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JOHN MCWHORTER MAY 24, 2009

Should We Have To Read The Bard Before Hearing Him? More On Shakespeare

BY JOHN MCWHORTER

The responses to my post on Shakespeare have been interesting, and deserve response. Despite the predictable component of, shall we say, disagreement, most seem to agree on one thing: Shakespeare's language requires, at this distance from Elizabethan times, considerable effort to process in real time during performance.

No one would expect modern English speakers to rise to the "challenge" of Beowulf (Old English) or Chaucer (Earlyish Middle). On the other hand, we figure that if the language of a Congreve play of 1700 is somewhat formal and dense at times for modern tastes, it is hardly unreasonable to expect people to just listen closely. Shakespeare is an intermediate case.

Many take as a given that the solution for this intermediate case is simply that one should have read the text beforehand. Certainly, reading, which is slow and allows backtracking and checking helpful notes, allows comprehension of the language.

However, the idea that English speakers ought be expected to read Shakespeare before seeing the plays performed is not a truth but an opinion - a reasonable one, but an opinion, and one with which I disagree.

Opinions, as opinions, will differ. However, I consider a situation where it is expected that all audience members at a production of a Shakespeare play have sat down and pored over the text beforehand unrealistic.

I have read Shakespeare before seeing a production. Yes, it's crucial. The first time I saw Macbeth, I got little out of it for the simple reason that I couldn't catch what was being said most of the time (and as a linguist, and one who has done a fair amount of work on the history of the language, as well as a theatre fan, I was not precisely ill-equipped to "rise to the challenge"). I read the text, and the next time I saw it (that BAM production last year) I was fine.

In the old days it was common for anyone with even pretensions of literacy to regularly peruse Shakespeare editions - Abraham Lincoln's fondness for such is often adduced. However, these are different times. We recede ever more from serious engagement with print / text. It is unclear that this powerful trend can be retarded.

As such, an expectation that one has read a Shakespeare play before seeing it will result, it would seem, in the current situation unchanged: a select few who pride themselves on having done their homework, while the majority sit through the plays genuflectively.

Because Shakespeare is such imperishable material - something I am well familiar with despite the impression some seem to have that I must be deaf to poetry or unable to appreciate challenging writing - I see this as unfortunate, and perhaps even elitist. Countless Americans do not have access to the quality of education that allows previous readings of Shakespeare plays. Is Shakespeare only to be available to the hyperliterate?

I sincerely understand if some would say, perhaps ruefully, yes. However, my preference is that Shakespeare be more widely cherished than that, and that as such, the language be "translated" into the one we speak - available in assorted translations just as Beowulf and Chaucer are. As to Lawrence Levine's chronicle of the treatment of Shakespeare before the late nineteenth century in Highbrow/Lowbrow, a great book, note that in this era Shakespeare was presented not just abridged but reworded, even to the point of changing the plots (the latter which I would not recommend a revival of, but still).

There seems to be an idea that the issue is merely one of "poetry," and perhaps my using August Wilson as an example doesn't make my case. That is poetry of a "spoken" substrate; despite that whole evenings of it wear out many viewers, it may not seem formally intricate enough to compare to the challenge that Shakespeare presents.

Here is perhaps a better example of "poetry," and challenging to boot, that is still comprehensible to we moderns for the simple reason that we know what the words mean - which too often we do not, and can not, in Shakespeare's language.

David Hirson’s La Bête of 1991 was set in seventeenth-century France and composed entirely in elegant, overeducated verse. In this scene, Prince Conti has just passingly coined the term tête-à-tête-à-tête based on tête-à-tête, and the following dialogue ensues from the reaction of the unctuous pseudointellectual Valere:

VALERE:A “TÊTE-À-TÊTE-À-TÊTE”!!
MY LORD, YOU'RE BRILLIANT!!
There’s not a wit more nimble or resilient
Than that which you possess! Not now or ever!
A “tête-à-tête-à-tête”:
(Laughing and applauding.)

PRINCE: O, very clever!

Bravo, my Sovereign! Daunting is the ease
With which you weave linguistic tapestries!
Astounding is your skill at verbal play: Each sentence seems an intricate ballet
Where pronouns leap, and gerunds pirouette!
That phrase, again...?

PRINCE: A tête-à-tête-à-tête...

VALERE:A “TÊTE-À-TÊTE-À-TÊTE"! IT'S TOO DELICIOUS!
My Lord, thou art so...

(Searching his mind for the perfect word.) ..what? ...so...

(Positively blurting it out.) ... LOVALITIOUS!!...
A word I’ve just created on the fly!
For “LOVALITIOUS” seems to typify
(As common metaphors would fail to do)
The deep-down ... LOVALITIOUSNESS of you.
Yet were I bound by ordinary speech,
Thy every phrase I’d liken to a peach
Which thou hast coaxed (no mortal can say how)
To ripeness on the philologic bough;
Yes, like a shepherd to linguistic herds,
Thou hast -- in short, my liege -- a way with words.

Like Shakespearean dialogue, this language is replete with recherché references (tête-à-tête, gerunds, philologic), inverted syntax (“Thy every phrase I'd liken to a peach”), and archaic word forms like thou hast.

Two-and-a-half hours of this type of dialogue certainly requires a close attention which Neil Simon does not--there is a challenge to be risen to. When I saw this play I had to sit at the edge of my seat the whole time. But the effort paid off in complete comprehension. The problem with Shakespeare runs much deeper than the fact that it is poetry.

I know: Hirson’s language is hardly intended to limn eternal truths or stand as aesthetically profound. The structural difference between La Bête and our colloquial language is similar to that between Shakespeare’s dramatic syntax and how people spoke on the streets in his time, but then, with Shakespeare there are also words’ meanings and the synergy of their conglomeration.

Upon which there remains the simple problem that so much of Shakespeare’s poetry is unavailable to us not because it’s “challenging” but because it’s not in the language we speak – the words’ meanings have changed in ways that bar us from understanding.

In Twelfth Night, Viola observes:

This fellow is wise enough to play the fool; And to do that well craves a kind of wit.
He must observe their mood on whom he jests,
The quality of persons, and the time,
And, like the haggard, check at every feather
That comes before his eye. This is a practice
As full of labour as a wise man’s art:
For folly that he wisely shows is fit;
But wise men, folly-fall’n, quite taint their wit.

A natural assumption is that Viola is talking about wit in the sense that we know: Noel Coward, Hepburn and Tracy. However, in Shakespeare’s day, wit simply meant wisdom or knowledge, and what Viola is pointing out is the irony that playing the fool can sometimes require one to be knowledgeable. After all, Shakespeare wouldn’t be much of a genius if he were simply telling us that playing the fool means being funny, would he? Similarly, in the last line, Shakespeare is pointing up the fact that wise men can have lapses of wisdom, surely a more interesting observation than that smart men often aren’t funny!

The story of wit is an ordinary one of language change. Witan meant “to know” but cnawan was a competitor and happened to win out, today surviving as know, leaving witan and its relations like wit by the wayside. The meaning of wit atrophied from “knowledge” into today’s meaning of “humor informed by cleverness (i.e. a kind of knowledge).”

Yes, some might say, but the “knowledge” meaning of wit isn’t completely lost to us today. Not only does it survive in the frozen expression to wit, but also in the old expression mother wit, which refers to innate common sense, not a mother who glides around quoting Oscar Wilde. Nor does keep your wits about you mean to retain a stock of quotations from 30 Rock.

But today, this is the peripheral meaning of the word -- not one person in five thousand, asked what wit was, would say “knowledge” rather than “humor.” And as Viola makes this speech we don’t have time to search our mental archives for archaic layers of meaning, nor do we bring a dictionary to check.

Say that audiences should come to a performance of Twelfth Night having learned the archaeology of the word wit from the footnotes of a printed edition – plus that of hundreds of other words used in the play (what’s a haggard? what does Viola mean by fit?) – and I say that you have presented an opinion, and only that.

A second opinion is that there should be versions of these plays couched in English comprehensible without engagement in junior scholarship.

=

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131 comments

I think many or most of the objections to the last article were from interpreting your argument as being for the substitution/replacement of Shakespearean English productions with contemporary English ones.  I thought you did a good job - in this entry as well as last - making the point that Shakespeare's language is essentially foreign to us, but I don't think you've allayed the concerns that translations would supplant original language performances or that understanding Shakespeare would lose its allure as an aspiration.

I don't know if the first worry can be addressed; it's an open question whether translations would eat the lunch of or drive people to original language productions.  The second worry seems to me to lack faith in the Bard, though: Shakespeare right now is mostly revered by the upper middle class, but if more people could experience his genius then maybe studying Shakespeare would look less like an affectation or social striving and more like an enjoyable nerdy hobby.

- Simon Greenwood

May 24, 2009 at 9:50pm

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Okay.  I will abandon my first gut  over-reaction.

This fellow is wise enough to play the fool;

And that done well requires that he be wise.

He must observe the moods of those he’ll tease,

How jokes will sit with each, suit the event,

And like a hawk eye every move they make.

This is not easy work, but a master’s art:

For folly he wisely shows is his fair game,

But wise men, fallen to folly, do taint their name.

It is very difficult to do, that's for sure.  There is always the problem of what level should be established.

I do get hung up in what Simon Greenwood wrote: but if more people could experience his genius then maybe studying Shakespeare would look less like an affectation or social striving and more like an enjoyable nerdy hobby.

