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."