Essay 3—
"Theory"

When René Wellek and Austin Warren published Theory of Literature in 1942, they included chapters on virtually every topic in literary study that they thought could be theoretically—meaning generally, or philosophically—treated. Throughout most of the 1980s, "theory" in North American literary studies had come to have a very limited and specific meaning. It had come to mean primarily literary criticism showing the influence of the Yale version of deconstruction.^[1] I will henceforth refer to this version of literary theory, the Yale version of deconstruction, as Theory, to indicate the special status that it then had. The two volumes on Shakespeare that I will consider were published at the height (or perhaps I should say crest) of the Theory boom. One, Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, is a large collection of essays by various hands, mostly American or American-affiliated academics; the other, William Shakespeare by Terry Eagleton, a tiny monograph by an engagé British academic.^[2] Taken together, these volumes complement each other interestingly and provide an occasion to think through the value of Theory and of some other theories for practical and historical literary studies.

[1] See the helpful collection edited by Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin, The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).

[2] Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds., Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York and London: Methuen, 1985); Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (New York and Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).

I will begin by analyzing two explicitly deconstructive essays in the Parker-Hartman volume. I will argue that these essays are led into distortion and bad faith by their problems in dealing with the literal and the social. The social and the political turn out to bulk unexpectedly large in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory . A number of other essays in the volume—some, but not all, connected to Theory—explicitly wish to focus on political, social, or economic matters yet have great difficulty in keeping (or in intelligibly keeping) the political, social, or economic focus they purportedly wish to have. I will argue this in relation to essays by Jonathan Goldberg, Thomas Greene, Stanley Cavell, and Terence Hawkes. The final section of the Parker-Hartman volume considers essays that explicitly reject Theory (though not necessarily other theories) in the name of social and political realities, essays by Elaine Show-alter, Stephen Greenblatt, and Robert Weimann. I then turn to an essay in the volume (by Joel Fineman) that I see as suggesting a way of making Theory productive by reducing its generality and abstractness and making it historically specific.^[3] The discussion of Fineman's essay leads directly into consideration of Terry Eagleton's book. I will argue that Eagleton has two distinct critical modes and that the more successful of these also suggests a way in which Theory can be made critically productive through being focused on social and political issues rather than on Language in general.

I

The piece that opens the Parker-Hartman volume announces its commitment to "Theory" in its subtitle, "The Deconstruction of Presence in The Winter's Tale ," and the methods and assumption of this essay by Howard Felperin can be taken as paradigmatic of applied Theory. Felperin begins with a good question about the initial action of the play: "Why do we take it for granted" that Hermione has not had an affair with Polixenes, that Leontes is deluded about this? Instead, however, of exploring the ways in which Shakespeare makes us

[3] Those familiar with the Parker-Hartman volume will note (and those unfamiliar with the volume should be alerted) that this chapter by no means constitutes an inclusive review of the volume. For those seeking such a review, see my "Shakespeare and the Question of Theory," Modern Philology 86 (Summer 1988): 56–76.

feel certain of Hermione's innocence and of the pathological nature of Leontes' jealousy, Felperin insists (unsurprisingly) that there is a major epistemological problem here: "neither Leontes nor we can know for sure, short of divine revelation." This is a trick sentence. We have met "for sure" before.^[4] It works to make us hesitate, upping the epistemological ante to the level of the "hyperbolic" and "ridiculous" doubt that Descartes both mocked and made familiar (the adjectives for this doubt are Descartes's own).^[5] The mention of divine revelation sets up the rest of Felperin's essay. Felperin makes it sound as if the word of the oracle is our only reason for not sharing Leontes' doubts. The straw man is now fully in place. Having rigged the epistemological situation in this way, Felperin's task is clear: to attack the oracle, and thereby undermine our (unearned) certainty.

Felperin's strategy, a paradigmatic deconstructive one, fails in two ways. First, the basic premise, that our assurance rests only on the oracle, is false; second, the attack on the oracle, made falsely crucial, fails in itself. To take the latter point first, Felperin is constantly in a position of discounting facts within the play—always, I would argue, a sign of bad criticism. Critical sentences beginning with "although," like those discounting "surface rhetoric," are often a bad sign, a syntactical badge of special pleading.^[6] With regard to Leontes' refusal to believe the oracle, Felperin writes, "Although this is the only point in the play where such a conventional mistrust [of oracles] is ever hinted at, it would seem that such mistrust is well grounded." Why "it would seem" this way has nothing to do with The Winter's Tale . Again we get the technique of importation. We get something like "tradition" as Tuve deploys it: there are riddling oracles elsewhere in Shakespeare; there is a long classical and Renaissance tradition (documented in a footnote) of distrusting oracles. This is all well and good, but no contextual reason is offered for distrusting what Felperin to his credit recognizes as the distressingly "plain spoken and un-Delphic" oracle in the play. We are close here to the kind of historical criticism that tells us what, given the prevailing beliefs, etc.,

[4] See Essay 2, p. 40 above.

[5] See the end of the Sixth Meditation in The Philosophical Works of Descartes , trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931), 1:198–99. For persuasive accounts of Descartes's project in the Meditations , see Harry G. Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen: The Defense of Reason in Descartes's "Meditations" (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970); E. M. Curley, Descartes against the Skeptics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); and the essay by Foucault cited in note 23 of Essay 2 above.

[6] On "surface rhetoric," see Essay 2, p. 34 above.

a text must be saying. Felperin's argument for the rightness of Leontes' distrust draws no evidence from the play; it must discount not only the words of the oracle ("surface rhetoric" again) but also the whole scene in which we hear, as Felperin puts it, Cleomenes' "reported awe" at the oracle. Yet the point of the scene between Cleomenes and Dion seems to be precisely to defuse skepticism about the oracle. The language is as replete with religious and mystical solemnity as Shakespeare can make it. Felperin finds here what he rather coyly says "might be termed the problem of linguistic indeterminacy." He finds this problem here because he must find it.

Felperin argues that Leontes' interpretation of Hermione's behavior is not logically impossible. Hermione's behavior could mean what Leontes takes it to mean; the words that Leontes puns or seizes on could have the meanings Leontes finds in them. But the point of the play is not that to interpret the way Leontes does is logically impossible but that it is crazy. In order to use Leontes as a spokesperson for the essential difficulties of interpretation and for "the defects of language" in general, Felperin must discount the fact that the play presents Leontes as, at least temporarily, mad. Everyone in the play understands exactly what Leontes takes to be evidence for his beliefs. And everyone in the play agrees that it is mad to interpret the data in this way. What is striking in the play is not how plausible Leontes' interpretations are—how difficult it is to interpret human behavior—but how isolating and mistaken Leontes' interpretations are, how thoroughly they cut him off from the interpretive and political and familial community of which he ought to be a part. The problem with which the play is concerned is not that of linguistic indeterminacy but that of the role of faith in the constitution of human community. The problem, to use Stanley Cavell's favorite distinction, is not one of knowledge but one of acknowledgment.^[7] The programmatic nature of Felperin's reading leads him away from the play's central concerns.

