SHAKSPER 2002: Re: Cordelia and Listening to the Play
From: Hardy M. Cook (editor@shaksper.net)
Date: 12/12/02
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The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 13.2412 Thursday, 12 December 2002
[1] From: Carol Barton <cbartonphd@earthlink.net>
Date: Wednesday, 11 Dec 2002 08:39:13 -0500
Subj: Re: SHK 13.2396 Re: Cordelia
[2] From: Don Bloom <dbloom@asms.net>
Date: Wednesday, 11 Dec 2002 13:43:34 -0600
Subj: Re: SHK 13.2396 Re: Cordelia
[3] From: Kezia Vanmeter Sproat <KEZIAV@aol.com>
Date: Wednesday, 11 Dec 2002 15:42:57 EST
Subj: Re: SHK 13.2396 Re: Cordelia
[4] From: Robin Hamilton <robin.hamilton2@btinternet.com>
Date: Thursday, 12 Dec 2002 05:44:47 -0000
Subj: Re: SHK 13.2396 Re: Cordelia
[5] From: David Schalkwyk <schalk@humanities.uct.ac.za>
Date: Thursday, 12 Dec 2002 10:31:02 +0200
Subj: Re: SHK 13.2396 Re: Cordelia
[6] From: C. David Frankel <frankel@arts.usf.edu>
Date: Thursday, 12 Dec 2002 08:57:59 -0500
Subj: RE: SHK 13.2396 Listening to the Play
[7] From: Terence Hawkes <hawkest@compuserve.com>
Date: Thursday, 12 Dec 2002 08:59:34 -0500
Subj: Cordelia
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Carol Barton <cbartonphd@earthlink.net>
Date: Wednesday, 11 Dec 2002 08:39:13 -0500
Subject: 13.2396 Re: Cordelia
Comment: Re: SHK 13.2396 Re: Cordelia
I have responded to Mr. Shurgot privately. Though there was nothing "ad
hominem" in my post, there was, as he recognized, a *conscious* attempt
to belittle his condescending proclamation of THE TRUTH about Cordelia,
and to silence those who would dare to discuss it after he and others
had permanently resolved the matter this past spring---in the tradition
of Martin and Margery Marprelate, and John Milton (see, for example
_Colasterion_), and hundreds of others. I attacked the argument, not the
man; the tone, not the "scholarship."
I do, however, heartily suggest that he who does not wish to be stoned
refrain from casting the first pebble.
Best to all,
Carol Barton
[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Don Bloom <dbloom@asms.net>
Date: Wednesday, 11 Dec 2002 13:43:34 -0600
Subject: 13.2396 Re: Cordelia
Comment: Re: SHK 13.2396 Re: Cordelia
The Estimable Hawkes scarcely needs my defence, but I think his comment
(or koan) about listening to plays as well as (or more than) listening
to characters deserves a better look than several of the equally
estimable list-members have given it.
When I first read his comment, I reacted in much the same way as others.
And then I thought about it. Yes, it flies in the face of logic (most of
what a play consists of is what the characters say). Moreover, it goes
against what I keep trying to hammer into my composition students (read
closely -- what does the text really say -- what does it mean.).
But if it's so illogical, why would he say it? Just to be provocative?
Or does he mean something that I'm missing? And I decided he did. I
asked myself this: Do we figure out what a play means (that is, why it
has power to move us) by looking at what the characters say, or do we
figure out what they have said by understanding what the play means?
I concluded that the latter was just as important as the former, and
TH's point (if I have heard him correctly) is that it is (or may be)
*more* important.
I would say (and perhaps he would, too) that a great deal of weak
criticism comes from over-reading what the characters say and then
justifying the inconsistency with what gives the play its power on
grounds of irony. Shakespeare, we are told, really wanted to make a lot
of points that destroy his plays' structural and moral integrity, and we
are childish to want to maintain that integrity.
In the case of *Lear*, I was puzzled enough by some of the comments that
I hauled out the play and re-read the opening with more care than I've
applied to it in many years. But what I found there was what I had found
before: a foolish old man (first cousin to Capulet and the Egeus of
MSND) who inflicts on his daughters a public test of their affection;
two daughters who are obviously cynical and self-serving; and one
daughter who has the character to refuse this emotional strip-tease. As
might be expected, the foolish old man gets furious at this refusal and
curses her. She remains loyal to her principles, however, which she
won't sacrifice no matter how much she loves the old buzzard. It is her
tragedy that she should die trying to save her father from the results
of his own vicious folly, and his that he should carry in his arms the
corpse of the daughter whom he wronged so stupidly.