But how would realization of a project for just one play look like?  

Thanks for this second contribution.  

- Ken Rasmussen

May 26, 2009 at 7:50am

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The best way for students to approach Shakespeare?  I had some success with Bronx students by starting off with story.  I taught MUCH ADO with an emphasis on its being a foundation for current romantic comedies.  OTHELLO was easy for them to get into because 1) their school was producing it so some of their friends were in it and 2) the racial angle was an easy hook.  Once they're hooked on the stories, then the best is to give them access to dynamic performances.  Shakespeare's plays were written to be played, not read.  In performance, they might not get the meaning of all the language, but, armed with an understanding of the narrative, they can pretty much follow what's going on.

The best way to teach Shakespeare?  Have them act it.  There have been a few documentaries on the connection prisoners have made putting up Shakespeare.  I think THIS AMERICAN LIFE did a program on a group of prisoners working on HAMLET one act a year.  And SHAKESPEARE BEHIND BARS is a powerful look at a group undertaking THE TEMPEST.  They, of course, connected to the idea of Prospero's island as a prison.

As proficient with language as he was, his continuing presence in our lives is as much due to the ability with which he created opportunities for actors to create compelling behavior.  (This is why I discount any theory on who Shakespeare was that contradicts the idea that he was an actor.  He knows stuff that only people with acting experience really understand.)  

- dgsweet

May 26, 2009 at 12:31pm

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I strongly intuit that asking theater-goers to open their ears to the (currently) peripheral meanings of a word such as "wit" is to open their ears to greater possibilities of expression and meaning in their own lives, and this is one of the things that art does.  To edit out difficulty or unfamiliarity is to constrict meaning and potentiality; to always 'update' language is to follow an ever-narrowing, and fading, path into the thickets of increasing inexpressibility.  I want to shine search lights into the thick tangles beyond my immediate reach.  Don't you?

I also strongly believe you are underestimating audiences.  No, Shakespeare's language isn't going to reach everyone.  But, that's true of every playwright's language, including Wilson's.  The theater is not a place where actor merely talks TO audiences; it's where actors and audiences talk WITH each other.  The audience has to participate.  Asking it to do a little work is neither elitist (on the contrary, as a matter of fact!) nor didactic.  The theater is NOT film nor t.v., thank god (let me hasten to add, I love film and t.v.!) Those mediums rely on a certain degree on the audience's passive reception.  Theater relies on it's active engagement.

I also remain shocked at your apparent inability to hear the necessary relationship between form and meaning in Shakespeare, not to mention the rich relationship between local reference and expression (who was it that pointed out that much of Dante's greatness lies in his references to obscure Italian political and social, even personal and idiosyncratic, conflicts of the day?)  The peculiarity and distance of Elizabethan culture, as we find it through Shakespeare, both helps us see what we are and what we aren't, today.  And, very frequently, those very differences highlight our underlying similarities.

Lastly, you continue to ignore how popular Shakespeare is today.  Festivals and small productions abound.  SOMEONE out there is not failing to understand the essentials of Macbeth on his or her first viewing.  Not every viewer walks in with the budding literary critic's need to sum up their experiences in tight narrative summaries.  Many of them are content to let the experience MOVE them, despite and because they don't understand everything.  I suggest you pay more attention to the breadth of audience experiences than you seem to have done.  If that sounds elitist or snotty, I can only answer that your lack of aspiration for audiences is far, far more elitist.

David Millstone,

Actor

- turnipauto

May 26, 2009 at 12:57pm

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"I have read Shakespeare before seeing a production. Yes, it's crucial. The first time I saw Macbeth, I got little out of it for the simple reason that I couldn't catch what was being said most of the time (and as a linguist, and one who has done a fair amount of work on the history of the language, as well as a theatre fan, I was not precisely ill-equipped to "rise to the challenge"). I read the text, and the next time I saw it (that BAM production last year) I was fine."

I agree and disagree with this. On the one hand, the plays are intensely kinetic experiences that deserve to be experienced on their own terms the first time through, i.e. in a theater, within a two hour window or so.

On the other, the fact that somebody with the background listed above had difficulty getting into Shakespearean language is a testament to its complexity. It's worth noting, however, that the issue here probably isn't just the distance of time: the language would have been odd and difficult to a seventeenth-century audience of Macbeth in any case. Macbeth is a weird, incredibly complicated play.

The criticism of Stephen Booth (full disclosure: I had him as a thesis adviser as an undergraduate) is worth reading on this point and a related one: the plays are probably designed to be impossible to contain intellectually in one setting. If you had total awareness at the time of production of the intricacies of Hamlet, for instance, you would probably notice items such as the fact that the "to be or not to be" speech makes reference to death as a metaphoric "undiscovered country," despite the fact that the plot of Hamlet revolves around the return of a ghost. Similarly, you would probably notice that the character of Gloucester in King Lear is three different characters from the first scene to the second to the rest of the play (cruel rake, old fool, pure victim, respectively). And if you understood the ways in which the "tommorow" speech in Macbeth is a incredibly dense conceptual blend, you would see it in terms of its discrete parts instead of a continuum and likely  rob yourself of its full experience.

Shakespeare plays, in other words, are designed to be overwhelming; their language is merely one part of this. Certainly they also reward close readings. But the danger with reading the plays on your own terms before you see them is that you may start to focus too much on their stitching.

- aazlant

May 26, 2009 at 5:52pm

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I disagree with the "elitist" point.  I fail to understand how reading, say, a "No Fear Shakespeare" modern translation of the play side-by-side with the original -- which is available for free online -- is an activity reserved for the "hyperliterate."  It requires a small investment of time.  It does not require any special intelligence or knowledge or "junior scholarship."  You could also just read a well-annotated edition.  It's not "scholarship" to read "wit -- footnote -- intelligence."  The editor has already done the necessary scholarship.  Reading the play itself requires a bit more concentration than reading a modern translation or a Cliffs Notes-type summary, but it would acclimate you to the poetic style that Kent Richmond's modern translations leave intact and that is, perhaps even more than the unfamiliar meanings of some words, a source of difficulty for the ordinarily literate theater-goer.  Now, you say that expecting non-elite-types to take the time to read the play or a basic modern translation is unrealistic.  Perhaps, but, as long as we're acknowledging reality, let's not do so selectively.   It's also unrealistic to expect a great many non-elite types to go to the theater at all, whether it's Shakespeare or Mamet (see, in his day, "fairy" meant ....) or The Philadelphia Story, unless it's some piece of crap musical.  Anyone who knows what "tete-a-tete" means is more than literate enough to do the little but of homework that would completely solve the problem of some of the original words having different meanings that you are unlikely to pick up from context.  And if you are not literate enough to do such homework -- meaning you are illiterate -- you probably won't get Richmond's translations anyway.

But I continue to maintain that even that little bit of study is not "crucial."  Yes, it is desirable.  I was inspired by this conversation to read Twelfth Night before seeing it next weekend.  (I thought I was seeing it last weekend, but I had my dates confused, and I was seeing Harold Pinter's "Old Times" instead, which is much harder to understand, though not the words.)  Now, I probably would not have intuited immediately that Viola is talking about wit in the sense of intelligence, but I would have understood her to be praising the fool and his profession and I would have been right about that.  I recently saw a production of Macbeth for which I did no homework.  I understood it well and enjoyed it.  There was one minor bit of exposition I didn't catch -- a character was pretending to behave in a certain way, and the point passed me by -- but that was not a significant hurdle.  In reading Twelfth Night, I'm somewhat surprised, in fact, by how much I do understand without help from the annotations, and I do not imagine myself to be "hyperliterate."

But, you might say, even if we grant that reading the play beforehand is not necessary to get the gist and even enjoy yourself, and even if we grant that reading beforehand is a minor imposition, why have any imposition at all?  Why not just fix the problem of the words we don't understand at the performance level?  Well, it really depends.  I can imagine some "translations" that wouldn't bother me and others that would.  I see no reason to change things like 'tis or thee or thou or hast or art and so on.  We all know what those words mean, and changing them would sound, to my ear, anachronistic.  We might change "wherefore" -- Romeo, via Dave Barry:  "I art down here!  Throw me down the car keys." -- but we will have altered a famous line.

However, I take the point that there are other things we just won't get.  More difficult, for example, in that little speech from Viola than "wit" -- which you more-or-less get from context -- is that part about a "haggard" who "cheques at every feather."  Huh?  There, you would have to do a more creative translation.  Same with the early play on the words "hart" and "heart," where you would have to know, in order to get it, that a hart is a stag.  Once again, a *creative* translation would be required that, because it is creative, alters the original meaning, even if slightly.  There is nothing *wrong* with a creative translation -- all translation is creative -- but you might prefer to take it in without that interpretive step standing between you and the original expression.  For example, non-English speakers will understand a foreign translation of Shakespeare well enough, but they might *prefer* to read it or hear it in the original, provided they understood it, just as Russian literature enthusiasts insist that to really get it you have to read it in the original Russian.

Moreover, would the translation go beyond what is necessary and also take away from the beauty and power of the original poetry that you *do* get, even without study?  My edition of Hamlet has only a couple of annotations to the "to be or not to be" speech.  You have to know, for example, that a "bodkin" is a dagger.  But the rest is well within our reach.  That's one of my fears -- that in a rush to declare Shakespeare's English a foreign language -- when, in fact, it is not anywhere near as difficult as Chaucer's English, which *is* a foreign language -- we will go too far and sap the language we both like and understand of some of its vitality.