A similar process occurs in Margaret Ferguson's essay on Hamlet , wonderfully entitled "Letters and Spirits." Ferguson purports to accept de Man's deconstruction, following Derrida, of the idea of the literal.^[8] She uses Hamlet as Felperin uses Leontes. Hamlet leads us "to question

[7] See "Knowing and Acknowledging" in Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Scribner's, 1969), 238–66.

[8] See Paul de Man, "The Epistemology of Metaphor," Critical Inquiry 5 (1978): 13–30; Jacques Derrida, "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy," New Literary History 6 (1974): 5–74.

the distinction between literal and figurative meanings," to confront "the problem of distinguishing between multiple—and perhaps equally figurative—meanings." These formulations are produced by Theory. Inaccurate as descriptions of Hamlet's verbal behavior, they are used to license a kind of criticism that gives greater weight to metaphors and semantic possibilities than to narrative and stylistic facts. This bears careful watching.

Ferguson approvingly quotes a comment by Lawrence Danson on the puns in Hamlet's opening speeches, but she misreads this comment in a characteristic and significant way. Where Danson states that Hamlet's puns demand "that words be given their full freight of meaning," Ferguson takes this to imply that words be given multiple meanings, more meanings rather than more meaning. Moreover, Ferguson sees puns as "driving a wedge between words and their ordinary meanings," a tendentious description of what puns do, since they often rely on multiple "ordinary meanings." The key move for Ferguson is to link the (supposed) violence of this linguistic behavior—"driving a wedge between words and their ordinary meanings"—to the physical violence that we see Hamlet perform. The violent metaphor, it should be noted, is entirely the critic's invention, and this turns out to be a crucial strategy. We are told that Hamlet performs a "rapier attack" on the word "matter" in his early conversation with Polonius. So described, this behavior "foreshadows the closet scene in which [Hamlet] both speaks daggers to his mother and literally stabs Polonius." But this is mere critical sleight-of-hand. The critic's metaphor (Hamlet's "rapier attack" on a word) is used to establish a connection that is then ascribed to Shakespeare. The critic must ignore the fact that when Hamlet vows to "speak daggers" to his mother, his emphasis is on the distinction between this activity and using daggers. What Hamlet distinguishes, the critic conflates. Yet there is a characteristic sort of bad faith at work here. It can be seen in Ferguson's use of "literally." She uses the term perfectly normally and properly. What this implies is that the "foreshadowing" that Ferguson strives so hard to establish is not something in which she herself strongly believes. Her argument about Hamlet's movement in the play from verbal to nonverbal action relies precisely on the distinction between speaking daggers and using them. The essay cannot hold to its premise about the nonexistence of the literal.

If the only result of a commitment to Theory were to produce a halfheartedness disguising itself as wit, this would not be a serious matter. What is serious is the way in which this commitment prevents Ferguson from distinguishing her cogent points from her forced ones,

and therefore from developing her cogent points in productive ways that, unencumbered by Theory, she could have. The last quarter of Ferguson's essay is devoted to a passage in Claudius's discussion with Laertes about the duel with Hamlet in which Claudius speaks in a (for him) unusually glowing and poetical way about the horsemanship of "a gentleman from Normandy." Ferguson beautifully characterizes Claudius's speech as, in some sense, "a digression from the world of tragedy itself," and she tellingly connects this "digression" both to Ophelia's description of Hamlet as a perfect courtier and to certain characteristic moments of description in Shakespeare's romances. But instead of exploring these connections, Ferguson insists that the key to this passage is the name that, in the the Second Quarto only, is given to the Norman, "Lamord" (he is "Lamound" in the Folio). For Ferguson, Lamord quickly becomes La Mort and L'Amour, so that the passage is secretly about death and love, a secret "letter" from Shakespeare to his audience. In this way of reading, a noncontextual pun becomes more important than the straightforward stylistic and thematic connections that Ferguson has also noted. Allegorizing distracts Ferguson from hard thinking. She ends up seeing the passage as suggesting that Hamlet could have been a romance if its plot had not been arbitrarily darkened. Something like this is true of some of the tragedies, most notably of Lear , but it is not true of Hamlet . Serious thought about the plot of Hamlet (like that of Helen Gardner in an essay that Ferguson cites) would have made this clear.^[9] But Ferguson's method does not really allow her, as Empson puts it, to "attend to the story."^[10]

We have already discussed the role of hyperbolic skepticism in Theory. Ferguson attempts to deny that Hamlet can draw "a clear epistemological distinction" between his father and Claudius. This attempt is based on the general view that there simply cannot be "a clear epistemological distinction," and it is halfhearted and tendentious in ways that we have seen. On the other hand, Ferguson's argument for some similarities between Hamlet and Claudius is a very different matter. This claim is based on the overt content of some of their speeches and on aspects of the (literal) plot. When Ferguson argues that, with the killing of Polonius, Hamlet takes a crucial step toward occupying "the place of the king as the play defines it: not in terms of an individual, but in terms of a role associated both with the power to kill and with the tendency

[9] See Helen Gardner, "The Historical Approach: Hamlet ," in The Business of Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 35–51.

[10] See Essay 1, p. 22 above.

to justify killing with lines of argument unavailable to lesser men," we are in a different, and I think better, critical world. Ferguson tries to relate this point to Language by making it a hermeneutical one about "the desire to interpret literally," but the power of the point is ethical and structural, not linguistic. Moreover, on the linguistic level, the claim is false. Metaphors are often quite useful in establishing "lines of argument" that justify killing. There is a point to be made here about particular uses of language, not about Language in general. And it is potentially a historical point. It sends us to the actual, literal world of Renaissance politics and Renaissance political thinking, with and without its metaphors.

II

The literal is the ghost that haunts Shakespeare and the Question of Theory with its nagging "Remember me." That a major section of the volume is entitled "Politics, Economy, History" is interesting in itself, suggesting that even in the heyday of Theory, "politics" and "history" were becoming, as they certainly are now, privileged terms in literary studies. Yet even more interesting and revealing is the way that such terms are used in many of the essays. Such terms are often used in thin and metaphorical ways, ways that are actually at variance with the literal meanings of the terms. Despite significant gestures to the contrary, gestures that indicate an uneasy awareness of the problem, many essays in the volume are unable to maintain a focus on (literal) politics, economy, or history.