To a certain kind of mind this view is so simple and so well-known that
it must be wrong. Certain passages, then, can be read and puzzled over
until they contradict it. But that's only because those readers have
stopped listening to what the play is saying.
The play is telling us that an irascible and egotistical old man may do
something cruel and vicious to a child who really loves him, and he may
pay for it with the death of that child who tried to help him in spite
of all, and he may further pay with the anguish of knowing that he can
never get her back and never make up for his stupidity.
Good directors, I submit, start with that. They know that they can have
an audience of highly educated, highly sophisticated New Yorkers or
Londoners bawling their eyes out if they can stage that last scene right
-- even though the audience knows what's going to happen! But to get
that response every scene, every character, every line has to work
toward that supreme moment, or else it will be weakened, even destroyed.
If you find some lines that don't seem to fit (and this happens), then
you have to work around them. If instead you simply ignore them, or have
the actor interpret them in a way that contradicts this larger vision,
you make it incoherent, contradictory, and dull. Individual scenes or
confrontations may still have impact, but the play as a whole will
suffer. And the plays, alas, have suffered.
This may not be what TH had in mind when he sent his typically brief,
koan-like riposte. It is only what I came up with -- an ill-favoured
thing, sir, but mine own.
Cheers,
don
PS: I did not like Ben Kingsley as Feste. I thought the character as
done was grim and weird. While it might be interesting in a different
context, I found that kind of Feste badly out of synch with Twelfth
Night, and thus a very apt example of the foregoing. (Also, I thought
the movie of 12N with Kingsley as Feste was directed by Trevor Nunn.)
[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Kezia Vanmeter Sproat <KEZIAV@aol.com>
Date: Wednesday, 11 Dec 2002 15:42:57 EST
Subject: 13.2396 Re: Cordelia
Comment: Re: SHK 13.2396 Re: Cordelia
Re. the much-disputed Terence Hawkes statement about what plays "say": I
too contend that plays "say" things, but keep in mind that intelligent
readers can differ about what they "say" just as intelligent readers for
generations have not agreed on what Cordelia "says."
Beethoven's Fifth "says" something, King Lear "says" something. Coming
out of the academic forest and climbing a hill and looking back can help
"read."
I've not read this list for nearly a year, during which my native nation
has "said" quite a lot. We could use a good writer of history plays
right now, couldn't we?
Best to all,
Kezia Vanmeter Sproat
[4]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Robin Hamilton <robin.hamilton2@btinternet.com>
Date: Thursday, 12 Dec 2002 05:44:47 -0000
Subject: 13.2396 Re: Cordelia
Comment: Re: SHK 13.2396 Re: Cordelia
>T. Hawkes asks:
>
>>Why do people persist in paying more attention to what the characters
>>say than to what the play says?
I think I have may just have gone barking mad.
The (five?) challenges to what Professor Hawkes asks are ludicrous.
They miss the point.
Professor Hawkes is simply right, and everyone else is wrong.
:-(
Robin Hamilton.
{I could uncrumple this much-crumpled thing, but who cares?
I'm sure, if he wished, Prof Hawkes could defend his koan, but if he
wishes to keep schtum, well ... }
The "problem" with Terrence Hawkes's observation isn't that it's wrong,
but that it's a cliché.
OBVIOUSLY every single Shakespearean play is larger than any single
character.
But WHERE do you draw the line?
_Othello_ is to a large degree open to a psychological reading ...
Things break apart, the centre does not hold ...
Lear (as Don Bloom pointed out) is rooted in a fairy-tale structure.
This doesn't make it a fairy-tale pure-and-simple, but ...
Any attempt to read _Lear_, in terms of psychological realism, goes
totally West.
It's not right-or-wrong, but simply the wrong paradigm.
... AND
If you want to contextualise Lear, hey ...
Let's remember 1HIV, Hotspur and Glendower trying to rip the Kingdom
apart -- "the kingdom/venture tripartate" (shadowed by Johnson's _The
Alchemist_...)
rim ram ruf ...
Robin Hamiton
[5]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: David Schalkwyk <schalk@humanities.uct.ac.za>
Date: Thursday, 12 Dec 2002 10:31:02 +0200
Subject: 13.2396 Re: Cordelia
Comment: Re: SHK 13.2396 Re: Cordelia
Far be it for me to defend Terry who, everyone knows, needs no help from
anyone. But it should be clear that he is drawing our attention to the
ways in which focussing on a character's speech can obfuscate issues
that lie beyond the speech of any single person.