I have not yet read Richmond's efforts, although it is on my list.  Part of the problem with this discussion is that we don't really know what we're arguing about.  "Translation" could mean changing the occasional word or reference -- perhaps a few on each page; it could mean aggressive changes that nonetheless retain the poetic aspect, which, I gather is what Richmond is doing, it could mean abandoning the poetic aspect to make all the lines easily understood on casual hearing, or it could mean abandoning the actual script altogether and doing a thoroughly modern update of the story like a movie remake.  I am less skeptical, I suppose, of the first and last options  than the middle ones, but I never said that we shouldn't have the middle ones or that merely doing them is somehow wrong.

Which leads to the other respect in which we don't know what we're arguing about:  As someone else has already pointed out, what place does McWhorter imagine such translations should have in education and culture?  Most of us took McWhorter to be proposing that we consign original Shakespeare to the same place original Chaucer resides today -- that is, read by virtually nobody.  The reason we thought that is because that is what McWhorter said.  Perhaps McWhorter did not mean to go quite so far and let a rhetorical flourish obscure his real intent.  Perhaps he is suggesting something like, well, let's have no artificial constraints put upon projects such as Richmond's -- including rushes to judgment -- let's try it out in performance, let's see what people think, etc.  It's hard to argue with that.  I see no reason not to teach original Shakespeare in school, however, where the purpose is to learn how to concentrate, read, and get some intellectual exercise, and, once again, the annotations are there for those occasional words and references you don't know.

- jhildner

May 27, 2009 at 2:57pm

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"No one would expect modern English speakers to rise to the "challenge" of Beowulf (Old English) or Chaucer (Earlyish Middle). On the other hand, we figure that if the language of a Congreve play of 1700 is somewhat formal and dense at times for modern tastes, it is hardly unreasonable to expect people to just listen closely. Shakespeare is an intermediate case."

I believe that McWhorter is confusing two separate issues.

The first issue is the one of language change. Some of the words Shakespeare used have undergone changes in meaning.

However, you can't compare such changes to the language of Beowulf since here we are talking about two different languages.

Chaucer's English while closer to modern English than to Old English is still almost a foreign language. To read him once has to learn the pronunciation system of the Middle English where the vowels are still pronounced in the continental way.

The A in April is closer to the A in Apple than to the A in Able.

With Chaucer than the difficulty is that the language sounds as if it were a foreign tongue.  Not so with Shakespeare.

However, there is a difficulty with Shakespeare which McWhorter didn’t address that is as important as is the question of syntax and word meaning. This is my second point.

Shakespeare is difficult because of the playful way he uses rhetoric and figures of speech.  Any translation of Shakespeare into a foreign language that is accurate like that of Pushkin or  Pasternak in Russian will try to keep the same dialectical interplay of sound and meaning and reproduce the puns as well as the figures of speech.

No translation of Shakespeare into modern English will be able to avoid a similar challenge. All the parallel texts I have seen tend to flatten the language. They don’t make Shakespeare easier they falsify his meaning.

Moreover, the analogy with translations of Shakespeare into a foreign language can only go so far since those foreign speakers read him translation know that they are nor reading the original.

A Spanish translator of Shakespeare will want to make him sound like a 17th c Spanish poet. Make him sound like Gongora. Gongora is one of the most difficult poets in any language. (Gongorismo has come come to mean both baroque and very difficult verse.)

en.wikipedia.org/.../Luis_de_G%C3%B3ngora

Ask any educated Spaniard what he or she thinks of “updating Gongora.”

Finally, I would compare Shakespeare’s conceptual difficulty to that of Proust. Proust can be difficult not because his language is difficulty but because of the figures of speech as well as the rhetorical stunts he uses in his prose.

It’s not the length of the Proustian sentence alone that’s the problem but the rhetoric he used, his negations and qualifications that you have to keep in mind while reading these long sentences.

There was recently an attempt to retranslate Proust into “easy English” by breaking up the sentences. To do so however one falsifies the original. The same would be true for Shakespeare.

Translate him into modern English and what you have is not Shakespeare but a poor imitation of the bard. It’s the difference between seeing animals in their natural habitat and seeing them being fed in a zoo.

Who needs to be forced fed tame Shakespeare?  What is the point?

And I haven’t even mentioned James Joyce. Do we want to dumb him down too?

- jacksondyer

May 27, 2009 at 6:49pm

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What he (jacksondyer) said.

- turnipauto

May 27, 2009 at 8:25pm

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There is also a discussion on this issue goint on here:

www.thevalve.org/.../mcwhorter_translate_shakespeare_into_intelligible_english

- jacksondyer

May 27, 2009 at 10:13pm

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'Is Shakespeare only to be available to the hyperliterate?'

Over the years, I've had a few girlfriends who tried to watch NFL football with me.  They'd stare silently for a while, and then start asking questions. "Why do some guys line up together, but others are behind them?"  "Why did that guy in the stripes throw a yellow handkerchief into the air?"  "How come there are prostitutes on the sidelines, all wearing the same outfit?"  I would dutifully attempt to explain downs, blitzes, zone defenses...but, in every case, they would get up off the couch after the first quarter and wander away, never to return (to the game, that is).

I guess I'm just hyperfootballate.

- porkido

May 27, 2009 at 11:36pm

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I like your comments on John McWhorter's piece a lot, jacksondyer. Chaucer's language is almost foreign to us. Chaucer wrote at at time when English was much closer to its West Germanic roots (English having devolved from Anglo-Frisian dialects) than it was in 1600, when Shakespeare flourished. As Mr. McWhorter noted, there are a lot of archaisms in Shakespeare's plays but I still prefer the originals to bastardized versions of them. Sure, it requires some work to ferret out the archaic meanings, so there is nothing like a good annotated edition of whatever play by the Bard that you are interested in. The real novices might want to start with Charles and Mary Lamb. I don't think that is especially elitist to wish for audiences that have read through at least some of Shakespeare's plays before attending theatrical productions of them. People spend endless hours immersed in our ghastly pop culture, which is, I know, a pet peeve of yours (and mine, too). Sixteen years ago, I recall visiting a neighbor, who, at the time, was a stay-at-home mother of two elementary-age school children, a boy and a girl. She, her husband, and myself were watching television and - my memory has faded a bit here - I believe there was a quiz question on who the then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was. I blurted out "William Rehnquist" and the lady said that she didn't have the time to learn the composition of the Supreme Court. This was particularly hilarious because she watched hours of TV a day, including numerous soap operas. I have lost contact with this family but I don't suppose this lady is reading Shakespeare today any more than she was then, or that she knows that the current Chief Justice is John Roberts. So, right off, a reader will not know that a "bare bodkin" is an unsheathed stiletto but he or she can learn that. There is still, in these latter centuries, debate on the precise meaning of that locution. An 1896 article in the New York Times contends that "bare" means "mere". And so it goes. To me, the power of the plays come through and one can always hone the meanings of the archaisms by a little study. For sheer beauty and power, there is nothing like reading Hamlet and Macbeth and Othello and King Lear. My advice to people is, immerse yourself in the plays and then focus on educating yourselves in the technicalities of an English that is now four hundred years old.

- liberal reformer

May 28, 2009 at 5:06pm

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Thanks LR, I will reply shortly.

- jacksondyer

May 28, 2009 at 5:21pm

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liberal reformer said:  “I like your comments on John McWhorter's piece a lot, jacksondyer. Chaucer's language is almost foreign to us. Chaucer wrote at at time when English was much closer to its West Germanic roots (English having devolved from Anglo-Frisian dialects) than it was in 1600, when Shakespeare flourished.”

That and the fact that English a few generations prior to Shakespeare underwent a momentous pronunciation shift which changed the way vowels were to be articulated.

“As Mr. McWhorter noted, there are a lot of archaisms in Shakespeare's plays but I still prefer the originals to bastardized versions of them. Sure, it requires some work to ferret out the archaic meanings, so there is nothing like a good annotated edition of whatever play by the Bard that you are interested in.”

Yes annotated editions or glossaries that one can study are preferable to “translations” into modern English which will necessarily flatten the language and take away the rich tapestry of puns.

“To me, the power of the plays come through and one can always hone the meanings of the archaisms by a little study. For sheer beauty and power, there is nothing like reading Hamlet and Macbeth and Othello and King Lear. My advice to people is, immerse yourself in the plays and then focus on educating yourselves in the technicalities of an English that is now four hundred years old.”

I agree.

There seems to be a built in prejudice for spontaneity and against informed attention which means prior study. This I take it is McWhorter’s whole point.

- jacksondyer

May 29, 2009 at 10:26am

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liberal reformer said:  “I like your comments on John McWhorter's piece a lot, jacksondyer. Chaucer's language is almost foreign to us. Chaucer wrote at at time when English was much closer to its West Germanic roots (English having devolved from Anglo-Frisian dialects) than it was in 1600, when Shakespeare flourished.”

That and the fact that English a few generations prior to Shakespeare underwent a momentous pronunciation shift which changed the way vowels were to be articulated.

“As Mr. McWhorter noted, there are a lot of archaisms in Shakespeare's plays but I still prefer the originals to bastardized versions of them. Sure, it requires some work to ferret out the archaic meanings, so there is nothing like a good annotated edition of whatever play by the Bard that you are interested in.”

Yes annotated editions or glossaries that one can study are preferable to “translations” into modern English which will necessarily flatten the language and take away the rich tapestry of puns.