Jonathan Goldberg's "Shakespearean Inscriptions: The Voicing of Power" is a good example, even in its bifurcated title, of the difficulties of treating political issues in a deconstructive mode. Goldberg has notably solved this problem in his recent work on sodomy in English Renaissance texts, since the slippages of that key term are historically and politically revelatory, but in this essay on "the voicing of power" the deconstructive destroys the political.^[11] The essay is extremely cryptic. Insofar as I am able to reconstruct it, the argument seems to be that although the plays present power as a matter of occupying certain

[11] See Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).

culturally defined speech positions, this does not mean that silence, in the cultural system of the plays, can be taken to imply powerlessness. Not unexpectedly, the positive argument is convincing. The apparently—and truly—contradictory argument for silence is not. Like any speech act, falling silent needs to be contextualized. To equate the entrapped Shylock, reduced to silence by manipulation and coercion, with the exultant Bassanio, reduced to silence by joy, seems merely ingenious, not to say disingenuous. The argument that the Roman Portia of Julius Caesar participates in political power through her suicide seems equally disingenuous. To compound the problem, the one moment that Goldberg cites in which powerful female speech is actually represented, Emilia's assertion, near the end of Othello , that she feels "bound" to break out of the silence to which wifely duty would consign her, is converted by Goldberg, through a misleading historical analogy (regarding witnesses being legally bound to speak), into an act of constraint rather than of freedom. To counteract the effect of the silence of Hermia and Helena in act 5 of A Midsummer Night's Dream , Goldberg appeals to two queens, Hyppolyta and Elizabeth, as if their examples contravened rather than confirmed the general rule of female silence. In short, that queens could speak out and that men were sometimes silent are not facts that, in themselves, alter the cultural status of speech as empowered and male and of silence as unempowered and female. What we can see in this essay is the way in which dialectical ingenuity, the rejection of simple binaries, can produce political obtuseness. The metaphorical treatment of "voicing" in the essay blurs and confuses its political focus. I cannot see that Goldberg ever attended to Constance Jordan's point, to which he alludes, about the specific, political meaning of "having a voice."

In Thomas M. Greene's essay on "failed husbandry" in the Sonnets, it is the economic rather than political that disappears into metaphor. Although Greene's essay appears under the "Politics, Economy, History" rubric of the volume, the essay is much closer to Hubler's "economy of the closed heart" than to Empson's attempt to make the class issue central in the Sonnets.^[12] The essay does not perform an Empsonian or (Kenneth) Burkean class analysis. The real connections of the essay are not with any sort of social or economic analysis but with New

[12] Edward Hubler, The Sense of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), chap. 5; William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (1935; pap. rpt. New York: New Directions, 1960), chap. 4. For reasons that escape me, neither of these critics, indeed no critics other than the editors of the editions Greene uses, are mentioned or referred to in Greene's essay.

Criticism and deconstruction, and this essay helps us see the connections between these movements. Greene approaches Empson in describing an argument in which "the bourgeois poet accuses the aristocratic friend of a dereliction of those responsibilities incumbent on the land-owning class," but in general Greene uses class terms in a metaphorical and arbitrary way. He never makes clear why the claim that "in black inck my love may still shine bright" is a "desperate bourgeois maneuver," just as he never makes clear why the desire for intelligibility in human relations is "bourgeois"—surely many peasants and aristocrats have wanted this! The essay is concerned with the language of economics and (to use a fashionably chiastic but, I am inclined to think, empty construction) with the completely metaphorical "economics" of language.

Greene rightly points to the prominence in the Sonnets of economic terms and of terms that have economic as well as other (especially sexual) meanings in their semantic range. The fundamental effort of the essay is to show: (1) that the "economic" systems in the Sonnets are unstable; (2) that the Sonnets are aware of this instability; and (3) that the Sonnets are therefore profoundly poignant. The discovery of poignance is Greene's theme (here as elsewhere), but it is also his scheme.^[13] A theme merely has to be significantly present; a scheme requires the critic to show its presence everywhere. Schemes produce forced readings and hyperbole.^[14] For instance, the fact that the elements aligned against poetry are "cosmic" does not necessarily leave the poet and his poetry "in a confusing limbo"; affirmations of linguistic power do not occur only in the couplets of the Sonnets, nor do the affirmative couplets invariably "lack the energy of the negative vision of the 12 lines that precede them."^[15] Greene's major effort, however, does not lie in these particular assertions but in his more general analysis of the "rhetorical economics" of the poems. His central argument is that, in the linguistic world of the Sonnets, riches make Shakespeare poor: "the enriching of metaphor . . . is indistinguishable from a mutability of metaphor [in the Sonnets], a fragmentation which might be said to demonstrate instability." At one

[13] See, for instance, the treatment of Petrarch in The Light in Troy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), esp. chaps. 6 and 7.

[14] A theme, in my usage, need not be totalized. One can trace "the theme of such and such" in a work without claiming more than that the theme in question exists there. It need not be dominant, central, or "the" theme. A scheme, in my usage, is a view that insists on its own ubiquity and necessity.

[15] For sonnets that, I would claim, escape this generalization, see numbers 18, 63, and 65.

point, in a Derridean moment, Greene extends this view to all Language, but the "inopem me copia fecit " scheme is most cogent with regard to Shakespeare's poetic practices.^[16] It structures Greene's readings.

One result of Greene's commitment to this scheme is that he has to see the Sonnets as written entirely in the high style—"every rift is loaded with ore." Greene must therefore downplay the stylistic variety of the Sonnets and give short shrift to the plain-style ones.^[17] He is committed to a way of reading that sees all semantic possibilities as actual in every context, without regard for what Empson called "situations." This way of reading is fundamental to both New Critical and deconstructive poetics.^[18] It is interesting to compare Greene's readings with those of Stephen Booth, whose practice is close to that of the New Critics and who is definitely no eschewer of multiplicities. Booth turns out to be more judicious. In two major and rather surprising cases, Booth issues warnings that Greene ignores. Regarding Sonnet 80 ("O, how I faint when I of you do write"), Booth states that this poem "contains many words used elsewhere in sexual senses" but notes that "none of them is fully activated here." Greene, on the other hand, is tempted "to interpret the sonnet primarily in erotic terms." Sonnet 125 ("Were 't aught to me I bore the canopy") is central to Greene's argument; it is the poem toward which and from which his essay moves. Greene must reveal irony and pathos in the poem. The presence of a Eucharistic reference in the tenth line, "And take thou my oblation, poor but free," is crucial to this endeavor. Booth, on the other hand, again notes that while there are potential Eucharistic references in the sonnet, the analogy is "never applied or activated while the poem is in process."^[19] Greene's "economic" thesis does not allow for any distinction between potential and actual (or "activated") meanings in poetic contexts. Moreover, these multiple meanings must conflict with one another to generate the requisite pathos. Oddly and significantly, Greene has no comment what-

[16] The assertion "inopem me copia fecit " (abundance makes me poor) occurs in Ovid, Metamorphosis , 3.466. It is spoken by Narcissus.