Some of the more obvious would be: the basic dramatic reality of
dialogical interaction, in which what is "said" is not the product of a
character but the overall patterning of event and exchange--that is to
say, the play. We tell our students all the time not to assume that any
character expresses what Shakespeare (the play?) is trying to say. Then
there are the ways in which actions speak, sometimes, contrary to the
utterances of characters; the significance and signification of contexts
in which characters' speeches and actions are embedded, and of which
they are often only unconsciously aware (if at all); and, of course, the
great signifying power of language itself, registered through, but not
reducible to, the specific utterances of character. This last has been
a very powerful factor in critisism, from Harry Berger's questions
concerning the unconscious forces that language exposes, to
deconstructive interests in the play of language, to, dare I say it, the
tracing of patterns of imagery throughout the play to reveal what it
(and no character) says.
Terry is merely reminding us that there are more ways of reading a play
than by focussing on the expression of character. But we've all known
this for a very long time.
With greetings from the warm South.
David Schalkwyk
[6]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: C. David Frankel <frankel@arts.usf.edu>
Date: Thursday, 12 Dec 2002 08:57:59 -0500
Subject: 13.2396 Listening to the Play
Comment: RE: SHK 13.2396 Listening to the Play
I'm baffled by the responses to Professor Hawkes' statement. It seems
self-evident that what a play says derives from the totality of what the
characters say, the contexts in which what they say is said, the
dramaturgical methods of the playwright, and, in production, the complex
significations of text, gesture, lights, costumes, space, etc. Of
course, there are many ways of interpreting (and arguing about) what a
play says -- so one way of attending to what a play says is to examine
the rhetoric (broadly construed, not just a study of the use of
rhetorical tropes within the text) of the play.
C. David Frankel
[7]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Terence Hawkes <hawkest@compuserve.com>
Date: Thursday, 12 Dec 2002 08:59:34 -0500
Subject: Cordelia
David Evett asks me to "explain how the play "says" anything except by
way of what the characters . . . say"
Is it really necessary to point out that a good deal of 'King Lear' is
concerned precisely to demonstrate, and deplore, the inadequacies of
speech? And would anyone deny that all plays characteristically employ a
complex array of non-discursive modes operating well beyond the confines
of the words that individual characters utter? In King Lear,
sound-effects, dress, song, music, gesture and -since we're concerned
with Cordelia-silence, are all examples of that. Moreover, one of the
most important components of any play is always supplied by the huge,
unvoiced contribution -confidently ignored by Mr. Evett and others- made
to it by the audience. Its unspoken awareness of events outside the
theatre inevitably colours and covertly completes the performances
within it.
In the case of latter-day audiences, their sense of subsequent
historical events has a powerful, potentially transforming role. Lear's
words 'Know that we have divided/In three our kingdom' may present him,
on the level of 'character', as a foolish old man embarked upon a
disastrous course of action that must, as our colleagues breathlessly
urge, have his daughters rummaging through their intimate 'feelings' and
cudgelling their secret thoughts for our delight. But that reduces the
play to little more than a soap opera, a development whose only surprise
is the eagerness with which those who should know better hasten to
confirm its degradation.
No doubt the pleasures of comfy chit-chat about 'character' -the common
coin of such responses- are considerable. They may even be therapeutic.
But in so far as division, the deliberate subversion of 'nationhood' by
the regular imposition of crass partitions crudely sketched on maps, has
become a central aspect of the alienating politics of our time, then the
play addresses our world in deeply discomfortable terms each time the
character called Lear utters those lines. No one with any sense of the
nature of the tragedies currently engulfing Ireland, or Israel, can be
unaware of that, or of the possibility that the tangled roots of a
British involvement in both may just about be traceable in what this
play now 'says'. Even in the milder climate of the modern United
Kingdom, events have ensured that, since 1997 and 'devolution', 'Lear'
has acquired levels of irony well beyond any words that the King utters.
To reduce the play to what its characters say seems to me wilfully to
ignore the dimensions from which most of its resonance derives. It turns
Shakespeare into Jerry Springer.
Fie!
T. Hawkes
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Hardy M. Cook, editor@shaksper.net
The S H A K S P E R Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net>
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