Discussion of political attitudes in Eliz/Jacobean writers does present
difficulties in that the public vocabulary of political discourse was not,
ahem, quite as wide as it is now, but that does not mean one should assume
opinion was as limited as what was allowed to be said, the breakdown of
social control that happened in the Civil War amply revealed the range of
what people thought, viz. the Putney Debates, the Levellers, the Diggers
etc. In a brief period of dereliction of censorship many of the radical
political views that we are familiar with were prefigured.

Although it is common to characterise Shakespeare as something of a mystery
the biographical detail does have an unambiguous message, whatever else he
was, he was a businessman. Much more detail is known, in factual terms,
about WS's life than many of his contemporaries, for instance there is no
definite evidence about the year of Ben Jonson's birth, what are missing are
any kind of personal statements, biography throws up puzzle after puzzle
otherwise, for instance he was related to some of the Gunpowder Plotters,
was probably the son of a recusant, yet lodged with Huguenots while owning a
priest's bolt-hole in Blackfriars (I think it was) and had his (probably)
favourite daughter marry Stratford's leading Puritan. This from a poet who
was so sensitive about daughters and whose theatre was hated by the
Puritans.

So there is a mystery, but not about his commercial leanings. Perhaps the
'mystery' is no more than he was inconsistent, careless in his writing and
at the same time incredibly gifted. I don't know, as I said at the start,
I'm agnostic on WS. I love the language of the plays, I have an almost
lifelong ambivalence towards the social attitudes they project, and it is an
intimate matter, in literary terms, to me, I'm from Warwickshire myself, I
was born about 12 or so miles from Stratford, so, although it might sound
odd, I'm talking about my 'local' poet on this.


Best

Dave





David Bircumshaw

Leicester, England

Home Page

A Chide's Alphabet

Painting Without Numbers

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/index.htm
----- Original Message -----
From: "seiferle" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, January 24, 2003 7:02 PM
Subject: Re: Shakespeare, the radical?


Doesn't this discussion about Shakespeare turn upon the question being
asked? I don't think Shakespeare or any writer of his time could have been
"radical" or a "radical;" the term itself is so dependent upon political and
social terms that have come into existence only since. It's perhaps not
quite as strange as asking "Homer: a communist?" but almost. But how did
Shakespeare become God, even the god, of literature?  this might seem
heretical, but he's just one author among many to me-- better than many
others, but I would not want to give up many of those many others.  He is
not God, in whom having one has All.

The question is much more than a rhetorical trap, since the affirmative
reply is made implicitly implausible or ridiculous by the framing of the
question itself. The original discussion whether Shakespeare was subversive
or conservative seemed a more plausible question to ask of his work, since
it suggests a gradation of covert and overt political thought and response
that could vary according to the particular work being read. In comparison,
our current definition of "political" poetry is much narrower and more
explicit. For instance, Emily Dickinson has been faulted for her failure to
acknowledge the Civil War which was coterminus with her most productive
poetic years, and it is true that she never explicitly addresses it. But
what is to make of such lines,
"to comprehend a nectar/requires sorest need/not one of all the purple
host/who took the flag today/can tell the definition of victory/so clear as
he defeated dying/on whose forbidden ear/ the distant strains of triumph
break agonized and clear?"  (apologies for the missing punctuation and
dashes, I'm just typing from memory) It seems to me that our current
definition of "political" poetry requires that the poem be explicitly in
response to a political reality or perspective, that the poem in effect
takes us to the political as if it were a destination. Whereas, the best
writing it seems to me are those where the destination is the realm of being
human, which is always deeply subversive. I doubt if whoever 'sang' the
Iliad was singing for anyone other than a King  but it is deeply subversive
ending as it does with a funeral of the 'enemy's' hero. Though of course in
the overlays of criticism, the consideration of the great author, etc., we
may forget this. I was reminded whe!
n I was teaching a class of freshman the Iliad, and, at the end, of the
book, they were so dismayed, they wondered where was the rest of the story?
what happened to Troy? what about Achilles?  It left them with the taste of
ashes and of grief. But then they were 'unsophisticated' readers, unaware of
the glories of the author or the age or the work of literature. You would
have thought they had gone to a funeral. And it seems to me that it is, in
this sense, that Shakespeare is similarly subversive, not because of some
explicit equivalence of political event and response.  Of course, I think in
general,  that the modern age has been flawed by an emphasis upon
compartmentalization. What once were broad bands of experience, flow charts,
spectrums, a kind of flow between polarities, have been defined into narrow
and often warring terms. "Political" poetry which cannot be "personal"
poetry or, which conversely, _must be_ "personal" poetry, etc.

Best,

Rebecca

Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com