[17] For a great plain-style poem in the Sonnets, see for instance number 120.

[18] For the continuities between New Criticism and deconstruction along these lines, see, inter alia, Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 169. For some caveats, see Shuli Barzilai and Morton W. Bloomfield, "New Criticism and Deconstructive Criticism, Or What's New?" New Literary History 18 (1986): 151–69.

[19] Shakespeare's Sonnets , ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 273, 430. I will cite the Sonnets from this edition.

ever on the couplet of his central sonnet ("Hence, thou suborned informer! A true soul / When most impeached stands least in thy control"). He is not interested in Shakespeare's conception of the "true soul" (nor in the status of "suborned informers" in Shakespeare's world). The proud Stoic voice of this couplet, like the voice of the entire previous sonnet ("If my dear love were but the child of state")—which Greene virtually ignores—hardly seems a pathetic one. Greene's way of reading may not wholly derive from Theory, but it certainly relies on and is reinforced by a fashionable sense of language as based on or somehow permeated with loss, as if, in Robert Hass' wonderful paraphrase, "a word is elegy to what it signifies."^[20]

Just as "economics" in Greene's essay turns out to be rhetorical, "politics" in Stanley Cavell's essay turns out to be nonexistent. Although Cavell's essay mentions politics in its subtitle ("Coriolanus and the Interpretations of Politics") and occurs with Greene's in the "Politics, Economy, History" section of the collection, the torque of Cavell's essay is strongly away from political readings. He attempts to defuse this by presenting his reading as being about "the formation of the political" (whatever this means) if not about politics, and also by including a Kenneth Burkean "Postscript," but the main effort of the essay is not toward concern with politics or even "the political" in the play. One would think that the orientation of the essay would be psychoanalytical, since (despite his professed admiration for Burke) Cavell sees the psychoanalytic perspective as having produced "more interesting" readings of the play than the political, but this turns out not to be the case either. Cavell has already asked the question, "Politics as opposed to what?"^[21] It may be foolhardy, but in this context I am prepared to offer an answer, and that is: religion. The main effort of the body of Cavell's essay is to read Coriolanus in relation to Christianity.

This effort seems to me to be unsuccessful, and it seems to me to derive from the least productive strand in Cavell's previous work on Shakespeare. The work on Shakespeare, like the essays on other literary texts and on films, is part of Cavell's lifelong project, his attempt to provide a fully textured account and critique of post-Cartesian philosophical skepticism. Cavell's work on Shakespeare seems to me most incandescent when it is clearly part of this project, as in the treatment

[20] Robert Hass, "Meditation at Lagunitas," in Praise (New York: The Ecco Press, 1979), 4.

[21] See the essay by that title in Critical Inquiry 9 (1982): 157–78.

of shame in the essay on Lear and in the superb essay on Othello that forms the coda of The Claim of Reason .^[22] There is a philosophical moment like this in the essay on Coriolanus when Cavell offers as a reason why Coriolanus "spits out" words the fact "that they are words, that they exist only in a language," and that "a language is something metaphysically shared." This is not, however, the mode of the essay as a whole. Like Cavell's Lear essay, his Coriolanus essay is not content with reading that hews to the literal, even though both essays pay significant and even memorable lip service to such reading.^[23] Cavell applauds Brecht's discussion of Coriolanus for "getting us not to interpret , not, above all, to interpret food." Nonetheless, the essay proceeds to a resounding "Yet" (248). This signals the moment when a scheme kicks in. Suddenly the literal, the obvious, the surface is rejected. With this reversal, Cavell devotes himself to exactly what he praised Brecht for getting us not to do: interpreting food in the play (against which Kenneth Burke also cautioned).^[24] Cavell's discussion of interpretations of food in the play culminates in his approving quotation of Janet Adelman's reading of the strange lines in act 1, scene 3, in which Volumnia equates Hector's forehead wounded in battle with Hecuba's breasts when she suckled Hector. This too is followed by a crucial "But." Even Adelman's psychoanalytic reading is too literal. For Cavell in this mode, what is most important in the equation of blood and milk, the image of a male provider of blood that is food, is to get to the point where Coriolanus can be seen in relation to the sacrificial Christ—and "not so much imitating Christ as competing with him." The "proof" of this claim is the juxtaposition of bits and pieces of action and lan-

[22] See "The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear, ," in Must We Mean What We Say? and The Claim of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). Both of these essays appear in Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

[23] Cavell orients the first part of his Lear essay against an essay by Paul Alpers on "King Lear and the Theory of the Sight Pattern," which appeared originally in Reuben A. Brower and Richard Poirier, eds., In Defense of Reading (New York: Dutton, 1963), 133–52). Alpers's essay is both an attack on the symbolic reading of "the sight pattern" in King Lear and an attempt to suggest the power, importance, and ethical sanity of a literal reading of the material from which the "sight pattern" is constructed. Cavell seeks to defend and reinstate the "sight pattern." The phrase initially (or at least most prominently) appeared in Robert B. Heilman, This Great Stage: Image and Structure in "King Lear" (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1948), chap. 2, "'I Stumbled When I Saw': The Sight Pattern."

[24] See Burke's "Coriolanus and the Delights of Faction," in Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), 95.

guage in the play with bits and pieces of action and language from the New Testament.

Cavell is nervous about this. He acknowledges that "some good readers" may find these connections strained, but he nevertheless insists that "good reading may be guided, or inspired, by the over-excitement such conjunctions can cause." I am not sure of this. I suppose good reading can be inspired by almost anything, but these excitements seem to me more likely to produce bad reading, reading that is constantly discounting rather than acknowledging the obvious meanings of the words in the texts. Cavell here dismisses, through patronizing, more literal readings than his own (they "cannot be wrong, but . . ."). The important paradox is that Cavell's own best reading, in this essay as elsewhere, works to respect the literal, to focus on the "ordinariness" of the given words in their contexts rather than to find secret patterns in them, to understand what has been said as what has been meant.^[25]

Although Terence Hawkes's "Telmah" (Hamlet spelled backward) does not appear in the "Politics, Economy, History" section of Shakespeare and the Question of Theory , Hawkes's essay has a very peculiar relation to politics: his essay relates criticism to politics by conflating them. It is a very peculiar piece. Its first part is an essay on Hamlet , focusing, as Ferguson does not, on the structure of the plot; its second part is an elaborate argument about the cultural and ideological meanings of John Dover Wilson's account of the plot in What Happens in "Hamlet" (1935). The two parts of the essay are linked by both being oriented against the same straw man; the first part attacks it literarily, the second ideologically. The straw man in Hawkes's essay is "our inherited notion of Hamlet as a structure that runs a satisfactorily linear, sequential course." This "sense of straight, purposive, linear motion forward through the play" is, we are told, "required by most interpretations of it" and is, apparently, the same as "the orthodox Hamlet-centered interpretation of the play." Given this description of the inherited orthodoxy, any observations that show the play or the character not to proceed with "a sense of straight, purposive, linear motion" are therefore subversive—politically as well as literarily.