“To me, the power of the plays come through and one can always hone the meanings of the archaisms by a little study. For sheer beauty and power, there is nothing like reading Hamlet and Macbeth and Othello and King Lear. My advice to people is, immerse yourself in the plays and then focus on educating yourselves in the technicalities of an English that is now four hundred years old.”

I agree.

There seems to be a built in prejudice for spontaneity and against informed attention which means prior study. This I take it is McWhorter’s whole point.

- jacksondyer

May 29, 2009 at 10:27am

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Jack, thanks for the link to the valve if only for the reason that they posted  some of the brilliant musings of one Hasman, who writes and thinks identically to the way I do.

- basman

May 29, 2009 at 4:14pm

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Damn, why didn't they quote jbildner?

- jhildner

May 29, 2009 at 5:05pm

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Sure Itzik.

We should read something together, here or elsewhere.

- jacksondyer

May 29, 2009 at 10:21pm

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Thank you for your thoughtful comments, jacksondyer.

- liberal reformer

May 29, 2009 at 10:44pm

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...Damn, why didn't they quote jbildner...

Then you'd be named for a first generation Jewsih developer whose Yiddish was part and parcel with his English.

- basman

May 29, 2009 at 10:49pm

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...We should read something together, here or elsewhere...

love to

- basman

May 29, 2009 at 10:50pm

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I'd like ot read some literature on Utopia and utopian themes beginning with Thomas More's Utopia.

Interested?

- jacksondyer

May 30, 2009 at 12:41pm

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Jack, I was going to suggest the wit and wisdom of Slim Shady, focusing on the mother issue years.

But yours suggestion is better.

So definitely interested.

Give me some time to buy/get the book, read it and we can go from there in any manner you want to suggest.

I probably need 10 days or 2 weeks or so.

Does that work for you?

We can here our site for it: blogs.tnr.com/.../should-we-have-to-read-the-bard-before-hearing-him-more-on-shakespeare.aspx

- basman

May 31, 2009 at 11:00am

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yes, and yes, Basman.

The site is fine. I'll book mark it. And the time fram is good also.

- jacksondyer

May 31, 2009 at 4:34pm

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yes, and yes, Basman.

The site is fine. I'll book mark it. And the time fram is good also.

- jacksondyer

May 31, 2009 at 4:35pm

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Good.

Once I'm good to go I'll let you know and we can figure out a sensible way to proceed.

- basman

May 31, 2009 at 6:49pm

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"Once I'm good to go I'll let you know and we can figure out a sensible way to proceed."

Sounds good.

- jacksondyer

June 1, 2009 at 2:18pm

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Once again as I read the arguments against translation of Shakespeare, I see all sorts of claims but not much evidence to back them up. Has anyone cited a single study that measures how much we comprehend of an extended discourse in 400-year-old-English? I have done an informal, unpublished, one, and the results show that even English majors in their last year of college are operating at the level of an intermediate second language learner when reading 400 year-old-English on a familiar subject. If it takes 10 years of regular study and exposure to master a second language (by which I mean the ability to eavesdrop on native speaker conversations with full comprehension), then we are in about year five when it comes to Shakespeare.

Here is another thought for all of you to consider. Maybe those of you who find Shakespeare reasonably intelligible are gifted in this area. You pick up second languages and dialects quickly and have a better than average ability to hold a stretch of language in your head as you listen and parse it while hearing what is coming next. I know I can’t do that for more than a few minutes at a stretch. For that reason, I struggle to understand live Shakespeare in the original language even when the play is one I have translated. I soon grow tired and my mind wanders. Some sophisticated research might shed some light on individual differences in this area.

Some posts have toyed with the notion that only the hyperliterate can follow Shakespeare. Certainly extended exposure to language increases comprehension, but many of us who are hyperliterate (I taught English for 33 years before retiring last year) also struggle with Shakespeare. I simply cannot process difficult material language in a distant dialect unless I proceed very slowly and can ask questions and demand repetition of something I did not catch. Eavesdropping on native speaker conversations in 400-year-old English is simply beyond my ability. And believe me, many other hyperliterate types feel the same.

It is important to recognize that comprehension involves more than archaic vocabulary and meaning changes. Teachers already warn about “false friends, those words we recognize but misinterpret because Shakespeare meant something different by them. McWhorter discussion of “wit” concerns a false friend.

But vocabulary issues go far beyond that. Linguists, aided by advances in corpus linguistics, have made progress in understanding how words form partnerships. One area we expect comprehension difficulties involves lexical phrases. A lexical phrase is a “frozen” stretch of language that can be used as a piece of a sentence. Shakespeare made constant use of lexical phrases, a good many of them now centuries out of fashion. Some examples are “in fine” (to conclude), “make that good” (explain that), “say’st me so” (you don’t mean that), “by mine honest” (truly), and hundreds more. Naturally, our understanding suffers because these phrases are essential for linking ideas and showing speaker attitude.

Less obvious are the looser word partnerships that linguists call collocations. Collocations are much more numerous than lexical phrases, yet knowledge of collocations is essential for speedy processing of language because they make much of what we say more predictable. Take, for example, what you know about the word “evidence.” The noun “evidence” partners with the noun “piece” as in “a piece of evidence,” with verbs such as “present, collect, find, hear, and provide”, and adjectives such as “convincing, damaging, incriminating, strong, and anecdotal.” The sentence “She presented several pieces of convincing evidence” sounds quite natural to us, and we can quickly process it. But what if I said it this way: "She transmitted multiple slices of inducing evidence." Though quite grammatical and certainly possible, the sentence seems strange, and it takes us much, much longer to process and think about what it might mean.

Shakespeare is difficult today partly because so many of his word partnerships seem strange. The word “great,” for instance, takes on unexpected partners in Shakespeare’s plays: great persuasion, great preservation, great of birth, a great natural, great leaves fall, great creation, great prediction, and great aspect. These strange partners complicate our ability to determine which sense of the word Shakespeare intended. When he used "great," did he mean gigantic, large, extensive, plentiful, high-ranking, extraordinary, chief, or main? Naturally, our comprehension suffers, and we need much more processing time. To develop an eye for these, take a look at a passage from Shakespeare and see how many false friends and strange partners you can find (I found 29 in the first 33 lines of “Othello,” plus another 9 archaic words).

And here’s another difficulty. So many words have been added to the language since Shakespeare’s day that we have to suffer through what must subconsciously seem like circumlocutions. Shakespeare did not have the vocabulary to make this sentence: “The adult adapted adequately to academic culture.” No doubt he could have expressed the thought but in a much different way because the only words he likely knew were “the” and “to” and perhaps “culture” in its farming sense of “cultivation.” Communicating with Shakespeare would be a challenge for an educated speaker today. And he would struggle to communicate with us. We are crossing a much wider linguistic divide than we realize.

I hope this lesson in linguistics gives doubters food for thought.

Kent Richmond

- kcrichmond

June 1, 2009 at 8:56pm

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I don't know, kcrichmond.

I have taught myself Spanish and leraned French and am teaching myself Hebrew right now.

I feel quite comfortable  watching Spanish and French films without subtitles and look forward to seeing them.

In learning a language wyou have to spend at least three months speaking and hearing only that language.  After that it gets much easier.

When I went to France I knew no French avoided English speakers and had to learn the language or not be able to ask were the rest room was.

I  never found Shakespeare as difficult as a foreign  language.  

Here is a random sample of Shakespeare. How difficult is this to comprehend even without a glossary?

Julius Caesar

Act 2:

SCENE III. A street near the Capitol.

Enter ARTEMIDORUS, reading a paper

ARTEMIDORUS

'Caesar, beware of Brutus; take heed of Cassius;

come not near Casca; have an eye to Cinna, trust not

Trebonius: mark well Metellus Cimber: Decius Brutus

loves thee not: thou hast wronged Caius Ligarius.

There is but one mind in all these men, and it is

bent against Caesar. If thou beest not immortal,

look about you: security gives way to conspiracy.

The mighty gods defend thee! Thy lover,

'ARTEMIDORUS.'

Here will I stand till Caesar pass along,

And as a suitor will I give him this.

My heart laments that virtue cannot live

Out of the teeth of emulation.

If thou read this, O Caesar, thou mayst live;

If not, the Fates with traitors do contrive.

- jacksondyer

June 1, 2009 at 11:33pm

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Another point:

__________________

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

__________________________

This may be dense in its meanings but clearly the language is accessible.

- basman

June 2, 2009 at 1:26am

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Jacksondyer,

You confirm my point. You are gifted at languages. I could never achieve that much in a few months (and my long years as a language teacher confirm that such abilities are truly rare among my students).

I never said Shakespeare is as difficult as a foreign language. I hope you are not purposely misunderstanding me. My comments suggest we have a five-year head start on a second language learner. I chose those words carefully based on my background in second language assessment.

As long as we are cherry-picking scenes, how about this one from King Lear 3.1? John McWhorter found it for an earlier article he wrote.

KENT

                                   Sir, I do know you;

And dare, upon the warrant of my note,

Commend a dear thing to you. There is division,

Although as yet the face of it be cover'd

With mutual cunning, 'twixt Albany and Cornwall;

Who have,--as who have not, that their great stars

Throne and set high?--servants, who seem no less,

Which are to France the spies and speculations

Intelligent of our state; what hath been seen,

Either in snuffs and packings of the dukes;

Or the hard rein which both of them have borne

Against the old kind king; or something deeper,

Whereof, perchance, these are but furnishings;--

But, true it is, from France there comes a power

Into this scatter'd kingdom; who already,

Wise in our negligence, have secret feet

In some of our best ports, and are at point

To show their open banner.

