had triumphed in the past and bade them weave themselves into a fresh pattern."   And I certainly hadn't seen that Cymbeline, all the way over at the far end of Shakespeare's working life, "is Shakespeare's most recapitulatory play.  It does for a large number of his works what Twelfth Night does for the earlier Comedies: echoes them while remaining completely sui generis. It exceeds even Troilus and Cressida in defying classification ..."  Here is a fuller, and yet more specific, exposition of the same technique:

The opening scene of The Tempest—the shipwreck scene—is like an overture throughout which we catch echoes, like distant thunder, of the themes that dominated the historical and tragic music dramas of Shakespeare's earlier periods. It is an extraordinary epitome. “What cares these roarers for the name of king?” Into that question—or exclamation, if you will—the disdainful Boatswain condenses not only King Lear but all that Shakespeare ever said on the subject of worldly place and power. Here are a group of “great ones”—from king down—up against it. “The king and prince at prayers!” The mingled surprise humor, and consternation in the words of old Gonzalo say it all. When kings and princes re reduced to prayer, then in deed is the day of doom near. The roaring Boatswain—a kind of emancipated and active twin to Barnardine in Measure for Measure— is the one man who shines in this crisis, his combined cheerfulness, energy, resourcefulness and contempt being just the brew needed in the situation. Even the master of the boat relies on him to carry ship, mariners, passengers, and master himself through on his lone shoulders. Emergencies crown their own kings. As the Bastard in needed no title in King John, so this man can stand on his own feet. Nature hands him the command and everybody of any account concurs.

Except that Goddard, having situated the play (and not incidentally clarified our understanding of other plays) shifts almost effortlessly into a specific appreciation of The Tempest  itself; in particular an aspect that a thousand readers might pass by unnoticed:

“Keep your cabins; you do assist the storm,” he orders his royal passengers. There is a symbolic diagnosis of war in eight words, with a prescription for peace thrown in. Let “great ones” go below and leave the decks to the boatswains and their mariners. It is still sound advice. Even the good Gonzalo, with his philosophy, strikes us as a bit superfluous at the moment. “You are a counsellor,” says the Boatswain; “if you can command these elements to silence, and work the peace of the present, we will not hand a rope more; use your authority....Cheerly, good hearts! Out of our way, I say.” Again Shakespeare amends Plato: not when philosophers are kings, but when boatswains are. William James declared that the best thing education can impart is the power to know a good man when you see him. In this case these scions of royalty are not educated, for all they can call the genius of the storm is bawling, blasphemous, incharitable dog, whoreson, insolent noisemaker, and cur.

And finally: "What fools! What a man! What a scene!"  Indeed.  And what a book.

Ms.K Endorses Goddard on Shakespeare

You remember H. C. Goddard?  I wrote an appreciative squib about his Shakespeare commentaries a year ago September.  Comes now one Sue K (unknown to me) with a far more interesting bit of background about Goddard and his work.  It will profit you to go read it even if it is a bit belated.

Of course Ms. K's generally positive view though I will add an afterthought, meant to reflect ill on neither Goddard nor me.  Specifically: although I've had the book(s) for something like 16 months so far, I haven't finished it yet.  I don't think this is nearly as shameful as it may sound.  The point is that this is a book to be imbibed slowly and savored, not scarfed down with a gulp.  It's a bedside book: I read a few pages every few days.  I think about them for a few days and then sometimes, I read the same pages again.  I'm jumping around from play to play almost at random though I guess I have done about half the book so far.  I'm delighted that I have so much to look forward to and I will only be sorry when it ends (the last book that made me feel this way was War and Peace).

Hamlet as a Summing-Up

A few days ago I quoted Harold C. Goddard explaining how Hamlet precipitates out among so many characters in Troilus and Cressida.  But Hamlet is not just a beginning.  Others have pointed out that Shakespeare wrote the play at just about the midpoint of his career, and can be seen as using the character as on occasion to tell us everything he had learned about the theatre.  Here Goddard itemizes how Hamlet encapsulates what has gone before:

He has the passion of Romeo ("Romeo is Hamlet in love," says Hazlitt), the dash and audacity of Hotspur, the tenderness and genius for friendship of Antonio, the wit, wisdom, resourcefulness, and histrionic gift of Falstaff, the bravery of Faulconbridge, the boyish charm of the earlier Hal at his best, the poetic fancy of Richard II, the analogic power and meditative melancholy of Jaques, the idealism of Brutus, the simplicity and human sympathy of Henry VI, and, after the assumption of his antic disposition, the wiliness and talent for disguise of Henry IV and the cynicism and irony of Richard III--not to mention gifts and graces that stem more from certain of Shakespeare's heroines than from his heroes--for, like Rosalind, the inimitable boy-girl, Hamlet is an early draft of a new creature on the Platonic order. ... Hamlet has been pronounced both a hero and a dreamer, hard and soft, cruel and gentle, brutal and angelic, like a lion and like a dove.  One by one, these judgments are all wrong.  Together they are all right--

These contraries such unity do hold ...

So Goddard  in The Meaning of Shakespeare vol. 1, 332 (1951).  I  may seem that I'm at risk of quoting the whole book.  Not really.  I could be tempted but the fact is that anything I leave behind is as rich as what I quote.

The Imagined Life

I wrote the other day about the difference between Shakespeare as presented and Shakespeare as imagined.  Here's a particularly forceful expression of the point:

How many a woman who sees or reads As You Like It either believes in secret that she does resemble Rosalind or wishes that she did! And how many a man projects on its heroine the image of the woman he loves best, or, if not, the memory of some lost first love who still embodies the purest instincts of his youth, and hears her voice instead of the words on the printed page! Which is why the imaginative man will always prefer to read the play rather than to have some obliterating actress come between the text and his heart. ... In her own way, and on a lower level, Rosalind contributes her mite to our understanding of why Dante chose the Rose as a symbol of the ultimate paradise.

--Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare I 292-3 (1951)

Goddard may be offering nothing more than a special case of a more general point.  Consider: 

Chaque homme porte en lui un monde composé de tout ce qu’il a vu et aimé, et où il rentre sans cesse, alors même qu’il parcourt et semble habiter un monde étranger.

Every man carries within him a world which is composed of all that he has seen and loved, and to which he constantly returns,even when he is travelling through, and seems to be living in, some different world.

From Chateaubriand, Voyages en Italie, entry dated December 11th. It's from his entry for his outing to Tivoli outside Rome.  In the 21st century, Tivoli is still a tourist spot, though you have to change busses to get there so you wind up with mostly Italians. I ran across the observation in the first chapter of Claude Lévi-Strauss' Tristes Tropiques.  I see in my battered paperback that I underlined it (I think in 1979).  I tend to think Chateaubriand is right, although I suspect I have believed it moreso since I read it than I did before.

Lévi-Strauss quotes Chateaubriand in a long meditation,  puzzling over the construction of his own vision of the world. Here's a taste:

Journeys, those magic caskets full of dreamlike promises, will never again yield up their treasures untarnished. A proliferating and overexcited civilization has broken the silence of the seas once and for all. The perfumes of the tropics and the pristine freshness of human beings have been corrupted by a busyness with dubious implications, which mortifies our desires and dooms us to acquire only contaminated memories.

As I write, I'm remembering what might be the flip side:  a passage from (Walker Percy?) where he says we can never see the Grand Canyon neat because on our first trip we will have already seen a post card of the Grand Canyon and will be measuring our reality against the post card.  And there's this:

I once knew a man from Khartoum
Who kept a live sheep in his room.

"It reminds me," he said,
"Of a lover long dead,

But I never can quite recall whom."

Saddest poem in the English language. 

Shakespeare on Death and Transfiguration

A Serious Person would write about Ebola or the Yazidis or the soon-to-be-former Colorado River.  For the moment, I'll stick to Shakespeare, as seen by one of my favorite commentators:

Prospero, Duke of Milan [in The Tempest], deprived of his dukedom and riled on an island, is restored t the end to his former place, a man so altered by his experience that henceforth, he declares, every third thought shall be his grave. Obviously, this is the pattern of As You Like It with the Forest of Arden in place of the Enchanted Isle and with the difference that the Senior Duke is in no need of regeneration. But, less obviously, this theme of the King, Prince, Duke, or other person of high estate losing his place or his inheritance only to recover it or its spiritual equivalent, after exile or suffering, in a sense in which he never possessed it before, is repeated by Shakespeare over and over. All stemming in a way from that early and undervalued study of King Henry VI, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, and parts o f Pericles, Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale are built on that situation.They all, in  one way or another, contrast with and supplement Hamlet, whose hero propounds the same problem, wavers on the edge of a fresh solution, only to offer in the end the old erroneous answer. They all, in virus keys, reiterate the theme of Timon: "Nothing brings me all things."