But this version of the "orthodox" reading is absurd. Both the play and the title character are notorious for not developing a proper plot, and Hawkes's notion of "linearity" is so simplistic that any narratives of past events or patterns of repetition are taken to disturb it. They are all

[25] See "The Avoidance of Love," 269–70; Disowning Knowledge , 40.

part of Telmah , the "recursive," backward-moving elements in the play. The central element of Telmah , for Hawkes, is the stature of Claudius. The orthodox, linear reading of the play apparently requires that Claudius be "the simple stage-villain described by the Ghost." It is perhaps worth saying that the figure of uncannily seductive eloquence described by the Ghost is not at all a "simple stage-villain," but the important point is that Hawkes writes as if the recognition of Claudius as a powerful figure, truly Hamlet's "mighty opposite," were a new and startling discovery, one that deeply unsettles our sense of the plot of the play, revealing the alien and unexpected shape of Telmah .

One cannot miss the presence of a scheme at work here. For Hawkes, recognition of the stature of Claudius must be subversive so that Hawkes can make the connection that he wants to posit between readings of Hamlet and political ideologies. The key fact for the second part of the essay is John Dover Wilson's extraordinary response to an article by W. W. Greg on Hamlet that appeared and Dover Wilson read in the fall of 1917. Greg's article apparently gave Dover Wilson a more than Hamlet-like sense of mission; he felt he "had been born to answer" this article. And Greg's article, in Hawkes's words, "promoted" Claudius, and was therefore highly "subversive." Hawkes's effort is to show this (supposed) literary subversiveness to be truly in tune with its moment (1917)—to be, in other words, genuinely Bolshevik. This is done by connecting Dover Wilson's career as a writer and lecturer on Russia and an opponent of revolutionary trade-unionism at home, with his major work of literary criticism.

One (or, at least, I) can only feel indebted to Hawkes for the fascinating material about Dover Wilson, and I very much applaud Hawkes's attempt to link Dover Wilson's political life to his literary criticism (to see it all as part of his political life), but I think that Hawkes draws the circle too tightly. Only a very importunate scheme would lead one to see W. W. Greg as a Bolshevik. And Dover Wilson's book cannot in turn intelligibly be seen as pseudo-Fascist. Ascribed political "meanings" are here being substituted (or taken) for facts. This is especially disturbing because there are, pardon the expression, some real facts here. Where Hawkes is on firm ground is in his demonstration of the cultural meaning and avowed political function of English studies in England after 1917. Hawkes does not have to do "interpretation" to show this. In the words of the remarkably outspoken "Newbolt Report" of 1921, English studies would serve to establish "a bond of union between classes" and thereby defuse the possibility of working-class revolution (326–27). I

think that, contrary to his intentions, Hawkes's position is dangerously antipolitical in this essay. To think that we can be genuinely revolutionary either by subscribing to a particular literary interpretation ("Telmah" ) or by asserting that there is no such thing as a definitive interpretation seems to me disturbingly self-promoting and delusive. It is certainly good to have studies of the ideological determinations and functions of English studies in general and of Shakespeare studies in particular, but there are, I would maintain, less arbitrary ways of saving the study of Shakespeare from the ideals of a ruling elite than through the arbitrary political ascriptions of "Telmah."

III

The essays that I will now consider, those by Elaine Showalter, Stephen Greenblatt, Robert Weimann, and Joel Fineman, intend to be literal in their relation to "politics, economy, history" (though only one of them, that by Greenblatt, appears under that rubric in the Parker-Hartman volume). Although these essays are all, in some sense, against Theory, they show different ways in which the relation between the literal and the theoretical remains a problem. Only the essay by Joel Fineman suggests a way in which Theory and history can be brought productively together. I will argue that Eagleton's book at times succeeds in a similar way.

Showalter's work on "Representing Ophelia" is determinedly literal and social. Recoiling from the obsessive textuality and abstractness of Theory, Showalter calls for a wide-angled but specific feminist cultural history. As an example of such an endeavor, she presents some fascinating material on the representation of Ophelia in the theater, in the visual arts, and—most suggestively—in the actual discourse of nineteenth-century psychiatrists. Yet, from a methodological point of view, what can be seen in Showalter's essay is that the retreat from theory and from "critical hubris" can be too complete. An essay need not be "theoretical" to be reflective. One leaves Showalter's essay wishing that she had offered some speculations on, for instance, the theatricality of madness (which Ellen Terry apparently thought was excessive) and on the ways in which life imitates art. It seems that a critic's materials can be too raw as well as too cooked. If one has to choose between Theory and "stuff," I would certainly choose the latter, but need one make this choice?

Stephen Greenblatt, in "Shakespeare and the Exorcists," meditates on the relations between life, art, and theatricality in a sharply defined cultural context. He means to cook his cultural materials—though not to overcook them—and also to do some literary analysis.^[26] The topic of his essay is not so much the relation between its texts, Samuel Harsnett's Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures and Shakespeare's King Lear , as what the relation between these texts tells us about the culture that produced them both (within, probably, two or three years of each other). Greenblatt acknowledges the usefulness of deconstruction in calling into question the boundaries between the literary and the nonliterary and in deprivileging and demystifying the literary (which I am not sure it does), but he backs away from Theory insofar as it leads, as he puts it, "too readily and predictably to the void." However uncomfortable he might be in saying so (since "sophistication" seems to require hyperbolic skepticism), Greenblatt is committed to the view that there is something there in cultures to be studied, and that what is there is not to be found merely by thinking about Language.