Even though this clip helps to explain Cordelia's presence in England, many productions omit the scene because when presented up to speed, it is incomprehensible. Or how about this one?

Juliet

O, Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?

Nobody (and I mean nobody) interprets it correctly without a gloss, even with more than 3 months exposure to the language. I remember a humorous TV commercial from the 1960s or 70s where a nearsighted Juliet utters the line until she is fitted with glasses. Now she can see where Romeo is.

Even the most educated among us forget that "wherefore" means "why." We still have the phrase “the why and the wherefore”, but it is now so fossilized that we can no longer draw on it to help us interpret novel encounters with the word. The line is thus truncated to “Where are you Romeo?” Of course, this is a major error. Juliet most certainly knows where Romeo lives. Instead she is asking why her true love has to be Romeo, an enemy. Misled by a “false friend,” theatergoers see Juliet as a dreamy, lovesick adolescent when in fact her first thoughts go directly to the source of her conflict—the hatred between their families. Juliet is not pining (like Romeo's silly longing for an unattainable Rosaline). She is frustrated and desperate. The audience, by mistranslating, is missing an important distinction and doing Juliet and Shakespeare an injustice. And that is why most annotated versions provide a gloss for “wherefore.” Stage productions, unfortunately, provide no gloss.

Here is the sad paradox that the “we-must-preserve-Shakespeare crowd” faces: Not translating Shakespeare guarantees that Shakespeare is either mistranslated or simply discarded, as is common with Lear 3.1.

I leave you with another of my favorite audience-taxing passages. Try tackling this baby after a long day at work, a full bladder, and 1500 lines into the play.

Othello

....If I do prove her haggard,

Though that her jesses were my dear heartstrings,

I'd whistle her off and let her down the wind,

To pray at fortune. Haply, for I am black

And have not those soft parts of conversation

That chamberers have, or for I am declined

Into the vale of years,--yet that's not much--

She's gone.

Desdemona haggard? Haply..she’s gone? How much longer to the intermission?

Kent Richmond

- kcrichmond

June 2, 2009 at 3:22am

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Basman,

Your are entirely correct. That passage still works today, perhaps because its fame has kept its language current. In my translation of Macbeth, I made just two minor changes. I changed "lighted" to "lit for" and "that" to "who." This passage is remarkably clear, but clearly an exception. In my five translations, I can think of no other passages of this length that required so few changes. Interestingly, I had a miserable time with the two lines that precede the ones you have quoted. Scholars cannot agree on what they mean. "She should have died hereafter./There would have been time for such a word."

By the way, I considered changing "petty" since Shakespeare's "petty" is not the same as our "petty," but I had trouble maintaining the scansion and alliteration when I tried more accurate words. So "petty" it is.

Yes, I provide alliteration whenever Shakespeare does. In his mature plays, he mostly uses alliteration with evil or smooth-talking characters, rarely with the more honest ones . So I see it as a necessary effect that  I must maintain. As you can see, I take all changes quite seriously, sometimes brooding over them for months before I decide. I am in no hurry and face no deadlines.

Kent Richmond

- kcrichmond

June 2, 2009 at 4:12am

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krichmond: totally arbitrary pick from a play I never read opening of act 2 scene 2 ( I can't even remember)

from Cymbeline

SCENE II.

IMOGEN'S bedchamber in CYMBELINE'S palace:

a trunk in one corner of it.

[IMOGEN in bed [reading]; a LADY [attending.]]

IMOGEN.

Who's there? My woman Helen?

LADY.

Please you, madam.

IMOGEN.

What hour is it?

LADY.

Almost midnight, madam.

IMOGEN.

I have read three hours then. Mine eyes are weak.

Fold down the leaf where I have left. To bed.

Take not away the taper, leave it burning;

And if thou canst awake by four o' the clock,

I prithee, call me. Sleep hath seiz'd me wholly.

[Exit LADY.]

To your protection I commend me, gods.

From fairies and the tempters of the night

Guard me, beseech ye.

[Sleeps. IACHIMO comes from the trunk.]

IACHIMO.

The crickets sing, and man's o'erlabour'd sense

Repairs itself by rest. Our Tarquin thus

Did softly press the rushes, ere he waken'd

The chastity he wounded. Cytherea!

How bravely thou becom'st thy bed, fresh lily,

And whiter than the sheets! That I might touch!

But kiss one kiss! Rubies unparagon'd,

How dearly they do't! 'Tis her breathing that

Perfumes the chamber thus. The flame o' the taper

Bows toward her, and would under-peep her lids

To see the enclosed lights, now canopied

Under these windows white and azure, lac'd

With blue of heaven's own tinct. But my design,

To note the chamber. I will write all down:

Such and such pictures; there the window; such

The adornment of her bed; the arras; figures,

Why, such and such; and the contents o' the story.

Ah, but some natural notes about her body,

Above ten thousand meaner moveables

Would testify, to enrich mine inventory.

O sleep, thou ape of death, lie dull upon her!

And be her sense but as a monument,

Thus in a chapel lying! Come off, come off!

[Taking off her bracelet.]

As slippery as the Gordian knot was hard!

'Tis mine; and this will witness outwardly,

As strongly as the conscience does within,

To the madding of her lord. On her left breast

A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops

I' the bottom of a cowslip. Here's a voucher,

Stronger than ever law could make; this secret

Will force him think I have pick'd the lock and ta'en

The treasure of her honour. No more. To what end?

Why should I write this down, that's riveted,

Screw'd to my memory? She hath been reading late

The tale of Tereus; here the leaf's turn'd down

Where Philomel gave up. I have enough.

To the trunk again, and shut the spring of it.

Swift, swift, you dragons of the night, that dawning

May bare the raven's eye! I lodge in fear;

Though this a heavenly angel, hell is here.

There a few obscurities in these lines that a few explanatory notes could clarify and I take your point about the passage from Macbeth being world famous. But I dispute that the lines are linguistically forbidding or more obscure than the poetry of any number of poets and playwrights of the last 200/300 years.

Which observation raises a further point: is there any principled reason why you would not want "updated" / simplified / translated  for accessibility those poets and playwrights in the same way you argue for, for Shakespeare:

For Example:

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert…. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

- basman

June 2, 2009 at 4:13pm

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Yes, Kent Richmond, you have given me food for thought.  I've been thinking about this for a couple of weeks now.  I ordered your Twelfth Night last night, because I think I should read one of your translations before saying much more about the topic, and also because I'm interested.  I will say that I saw a production of Twelfth Night on Sunday that was totally awesome and that had the audience non-genufectively cheering.  I had decided to read the play beforehand, and I also saw the BBC movie with Helena Bonham Carter.  At the performance, I made a point of trying to pick up and understand fully each line.  Even having read the play, there were some passages I couldn't quite get -- in particular one of the Fool's early bits -- although I think I got almost everything -- something approaching "full comprehension."  But, yes, I had read the play and seen it once already in movie form.  (The movie, I notice, simply drops a lot of the difficult lines, even the latter portion of Orsino's opening speech about how love is so ravenous and all-consuming that it renders valued things (music, in this case) worthless in a minute.)  And I admit that, unlike, say Macbeth or Twelfth Night, few are likely to get King Lear without some study beforehand.  So, even though the audience seemed to have a blast, and I think the actors and staging conveyed pretty clearly what was going on, I'm sure the audience didn't get a lot of the lines and that their appreciation would have been enhanced to hear a beautiful, evocative line like "She never told her love, but let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, feed on her damask cheek" and actually know what it means.  On the other hand, now that I *do* know what it means, I'll want my worms i' the bud and damask cheeks, dammit!

- jhildner

June 2, 2009 at 5:07pm

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Several posts address New Republic readers' comprehension of  written text under conditions where they can control reading speed. That is the ideal reader under ideal conditions. A better test is to have fairly well-read 15 year-olds and their parents listen to a play cold with the words spoken at 150 words per minute or faster in a less-than-perfect theater (or outdoors after the crickets start chirping). Then see how much they understand.

As for the Shelley poem, it is usually read, not performed. It may be taxing for less experienced readers, but it is short and so well done that they can work through it. Plus it will not tie up six weeks of the ninth-grade English class curriculum as Romeo and Juliet does out here in California. (Yes, six weeks to get through what was then "two hours of traffic of our stage." Apparently, the rotation of the earth has sped up since Shakespeare's day. The hours just don't last as long.)

Other thoughts

I want listeners and readers to understand all the lines, not just some or even most of them. I want "And let us, ciphers to this great accompt" and "for the which supply" to be clear, not ignored or misunderstood or discarded. And no, context does not help unless the surrounding text is within the reader's comfort range and fully understood.

A colleague who teaches lit described my translations as "sly." I think he meant that I try to make you forget that you are reading a translation.

Did you know that having students translate a passage from Shakespeare is a popular classroom activity? I wonder why teachers find that necessary. The number one Shakespeare forum topic, apart from the authorship mumbo jumbo, seems to be "Can anyone help me translate Act x, Scene y from Romeo and Juliet?"