But it is not just those who have lost worldly kingdoms in a literal sense who come to realize this truth. Shakespeare uses the same idea metaphorically. Over and over in his plays when the object valued or the person loved is taken away, an imaginative object or person, more than compensating for the loss, appears in its place.

So Harold C. Goddard in The Meaning of Shakespeare, v. 2, 288 (1951).I'm not quite sold on this yet but I do think it invites some thought.  One particular, however, strikes me as momentous.  Goddard is reminding us of how rewarding it can be to read Hamlet not only on its own terms (where it is rewarding enough) but also in the context of Shakespeare's entire career.  Hamlet appears at just about the mid-point of Shakespeare's career.  Others have noted how you can read it as summing up everything (i.e., a lot) that Shakespeare has learned up to that time, but also posing questions that he will spend the rest of his career trying to answer.

Seeking Hamlet in Another Place

They say that the actor who plays Hamlet gets to go into heaven by a private door.  Harold C. Goddard offers a hint as to why as he goes to seek Hamlet in what was perhaps the next (or, less likely the next previous) play that Shakespeare wrote:

...Troilus and Cressida was evidently a part of the same creative wave that produced Hamlet. … [T]he plays are in a sense intellectual twins, or, better, rhe lessser a sort of intellectual satellite of the greater. The leading characters of Troilus can be conceived of with equal ease as the elements or fragments of the Prince of Denmark (Even an element or a fragment of Hamlet surpasses an ordinary man.). Hector, for instance, is Hamlet's modety and nobility ombined with his inability to live up to his convidtions; Troilus is his alternating feminine fineness and savage masculine fury; Achilles his brooding and inaction transformed in the end to their opposite; Ulysses is his intellect and craft; Therites hiscontempt and incredible coarseness; Pandarus his wit and scorn of innocence. All this cannot be coincidence. 

--Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, vol. 2, 4 (1951)

Shakespeare's Gentlemen

The unfailingly interesting Harold C. Goddard offers a typically provocative insight  inspired by what may be Shakespeare's least interesting play:

From The Two Gentlemen of Verona to The Tempest, without any deviation, he drew one portrait after another of the fashionable gentleman, either Italian or after the Italian model, and there is no possible mistaking what he thought of them, no matter how good their tailors or how "spacious" they themselves "in the possession of dirt" (as Hamlet remarked of Osric's real estate).  Boyer, Don Armando, Gratiano, Tybalt, the Claudio of Much Ado, Bertram, Parrolles, Si Andrew Aguecheek, the "popinjay" whom Hotspur scorned, Roderigo, Iachomo; these are just a few of the more striking examples, to whom should be added in spit of the anachronisms, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Osric, Paris (in Troilus and Cressida) and even, in some respects, men like Bassanio and Mercutio, not to mention many of the anonymous "gentlemen" and "lords" scattered throughout the plays.  Let anyone who doubts trace the word "gentleman" with the help of a concordance in the texts of Shakespeare's works as a whole. He will be surprised, I think, to find how often the situation or context shows it to be used with ironical intent.' 

There is a story that Abraham Lincoln, on being told that in England no gentleman ever blacks his own boots, asked in his quiet manner, "Whose boots does he black?"  If I am not mistaken, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, even more quietly, makes the same point.

So Goddard in The Meaning of Shakespeare, vol. 1, 47 (1951).  Yes.  Well.  But where exactly does that leave the most remarkable of young gentlemen, Hamlet himself, not to say Hamlet's staunch companion, Horatio?  One might object that that they are not "after the Italian model," but this is to confuse effect with cause.  The problem is not that Italians are popinjays; it is that popinjays adopt the Italian manner. And this is precisely what Hamlet and Horatio did not do. What saved them, I wonder, from so dismal a fate?

Afterthought:  And cf.:

    And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
    Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
    And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
    That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

So Henry V on the eve of Agincourt, in the play of his name, Act IV, Scene 3.   But then, where else would you expect to find a "gentleman?" when there is work to be done?