While Greenblatt rejects Theory, he does, of course, have a theory: "new historicism," or "cultural poetics." I will consider this theory in some detail in the next chapter (see Essay 4 below). What I want to do here is to begin to suggest the way in which even a theory that is against Theory can generate the pressure of a critical scheme and can lead away from an acceptance of the literal. Much of what Greenblatt asserts in "Shakespeare and the Exorcists" seems to me indisputable. He establishes the presence of theatrical metaphors in Harsnett's text and, more importantly, he establishes the function of these metaphors in the text, the ideological and political function of them. He shows Harsnett's need for "an analytical tool" that would account for both the fraudulence and the power of the Catholic exorcisms that Harsnett was attacking, and he shows that Harsnett found this "tool" in the metaphor of theater. The major connection to King Lear comes through consideration of the mock-miracle that Edgar provides to reassure Gloucester of the benignity of the gods. Greenblatt argues that this scene is precisely parallel to the mock-exorcisms in Harsnett's account. The play thus provides "theatrical confirmation of the official position" that exorcism is a fraud. Up to this point, the essay is straightforward and convincing. Shakespeare's play and

[26] This essay is included (though without the discussion of deconstruction and theory) in Greenblatt's Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 94–128.

Harsnett's treatise are shown to inhabit the same ideological as well as literal world, and Greenblatt assures us that he finds Shakespeare's "theatrical confirmation of the official position" (Harsnett's) to be "neither superficial nor unstable." But Greenblatt proceeds, as Cavell does at a similar moment, to a significant "And yet." The whole essay takes a turn here; Greenblatt now aims to show that King Lear serves not to reinforce but to undermine the intended effect of Harsnett's Declaration.

The idea, put crudely, is that Shakespeare uses theater to resacralize what Harsnett used theater to desacralize. Greenblatt wants to argue that the representation, in the actual theater, of the desacralizing power of theater serves, paradoxically, to undermine itself and to reinstate what it seems to be attacking. But why must the cultural transactions in question be paradoxical and circular in this way? It is here that we can detect the presence of a scheme. Suddenly the critic finds himself clutching at straws. He refers portentously to a performance of Lear in the home of a Yorkshire Catholic in 1610, and oddly but significantly flirts with allegorizing. The Edgar-Edmund story suggests the persecution of Catholicism by its "skeptical bastard brother." Both the text and history disappear. Protestantism becomes merely a form of skepticism. Greenblatt sees Harsnett wanting his readers to delight in the silence of the supernatural, while Shakespeare, on the other hand, makes us experience this silence as negative, as a loss rather than a liberation.

Yet Greenblatt knows that Harsnett is not in fact arguing for "the silence of the supernatural," but rather for its presence only in the Bible and properly authorized rites. Nonetheless, Greenblatt sees the force of Harsnett's argument only as negative. There is no possibility that Shakespeare's play is more skeptical and more secular than Harsnett's pamphlet. But why not see it in this way? If the dramaturgy of Lear awakens in us "the forlorn hope of an impossible redemption," why shouldn't the play be seen as criticizing this hope (so often voiced by Albany and Edgar) rather than, however complexly, encouraging and indulging it? Why can it not be liberating, if sobering, to know that the evil is not supernatural? Why should the play be seen as preferring evacuated rituals to none at all? The answer seems to be that, for Greenblatt if not for Shakespeare, there are no such things as "evacuated rituals." Rituals, even when performed as frauds, seem to function ex opere operato —as long as they are, in any sense, performed.^[27] We are in the

[27] ln "Resonance and Wonder," Greenblatt repeats the claim that "when Catholic ritual is made into theatrical representation," the transposition at once "naturalizes, denaturalizes, mocks, and celebrates." The first three of these terms are relatively clear in themselves and in Greenblatt's analyses, but the final term—the one that makes the "circulation" fully circular—is presented in a completely mystificatory way: the stage "celebrates such practice by reinvesting it with the charismatic magic of the theater." The technical anthropological edge of "charismatic" is not, I think, enough to make "magic of the theater" into a meaningful analytical category. See Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), 163.

presence of a scheme here. We know that something has gone seriously awry when Greenblatt is led to conclude that "the force of King Lear is to make us love the theater." Surely "the force of King Lear " is something deeper and more humanly central than that. One need not hold an idealized, noncontextualized view of Shakespeare to doubt that the ultimate aim of his art was to be self-promoting. Greenblatt has rejected Theory in the name of history, but nonetheless there are pressures on his analyses that skew his treatment of the texts and events with which he engages.

Robert Weimann's essay on "Mimesis in Hamlet " is a direct meditation on Shakespeare and Theory. He does not argue against deconstruction in general but specifically against its application to Shakespeare. The essay presents a series of theses about the particular nature of Shakespearean drama, or rather, of Shakespearean theater. Weimann sees text and theater as in many ways at odds in Shakespeare, and he takes this tension to be constitutive. He does not grant a privileged position to the textual.^[28] Weimann sees Shakespearean drama as questioning this (and all other) privilege. Deconstruction is rejected as irrelevantly text-centered and irrelevantly targeted against closure and authority. Weimann wants to see both aesthetic and political authority as constantly put into question in the plays. He relates the mimetic multiplicity of the Shakespearean play to the specific social and cultural situation of the Elizabethan theater. The essay is a program piece calling for a specific type of historical criticism.^[29]

[28] Not to grant privileged status to the textual distinguishes Weimann's from Harry Berger's essay in the volume ("Psychoanalyzing the Shakespearean Text: The First Three Scenes of the Henriad," Shakespeare and the Question of Theory , 210–29). Berger claims that only a text-centered, "anti-theatrical" reading can capture the hidden resonances of scenes like the opening of Richard II . Berger sees the Shakespearean text as the Lacanian Other to Shakespearean theater. The argument seems to me to rely on a programmatically impoverished sense of what theater can do.

[29] Unlike Greenblatt's, Weimann's essay is not a full-fledged example of the criticism for which it is calling. For what such criticism would look like, Weimann directs the reader to his essay on "'Appropriation' and Modern History in Renaissance Prose Narrative," New Literary History 14 (1983): 459–95, as well as to his earlier Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater , ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). I would call attention to Weimann's "History and the Issue of Authority in Representation: The Elizabethan Theater and the Reformation," New Literary History 17 (1986): 449–76.