Shakespeare designed his plays to be performed quickly with a minimal amount of "acting" in the brooding, contorting James Dean sense of the word. Shakespeare's characters tell us what they are thinking, so we do not need to guess it from their facial expressions or body language. The 1599 Globe theater was designed for listening and had great acoustics with no seat farther than 60-70 feet from the stage. Yet few seats were near enough to allow close up intimacy with the actors. Many seats did not offer full view of the stage. The patrons were there "Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play."

Remember, Jhilder and others, that I am not writing these translations for you people. You already enjoy Shakespeare.

A damask cheek by any other word would still be just as peachy.

- kcrichmond

June 2, 2009 at 9:53pm

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kcrichmond said:   “Jacksondyer,

You confirm my point. You are gifted at languages. I could never achieve that much in a few months (and my long years as a language teacher confirm that such abilities are truly rare among my students).”

I really don’t know how I am confirming your point, Kent.

I am not unique in this respect. Most people of the world are bi and trilingual. I met People from Ethiopia once who told me that they spoke five or six languages. If you go to Western Europe you will see that many, many people can speak German, English, and French in addition to their local languages.

The same is true in Eastern Europe. The US is an anomaly in this regard though I suspect that within a generation most people will be speaking Spanish in addition to English.

“I never said Shakespeare is as difficult as a foreign language. I hope you are not purposely misunderstanding me. My comments suggest we have a five-year head start on a second language learner. I chose those words carefully based on my background in second language assessment.”

 Here is what you said, Kent:

“Here is another thought for all of you to consider. Maybe those of you who find Shakespeare reasonably intelligible are gifted in this area. You pick up second languages and dialects quickly and have a better than average ability to hold a stretch of language in your head as you listen and parse it while hearing what is coming next. I know I can’t do that for more than a few minutes at a stretch. For that reason, I struggle to understand live Shakespeare in the original language even when the play is one I have translated. I soon grow tired and my mind wanders. Some sophisticated research might shed some light on individual differences in this area.” Kent Richmond June 1, 2009 8:56 PM

Maybe I misunderstood you, but you did compare Shakespeare’s English to a foreign language.

“As long as we are cherry-picking scenes, how about this one from King Lear 3.1? John McWhorter found it for an earlier article he wrote.”

I wasn’t “cherry picking” Kent can I gave you the example from Julius Caesar. I found a number of scenes from Shakespeare online and I randomly clicked on one.

I also don’t find your example from King Lear particularly difficult.

KENT

                                  Sir, I do know you;

And dare, upon the warrant of my note,

Commend a dear thing to you. There is division,

Although as yet the face of it be cover'd

With mutual cunning, 'twixt Albany and Cornwall;

Who have,--as who have not, that their great stars

Throne and set high?--servants, who seem no less,

Which are to France the spies and speculations

Intelligent of our state; what hath been seen,

Either in snuffs and packings of the dukes;

Or the hard rein which both of them have borne

Against the old kind king; or something deeper,

Whereof, perchance, these are but furnishings;--

But, true it is, from France there comes a power

Into this scatter'd kingdom; who already,

Wise in our negligence, have secret feet

In some of our best ports, and are at point

To show their open banner.”

But then, I already now the play, which I read for the first time when I was in the service many years ago.

You also ask:

“Or how about this one?

Juliet

O, Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?   Nobody (and I mean nobody) interprets it correctly without a gloss, even with more than 3 months exposure to the language. I remember a humorous TV commercial from the 1960s or 70s where a nearsighted Juliet utters the line until she is fitted with glasses. Now she can see where Romeo is.”

Yes, people need to be instructed about the meaning of “wherefore.” But then people need to find out about social relations when they see plays by Chekhov or Ibsen if they are to understand those plays.

I have met readers who had trouble reading Kurt Vonnegut.

The idea and this was my point, that we should all be able to go to plays, read books, or listens to music without learning about it first is a romantic notion.  

“Here is the sad paradox that the “we-must-preserve-Shakespeare crowd” faces: Not translating Shakespeare guarantees that Shakespeare is either mistranslated or simply discarded, as is common with Lear 3.1.”

Directors cut Shakespeare scenes all the time because of time constraints. Hamlet is rarely performed whole.

“I leave you with another of my favorite audience-taxing passages. Try tackling this baby after a long day at work, a full bladder, and 1500 lines into the play.

Othello

....If I do prove her haggard,

Though that her jesses were my dear heartstrings,

I'd whistle her off and let her down the wind,

To pray at fortune. Haply, for I am black

And have not those soft parts of conversation

That chamberers have, or for I am declined

Into the vale of years,--yet that's not much--

She's gone.

Desdemona haggard? Haply..she’s gone? How much longer to the intermission?

Kent Richmond”

Here is the complete soliloquy, Kent which in context the meaning is quite clear, and is very effecting even if the reader/listener misses some words:

“OTHELLO

258  This fellow's of exceeding honesty,

259   And knows all qualities, with a learned spirit,

260   Of human dealings. If I do prove her haggard,

261   Though that her jesses were my dear heartstrings,

262   I'ld whistle her off and let her down the wind,

263   To prey at fortune. Haply, for I am black

264   And have not those soft parts of conversation

265   That chamberers have, or for I am declined

266   Into the vale of years,—yet that's not much—

267   She's gone. I am abused; and my relief

268   Must be to loathe her. O curse of marriage,

269   That we can call these delicate creatures ours,

270   And not their appetites! I had rather be a toad,

271   And live upon the vapour of a dungeon,

272   Than keep a corner in the thing I love

273   For others' uses. Yet, 'tis the plague of great ones;

274   Prerogativ'd are they less than the base;

275   'Tis destiny unshunnable, like death:

276   Even then this forked plague is fated to us

277   When we do quicken. Look where she comes.”

Again, the fact that we need a glossary till we learn the meaning of all the words doesn’t mean that the play should be performed in translation.

- jacksondyer

June 3, 2009 at 10:47am

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"...As for the Shelley poem, it is usually read, not performed. It may be taxing for less experienced readers, but it is short and so well done that they can work through it. Plus it will not tie up six weeks of the ninth-grade English class curriculum as Romeo and Juliet does out here in California. (Yes, six weeks to get through what was then "two hours of traffic of our stage." Apparently, the rotation of the earth has sped up since Shakespeare's day. The hours just don't last as long.)...

1. Poetry is ideally read aloud as as its charged language is of its essence?

2. What about longer poems? What about shorter poems that are recondite?

3. What about anything written in English literature--usually not novels--which is comparably as difficult and as (in)accessible as Shakespeare?

Finally, "wherefore art thou" is a grain of sand for your world of making Shakespeare accessible, that grain seems thin gruel indeed.

- basman

June 3, 2009 at 1:09pm

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Here is some thicker gruel from the end of the passage quoted by jacksondyer.

Yet, 'tis the plague of great ones;

Prerogativ'd are they less than the base;

'Tis destiny unshunnable, like death:

Even then this forkéd plague is fated to us

When we do quicken. Look where she comes.”

There is too much unfamiliar here for even the most educated listener to grasp when it is spoken quickly. Unless we immediately know what "prerogatived," "forkéd plague," and "quicken" mean, the lines seem like non sequiturs or double-talk to us. This passage and the lines preceding it are full of false friends: quantities (F1)/qualities (Q1), dealings, haggard, though that, haply, fortune, soft, conversation, abused, delicate, base, even. Add to this the time it takes to figure out "whistle her off and let her down the wind" and "prey at fortune" and the sexual imagery involving "corners" and "uses." On top of these difficulties, the syntax offers many distractions: word order differences, unusual or unexpected complementizers, missing or different determiners, verb oddities (declined into, fated to us). Perhaps "jesses" distracted you for a second or "chamberers" or the nonce usage "unshunnable." All this comes at the listener over a mere 20 lines in about 40 to 50 seconds (maybe less; actors speed up when they figure you won't understand it no matter the speed). For me, the gist is not enough, and maybe even the gist is out of reach.

I believe it is time we own up and embrace the notion that the language has changed. Instead we imagine there is something pathological about an educational system that has not prepared students to readily process 1605 English.

By the way, I have been conducting research into vocabulary that Shakespeare did not use. Here is a list of word families that can be found in the Academic Word List (see en.wikipedia.org/.../Academic_word_list for info) but not in any of Shakespeare’s works. The AWL has 570 word families that are not among the 2000 most frequent words but used frequently in almost all academic fields. Certainly studying Shakespeare adds to a student’s cultural literacy in the E.D Hirsch sense, but is Shakespeare ready for college?

academy, accurate, adapt, adequate, adjust, adult, aggregate, allocate, alternate, alternative, analogy, analyze, appreciate, appropriate, approximate, arbitrary, area, assess, attitude, automate, available, category, chart, chemical, clarify, clarity, classic, code, coincide, compatible, collapse, complex, component, concentrate, concurrent, considerable, contact, contemporary, context, contrast, convene, converse(ly), cooperate, coordinate, correspond, criteria, crucial, culture, currency, cycle, data, decade, deduce, deviate, differentiate, discriminate, distort, domain, draft, drama, duration, dynamic, economy, edit, emerge, empirical, enable, energy, enhance, ensure, entity, environment, equate, equip, erode, ethic, ethnic, evaluate, evolve, expand, explicit, export, federal, finance, fluctuate, focus, formula, framework, fund, grade, guarantee, guideline, hierarchy, highlight, hypothesis, identical, identify, ideology, immigrate, impact, implicit, incentive, indicate, individual, infrastructure, initial, innovate, input, insight, inspect, integral, integrate, intense, interact, intermediate, internal, interval, intervene, investigate, involve, isolate, legal legislate locate manipulate, margin, maximize, mechanism, mediate, medical, medium, migrate, minimal, minimize, minimum, modify, monitor, network, nevertheless, norm, normal, nuclear, objective, obvious, offset, ongoing, option, outcome, output, overall, overlap, overseas, paradigm, paragraph, parameter, percent, phase, plus, phenomenon, predominant, previous, primary, principal, principle, professional, protocol, psychology, publication, qualitative, radical, ratio, react, regime, regulate, relax, relevant, reluctance, research, resource, restrict, revise, rigid, role, scenario, scheme, section, sector, series, similar, site, so-called, specific, specify, statistic, status, straightforward, strategy, stress, structure, subordinate, supplement, technical, technique, tense, terminate, topic, transit, transmit, trend, trigger, ultimate, underlie, uniform, unify, unique, vehicle, via, virtual, visual, widespread

Another 35 AWL word families were used just once.

administrate, append, chapter, clause, colleague, compensate, comprehensive, comprise, depress, document, equivalent, exclude, final, format, inherent, initiate, layer, manual, mode, panel, passive, pose, publication, reject, respond, route, stable, subsequent, symbol, temporary, transfer, utilize

Kent Richmond

- kcrichmond

June 3, 2009 at 9:38pm

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Kent don't have a lot of time.