Yet there is perhaps something too flat in Weimann's as in Showalter's rejection. Isn't there some way in which Theory, or some version of it, can be put in the service of history and help with Shakespeare? Fineman's "The Turn of the Shrew" is the only essay in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory that demonstrates how theoretical awareness, in the deconstructive sense, can inform textually and historically specific practical criticism and—this is important—vice versa (how historical can inform "theoretical" awareness). Fineman does not use his Shakespearean text merely as an example. He sees The Taming of the Shrew as embodying a discursive system—indeed, he would say, the discursive system—in which contemporary Theory fully and massively participates. Fineman's essay is fundamentally antideconstructive, but not, as Yeats would say, without vacillation. It sides with Lacan and the "not so freely floating signifier" rather than with Derrida. Writing from within the Freudian tradition, Fineman is interested not in the indeterminacy of language but in the determinedness of it, in the ways in which patriarchal structures seem to reassert themselves even in the face of and within their own subversion. Fineman builds on a textual crux: Grumio saying that Petruchio will rail at Kate "in his rope-tricks." Fineman's point about this crux is very delicately and carefully put. The meaning of the crux "is not altogether indeterminate or, rather, if it is indeterminate, this indeterminacy is itself very strictly determined."^[30] Fineman sees the gendered violence in Petruchio's "rope-tricks"/rhetoric as fully and determinately meaningful. Fineman is able to show in detail that Petruchio exploits the subversive "language of woman" in order to silence Kate (this is something like the opposite of Goldberg's thesis). Through a clearly motivated if overly elaborate detour through Robert Fludd's cosmology, Fineman shows that the traditional patriarchal cosmology includes and is in no way disturbed by a mise en abyme and various kinds of (female) indeterminacy. In Fludd as in Shakespeare, indeterminacy determines a specific story. This essay seems to show Theory fully and historically applied.

[30] Patricia Parker implies something like this about another textual crux,"dilations" in the Folio Othello, but she does not explicitly develop the point (see "Shakespeare and Rhetoric: 'Dilation' and 'Delation' in Othello," Shakespeare and the Question of Theory , 54–74.

IV

Terry Eagleton's monograph is, as one would expect, deeply aware of both politics and Theory. In one of its modes, the monograph attempts, in a pragmatic and deceptively modest way, an "articulation" of Marxism and deconstruction.^[31] In this mode, I think that it manages some striking successes at such articulation. The interesting question is how. The answer seems to be that Eagleton sees deconstruction as raising a general structural problem: the tension within any psychological or signifying system between the need for and power of distinctions and the need for and power of overriding distinctions. Conceiving the issue in this way allows Eagleton to tap into some of Shakespeare's deepest and most fully expressed concerns while at the same time making analytical use of deconstructive theory. The key conceptual breakthrough is that Eagleton does not see deconstruction as only a theory about Language. He can acknowledge the content of Shakespeare's actual concerns; he does not have to show these concerns to be all, ultimately, about Language. He can, following Lacan, use Language as a paradigm without making it his subject. Like Fineman, Eagleton does not have to "translate" Shakespeare's concerns into those of Theory. In this mode, Marx comes into Eagleton's book as one of the great theorists of the tension between differentiation and undifferentiation, between the world of differentiated objects and the abstracting and undifferentiating force of money. Eagleton is thus able to use some of the most haunting passages in Marx as part of his general analytical framework. Eagleton does not seem to know the adage, but his book brings new cogency to Wallace Stevens's remark that money is also a form of poetry.^[32] Perhaps paradoxically, Marxism enters Eagleton's book most powerfully as a form of Theory, not as a theory in itself. Unfortunately, as we will see, there are other moments in which Marxism appears in the book as the crudest sort of a priori theory. Eagleton's structural model, based on Marx on money, is much more powerful and sophisticated than his historical one.

"Language," Eagleton's first chapter, establishes the productive paradigm. The chapter begins with a stunning reading of Macbeth . With

[31] Compare Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).

[32] See Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous , ed. Samuel French Morse (New York: Knopf, 1957), 165.

wonderful insouciance, Eagleton remarks that "it is surely clear that positive value in Macbeth lies with the three witches." He is not merely being a critical bad boy here. He has a serious and persuasive case to make, even if he somewhat overidealizes the witches. Eagleton's major point is that order in Macbeth is "based on routine oppression and incessant warfare." The witches "are exiles from that violent order, inhabiting their own sisterly community on the shadowy borderlands, refusing all truck with its tribal bickerings and military honour." The sexual, material, and linguistic ambiguity of the witches is seen as subversively and precisely deconstructive, striking at "the stable social, sexual and linguistic forms which the society of the play needs to survive." This all seems powerfully and surprisingly right; it gives the witches a thematic force consonant with the power of their theatrical presence. And even if the witches are much more involved with "linear" history than Eagleton acknowledges (he does not mention their visions of the future royal house) this is an illuminating and thoroughly contextualized use of Theory. On the other hand, in his other critical mode, when Eagleton describes Lady Macbeth as "in short . . . a bourgeois individualist," we are in a critical world that is both literarily and theoretically cruder and less convincing.

Only a major critic can take on the challenge of saying something interesting about a topic that is explicitly central to a work. Law in The Merchant of Venice is obviously such a topic, and Eagleton's treatment of this topic is one of his triumphs (in his chapter on "Law"). He begins with a showstopping parallel to his opening assertion about the witches in Macbeth : "In The Merchant of Venice , it is Shylock who has respect for the spirit of the law and Portia who does not." As in the earlier case, Eagleton can back up his claim. Shylock respects the spirit of the law through knowing that a legal document cannot possibly specify "all conceivable aspects of the situation to which it refers." There are problems with this view—it ignores Shylock's insistence on what is "nominated" in his bond and his refusal to accept anything but what is so "nominated"—but it usefully problematizes the play at a point where we might too easily rest in apparent clarity. A similar moment of perhaps perverse illumination occurs in a wonderful discussion of Shylock's relation to the meaning of human embodiedness. Eagleton hauntingly links Shylock's famous speech on "organs, dimensions, senses" to the "merry bond" regarding Antonio's body. Eagleton argues that "Shylock's ferocious insistence on having Antonio's flesh must be read in the light of his sufferings at the hands of anti-semites; not just as revenge for

them—though this is no doubt one of his motives—but as a scandalous exposure of that which Antonio owes him—his body" in fellowship or communion. This has a Cavellian quality of profound "ordinariness," of reminding us what communion as incorporation, having (or being) "one body," means. Eagleton is idealizing Shylock as he did the witches (Shylock's desire for revenge is passed over in a concessive clause) but Eagleton's reading again draws attention to something powerfully present in the play. The same is true of Eagleton's treatment of Shylock's motivelessness, his extraordinary refusal to give a reason for his behavior toward Antonio. Eagleton sees this refusal as a perverse mirror image of agape ("motiveless" love), the value for which Portia is always taken to speak.^[33] This is a stunning insight, and one that follows from Eagleton's structural analysis.