The lines are not difficult to parse in context and in a live play we would hear them after we saw Iago trying to convince him of Desdemona’s unfaithfulness:

"Prerogative are they less than the base;

'Tis destiny unshunnable, like death:

Even then this forked plague is fated to us

When we do quicken.

Look! where she comes.

If she be false, O! then heaven mocks itself.

I'll not believe it."

Once one grasps that forked plague is an allusion to a “cuckold” the rest of the lines become clear. Quicken is still in use in saying such as “the quick and the dead,” etc.

I do object to you throwing lines at us from the middle of a speech, Kent.

However, there is much that you said that I agree with. I was especially touched by your anger at our inadequate education system, an anger that I share.

Yes, we should be learning the language so that we would be able to hear Shakespeare and the King James version of the Bible without having to look words up in dictionaries.

These texts are the glory of the English language just as the biblical Hebrew is the glory of the Hebrew language.

I wonder how French students do with Montaigne and Pascal or  Moliere and Racine.

- jacksondyer

June 3, 2009 at 10:53pm

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Actually, jacksondyer, I was defending the educational system a bit. I stated that the pathology is imaginary. Learning Shakespeare's language has limited utility since once you have read Shakespeare's best plays, there is little else of interest to read from that era. Jonson and Marlowe are still studied by English majors, but Kyd, Beaumont and Fletcher, Middleton, Lyly, Heywood, Greene,and Webster are familiar mainly to scholars now despite their poularity at the time. Most of the expository prose of that era, with a handful of exceptions, is dreadful. The poets were good, of course, but studying them has largely been confined to advanced college courses for many generations now. There is simply too much competition from the wonderful literature that has followed. Plus an increasing interest in the literature of other cultures and the increased popularity of Sophocles spurred by the accessible translations of Robert Fagles and others continue to gnaw away at the time we have to devote intensive study of 400-year-old English. There just isn't enough time.

(If anything, at least in California where I live, one of our educational problems is that we spend too much time teaching Shakespeare. The Shakespeare industry is simply too powerful a lobby to dare cross.)

And I must stress again that there is no time to study context while watching a stage production, so it does not matter what lines I chose. I could have taken the opening lines from Othello to make the same point. They are even more difficult than the passage I chose. Look  at all the odd stuff here coming at you with the speedy delivery employed by Shakespearean actors.

RODERIGO. Tush, never tell me! I take it much unkindly

   That thou, Iago, who hast had my purse

   As if the strings were thine, shouldst know of this.

 IAGO. 'Sblood, but you will not hear me.

   If ever I did dream of such a matter,

   Abhor me.

 RODERIGO. Thou told'st me thou didst hold him in thy hate.

 IAGO. Despise me, if I do not. Three great ones of the city,

   In personal suit to make me his lieutenant,

   Off-capp'd to him; and, by the faith of man,

   I know my price, I am worth no worse a place.

   But he, as loving his own pride and purposes,

   Evades them, with a bumbast circumstance

   Horribly stuff'd with epithets of war,

   And, in conclusion,

   Nonsuits my mediators; for, "Certes," says he,

   "I have already chose my officer."

   And what was he?

   Forsooth, a great arithmetician,

   One Michael Cassio, a Florentine

   (A fellow almost damn'd in a fair wife)

   That never set a squadron in the field,

   Nor the division of a battle knows

   More than a spinster; unless the bookish theoric,

   Wherein the toged consuls can propose

   As masterly as he. Mere prattle without practice

   Is all his soldiership. But he, sir, had the election;

   And I, of whom his eyes had seen the proof

   At Rhodes, at Cyprus, and on other grounds

   Christian and heathen, must be belee'd and calm'd

   By debitor and creditor. This counter-caster,

   He, in good time, must his lieutenant be,

   And I- God bless the mark!- his Moorship's ancient.

- kcrichmond

June 4, 2009 at 3:31am

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“By the way, I have been conducting research into vocabulary that Shakespeare did not use. Here is a list of word families that can be found in the Academic Word List (see en.wikipedia.org/.../Academic_word_list for info) but not in any of Shakespeare’s works. The AWL has 570 word families that are not among the 2000 most frequent words but used frequently in almost all academic fields. Certainly studying Shakespeare adds to a student’s cultural literacy in the E.D Hirsch sense, but is Shakespeare ready for college? “

I don’t know what the above is supposed to mean, Kent.

Shakespeare helped remold the English language and introduced thousands of words and phrases we use today:

“Words and Phrases Coined by Shakespeare”

www.pathguy.com/shakeswo.htm

- jacksondyer

June 4, 2009 at 11:20am

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Kent I had no problem reading the beginning of Othello, but then I already know the play. However, there is s context to everything and I doubt that any theater attendee (especially today when very few people go to the theater anyway) would not know what Othello was about.

Again, the few words that the listener would find hard to decipher could be remedied by a looking at a glossary.

We seem to have a fundamental disagreement about art that I don’t think any number of examples could clear up. You seem to think that art should be accessible to all without their having been educated into the nature of that art. I don’t think that is possible. Even some movies of the 30’s seem obscure to many viewers. How many people can see Citizen Kane and understand it without some prior knowledge of what Orson Wells was doing there. This is even truer with modern art. Cubist art isn’t readily accessible nor was meant to be.

In any case, I do think (apparently you don’t) that our education system has done a lousy job preparing students to understand our best literature which would include Shakespeare and the King James Bible (I write as an agnostic.) These writers many others have influenced the subsequent development of our language.

I doubt either one of us will convince the other at this point. So it might be better to stop. I do want to say that when you introduced the notion of a Shakespeare lobby then it is time to stop.

“(If anything, at least in California where I live, one of our educational problems is that we spend too much time teaching Shakespeare. The Shakespeare industry is simply too powerful a lobby to dare cross.)”

I don’t believe that California is unique in stressing the Shakespeare in its curriculum and I don’t see any powerful lobby at work in my State.

No Shakespeare lobby can be as powerful as the lobby of ignorance which is justified in hundreds of ways every day through inertia and appeals to relevance as well as well as not lowering people’s self esteem by making feel inadequate.

Ironically, by offering students Shakespeare in translation one is telling them that they are indeed inadequate, and that they will never be able to read the plays as they were written.

- jacksondyer

June 4, 2009 at 11:42am

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on gruel:

"...This fellow's of exceeding honesty,

259   And knows all qualities, with a learned spirit,

260   Of human dealings. If I do prove her haggard,

261   Though that her jesses were my dear heartstrings,

262   I'ld whistle her off and let her down the wind,

263   To prey at fortune. Haply, for I am black

264   And have not those soft parts of conversation

265   That chamberers have, or for I am declined

266   Into the vale of years,—yet that's not much—

267   She's gone. I am abused; and my relief

268   Must be to loathe her. O curse of marriage,

269   That we can call these delicate creatures ours,

270   And not their appetites! I had rather be a toad,

271   And live upon the vapour of a dungeon,

272   Than keep a corner in the thing I love

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

273   For others' uses. Yet, 'tis the plague of great ones;

274   Prerogativ'd are they less than the base;

275   'Tis destiny unshunnable, like death:

276   Even then this forked plague is fated to us

277   When we do quicken. Look where she comes:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Yet it is the plague of great one;,who are privileged lass than the base, it's thier ineviatble destiny, that can't be shunned, like death, our being cheated on--cuckolded--is our fate even as we stir in our mother's wombs.

So that is a very crude and awkward paraphrase of these lines. And they take me to the point I keep trying to make that, albeit with some words and phrases that need explaining, the text is at hand for those willing  and the text is not more remote and in accessible than comparatively modern texts. Why I keep mentioning poetry because so much inthe plays is dramatic poetry as opposed to dramatic prosody.

And the point of the bad paraphrase is to try to show that with a little teaching students at hte right age can be brought to the magnificence of Shakespeare and other great literature. If paraphrase is an entry point so be it.

So I don't want to get mired in trading quotes. iI'll just repeat my main point that efforts to make literature, Shakespeare,  more accessible are commendable, but they must not finally lead away from the text. They must take us to the text either for Shkespeare to enjoy and appreciate the plays more as performed as theatre or to read and take them in as world class dramatic literature full with the world's best dramtic poetry.