Troilus and Cressida is a play that seems temptingly open to appropriation by Theory.^[34] The play is deeply cynical, and it is easy to make it seem deeply skeptical as well. But here, surely, some wariness is called for. In his treatment of this play, and in his treatment of the issue of selfhood in general, Eagleton falls into very standard and programmatic deconstruction. Perhaps the problem is that the attack on selfhood is part of the program, so Eagleton's application of Theory to the topic seems predictable rather than fresh. The argument proceeds along familiar lines. Eagleton recognizes that Shakespeare "stands with Hector," who holds that "Value dwells not in the particular will," against the nihilism of Troilus's "What's aught but as 'tis valued?" So Hector's position must be deconstructed. It is worth looking at this argument because it is so standard. The key to the argument, the coup de grâce, is the supposedly devastating observation that "all that can be appealed to against the subjectivism of Troilus is simply a wider intersubjectivity" (60). But this "simply" is entirely unearned. A wider intersubjectivity need not "be anchored in anything beyond itself." Cavell is very good on this point in his (overtly) philosophical work, as is, for instance, Donald Davidson, who uses one of the key passages of Troilus , Ulysses' speech on "com-

[33] On "motivelessness" as constitutive of agape , the New Testament conception of love, see Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros , trans. Philip S. Watson (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 61–104. For an argument that Shakespeare, like Luther and George Herbert, recognized this feature of agape , see Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert's Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 22; see also 78–81.

[34] See, for instance, Elizabeth Freund's extremely programmatic essay in Shakespeare and The Question of Theory , "'Ariachne's Broken Woof': The Rhetoric of Citation in Troilus and Cressida ," 19–36.

munication," as part of his attack on subjectivism.^[35] Davidson shows, for instance, that "radical interpretation" among persons, leading to successful communication, is, as he puts it, both "commonplace" and of enormous metaphysical significance.^[36] The deconstructive strategy is, as always, to take the failure of an impossible absolute—here, something beyond intersubjectivity—to discredit every other kind of success.

To assert that selves are inconceivable without language and that language is a social product is not to imply that stable selves do not exist (though it may imply that totally "private" selves do not exist—a different matter). The nonexistence of the stable self is a premise rather than a conclusion of Eagleton's analyses. His extended treatment of selfhood focuses, naturally enough, on Hamlet and occurs in a chapter entitled "Nothing," an extremely witty and provocative rubric but also, in its content, quite predictable. Eagleton begins the chapter with a discussion of Othello, so he has to make a reverse-chronological transition to Hamlet, which he does by very cleverly employing his rubric: "If Othello tells the story of a man in hot pursuit of nothing, Hamlet tells the story from the standpoint of that nothing itself." In Othello, "the mysterious opacity" is, as Eagleton puts it, "none other than woman and desire," whereas in Hamlet , he says, "that opacity, while closely related to female sexuality, is quite evidently the hero himself." This is beautifully said; it is also, I think, accurate. It is not, however, fully compatible with Theory an opacity is not the same as a void. Eagleton's major effort in his discussion of Hamlet is to obscure this distinction. It is useful to compare this treatment of Hamlet with Eagleton's treatment of the play in his first book on Shakespeare, Shakespeare and Society , written almost twenty years earlier, long before his commitment to Theory. In the earlier treatment, as in the more recent one, Eagleton focuses on Hamlet's unwillingness "to take up a determinate position within the 'symbolic order' of his society."^[37] This is a powerful insight, now as then. In the earlier discussion, though, Eagleton's emphasis was on this situation as

[35] For Cavell, see "Knowing and Acknowledging" (note 7 above) and The Claim of Reason , parts 1 and 4 (note 22 above). For Donald Davidson, see Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). Davidson uses the quotation at the end of "Thought and Talk," p. 170.

[36] For radical interpretation as commonplace, see "Communication and Convention," Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation , 279. For the claim that "successful communication proves the existence of a shared, and largely true, view of the world," see "The Method of Truth in Metaphysics," Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation , 201.

[37] Terry Eagleton, Shakespeare, 71; Terence Eagleton, Shakespeare and Society (New York: Schocken, 1967), 61–62.

tragic ; here the emphasis is on the claim that Hamlet's "'self' consists simply in the range of gestures with which he resists available definitions." This is another unearned "simply." A "range of gestures" can, after all, be powerfully expressive. The idea of authenticity, of "truth to self," was central to Eagleton's earlier book on Shakespeare, and it was clearly the advent of Theory that shifted Eagleton from his earlier view. Terence Eagleton's conceptions of spontaneity and authenticity may have been somewhat naive and Romantic, but they provided him, I would argue, with a more accurate sense of Shakespeare's view of selfhood than Terry Eagleton's acceptance of Theory does.

Eagleton's commitment to the programmatic version of Theory skews a powerful insight into Hamlet; his commitment to an unnecessarily simplistic version of Marxist historiography skews his treatment of Coriolanus yet further. This is Eagleton in his other mode, his more "classical" Marxist mode, the mode of British Marxist criticism of the thirties, of a critic like Christopher Caudwell.^[38] The signs of special pleading are everywhere apparent: "Coriolanus, though literally a patrician , is perhaps Shakespeare's most developed study of a bourgeois individualist." The literal and the obvious are being discounted through the application of the theory. As the discussion proceeds, Eagleton seems to dig himself further into the hole of a crudely a priori historicism. Coriolanus is seen not only as "a bourgeois individualist," but also as the prophet of successful capitalism. Hamlet becomes "even more proleptic than Coriolanus." Something has gone very wrong with the whole framework here.

When Eagleton writes as a "classical" Marxist, he writes, as Blake would say, "in fetters." He is best when he is working most boldly and speculatively. It is a measure of Eagleton's refreshing boldness (or chutzpah) as a critic that he attempts to specify Shakespeare's sense of the fundamental tensions in the human condition and to explore Shakespeare's "solution" to these tensions. The tensions have to do with the relation between freedom and community. This would seem to be a rich context in which to discuss Lear , a play with which Marxists have often been successful, but Eagleton's discussion of Lear is weakened by Theory in a way that should by now be familiar—it is linguistic and metaphysical rather than social. The "linguistic animal" is (necessarily) the same as the social one, but the formulations point in different directions. The irony

[38] See Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry (New York: International Publishers, 1937).

of this treatment is that its key term, "excess" (sometimes "surplus"), could, in fact, do much of the work that Eagleton wants it to, but it will not do so when thought of, à la Greene, primarily in terms of Language.

What, then, can we conclude about Shakespeare and the question of Theory? It seems that the moments of greatest fruitfulness in the Shakespearean criticism influenced by Theory are not those focused on Language (or even language), but those focused on patterns in the Shakespearean texts that are structured like a language. When Language as such is the focus, the result tends to be a reduction of the Shakespearean texts to mere examples of the truths of Theory or tendentious attempts to show the Shakespearean texts to manifest sufficiently hyperbolic epistemological skepticism. The richer approaches either reject Theory or attempt to bring it in line with particular, nonepistemological content. The revelation of general indeterminacy seems sterile; the study of particular, historically conditioned indeterminacies seems fruitful, as does the study of the ways in which representational systems in Shakespeare and elsewhere are (and came to be) quite determinate, however richly plural.