- basman

June 4, 2009 at 1:23pm

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Sorry for all typos and butchered syntax and the like. I type faster than I think and I'm notoriously slow witted.

- basman

June 4, 2009 at 2:38pm

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The issue is not whether it can be paraphrased by  dedicated afficianados with the OED and  glossed texts in front of them. It is whether it can be paraphrased on the fly by a reasonably educated person who wants to enjoy the flow of the play in the actual time it takes to say it. And, of course, most can't. And those they say they can are probably fibbing a bit.

Shakespeare did not intend his plays to be homework assignments. They were live theater with the full texts of the plays kept secret from even his own actors. They only got their own lines and a line or two leading in to cue them. There were no decent dictionaries of the language available.

Kent Richmond

- kcrichmond

June 5, 2009 at 2:33pm

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"Shakespeare did not intend his plays to be homework assignments. They were live theater with the full texts of the plays kept secret from even his own actors. They only got their own lines and a line or two leading in to cue them. There were no decent dictionaries of the language available."

Given that he introduced many new words into the language which is contemporaries hadn't a clue about their meaning Shakespeare probably assumed that people in his audience were samrt enough to be able to deduce their meaninngs.

"And, of course, most can't. And those they say they can are probably fibbing a bit."

And of course, Kent knows that for sure.

I have been watching plays for most of my life and never had any problems figuring out their meaning. Moreover today you can watch the plays on DVD (excellent BBC production) and I saw most of the plays again a few years ago.

It's often easier to figure out the meaning of some words by the actors gestures than by merely reading it without a glossary.

- jacksondyer

June 5, 2009 at 3:35pm

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>>>the issue is not whether it can be paraphrased by  dedicated afficianados with the OED and  glossed texts in front of them. It is whether it can be paraphrased on the fly by a reasonably educated person who wants to enjoy the flow of the play in the actual time it takes to say it. And, of course, most can't. And those they say they can are probably fibbing a bit.>>>>

This is important to say, however misconceived it is, because it takes us back to the underlying issue.

The glossed texts and OED and all the footnotes and scholarship are of immense significance in making Shakespeare accessible for those who want to extend themselves to appreciate him. They are to my mind ultimately better than modern language paraphrases, which also rof course rely on them. Why that is so, I'd argue, is because the former, let's call it all generically the scholarship, is an adjunct to the text. It doesn't divert us from the text. Rather, it clarifies and enhances the text. The problem with the paraphrases of the text is that, while they may be an aid to understanding the text and may be good for that, they threaten to cheapen the text, denude it and dumb it down, by offering themselves as a *substitute*. So that in the four lines about the "forked plague" one, while *reading* the play, looks down the page for some clarification and then is brought back to the text to understand its particular meanings in the expansive light of the clarification, helping to illumine the genius. Not so with the paraphrases.

And in the theatre, what am I choosing between: Shakespeare as Shakespeare as against Shakespeare as paraphrased by Kent Richmond? There's no contest.

For high school kids studying Shakespeare for the first or second time, I can imagine some pedagogic utility to the paraphrases. But I can understand better a teacher who through the scholarship comes to command the language of the play and teaches it lovingly and passionately to his students. I studied a fair bit of Shakespeare as a graduate student and taught Shakespeare to university frosh as well as to high school kids on a few occasions, when I was subbing to make a buck. And I was no great, inspiring teacher. But finally if you as teacher understood and loved the language--and what high school English teacher wouldn't, or what's he or she doing teaching English literature-- you could educate kids 16--18 or so about it and sometimes get in them the sense of awe for Shakespeare that even I as an indifferent high school lout glimpsed. Paraphrases just aren't going to do that, and if not kept under measured pedagogic use, they have the potential to rob kids, and others, of even a small insight into, and sense of, the fantastic genius of art higher than most in the world, which sense and insight, even in bits, can be world changing for kids in wondrous ways.

- basman

June 5, 2009 at 11:48pm

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jack, progress report: i'm at page 20 of Book1. Just started today. Pretty sure I'll be finished by the end of the week or so, tho' I'm busy these days with work.

- basman

June 6, 2009 at 11:44am

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Sounds good, let me know when you are ready.

We'll start slow as I am pretty busy myself these days.

- jacksondyer

June 6, 2009 at 8:14pm

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To be fair, good basman, Kent is not doing "paraphrases," but rather line-by-line "verse translations" that retain the meter and occasional rhyme of the original.  He is attending to literally every syllable, which is impressive, and many of his translations are very close to the original or are attractive despite aggressive changes.

That said, I'll let the jury decide between the below two versions of the sentence from Twelfth Night I mentioned before.  It's part of a speech by Viola in which she describes the plight of an imaginary sister who tragically concealed her love.  (Viola is in love with the Duke but cannot profess it, because she's disguised as his male attendant.)

She never told her love, But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, Feed on her damask cheek.

She never showed her love, But let concealment feed like canker worms, On her peach blossom cheeks.

The problems of modern comprehension being addressed are the meanings of "worm i' the bud" (inchworm in a flower bud), "damask" (rosy, or prink color as that of the damask (i.e., from Damascus) rose), and that we might mistakenly think that Viola is saying that the woman never told the one she loves when she is actually saying that she never told *of* her love.

But, the pluralizing of "worms" and "cheeks," the use of the term "canker worms," which is likely unfamiliar anyway to those without particular knowledge of plant pests and, in any event, invites an unwelcome association with canker sores, and the replacement of "damask" with a three-syllable, non-adjectival name of a less sexy flower, to my ear, all lessen the elegance, tenderness, and impact of the line and suggest to me rather that a slew of slimy worms is devouring Viola's big bursts of flushed flesh.  Kent cautions in his intro that we should not be surprised if some of the "colors" of the language seem "brighter" to us than the original -- that part of his intent is to convey a vividness of language that Shakespeare's audience would have felt but that the years may have dulled -- but I doubt that Kent's translation of that passage, which sounds to me like a scene in a horror movie, is quite what Shakespeare's audience heard.

Kent says, cleverly, "A damask cheek by any other name would still be just as peachy."  Ha!  But would it?  I remember an episode of The Simpsons in which Lisa asks Bart, echoing Romeo and Juliet, "Would not a rose by any other name smell as sweet?"  Bart responds, "Not if you called them stench blossoms."  While "stench blossoms," contra Bart, probably would smell as sweet, they certainly wouldn't *sound* as sweet, and that's the crux of the matter.

Another small example:  When Viola finds herself, after a shipwreck, on the shore of the mysterious land where the action of the play takes place, she asks where she is, and the Sea Captain tells her it's Illyria.  "And what should I do in Illyria?" Viola asks.  "My brother he is in Elysium."  We probably wouldn't know that Elysium refers to the mythological underworld's version of heaven, and so Kent translates the line, "What am I doing in Illyria?  When I must fear my brother dwells in heaven."  Harold Goddard argues that the similar sound of "Illyria" and "Elysium" suggests a substantive comparison between the two.  "Yes," he says parenthetically, "in poetry echoes can throw light."  (I'm not sure if that quote is quite verbatim; it's from memory.)  Regardless of whether this echo "throws light," or throws the particular light Goddard argues that it throws, the translation loses the echo altogether and we are deprived of, at the very least, a lovely line, and, at most, a line of more substantive potential significance.  Moreover, is "What am I doing in Illyria?" quite right?  We would use that phrase to express present disorientation but not the forward-looking concern I take Viola to express, as in, "What am I supposed to do here?"

It is easy to take potshots at particular choices.  I've just taken a few.  And perhaps Kent's translation is, on the whole, about as good as any could be given his mission and self-imposed constraints.  But the reason it's easy for punks like me to take potshots is because original Shakespeare, unlike, say, original Moliere or Chekhov, is fully within the reach of literate English speakers with moderate aid and effort, and always at least partially within reach with no aid at all.  (Sometimes, that part for which no aid is necessary makes up a large fraction of the whole -- Much Ado about Nothing, for example -- and sometimes a smaller fraction.)

So, we come back to Kent's insistence that Shakespeare did not intend his plays to be homework assignments.  True.  But neither did he intend them for posterity or imagine that they would be read or performed at all 400 years later, translated or not.  He evidently did not set out to write enduring works of literature.  But he did anyway, which is why we still go to Shakespeare plays, read his plays, and, yes, study them in school for homework and, for some of us adults, study them at home for fun.

Part of what makes them great, even for those who have vigorously argued against "Bard idolatry," such as a cranky George Bernard Shaw, is the language.  Shaw called Shakespeare, famously, a narrow-minded, middle class man with no serious political or moral concerns.  He thought the comedies were mere concessions to fatuous conventions, that Shakespeare lacked philosophy and was essentially pessimistic (by which he meant nihilistic), that blank verse was no big whup, and that a lot of his verse wasn't really poetry at all.  (Shaw, of course, is known for conspicuous social(ist)-minded point-making -- something Shakespeare didn't do.)   However, even for Shaw, Shakespeare was a great master of the language and of "verbal music," especially in the prose but even in that blank verse he disparaged.  He thought the "to be or not to be" speech was "twaddle" -- he far preferred "what a piece of work is a man" -- but said that we were nonetheless seduced in all cases by "the magic of Shakespeare's speech," which was not owed chiefly to the iambic pentameter of the verse portions.

In other words, it's the *words* we like!  I know what Shaw means -- though I strongly disagree with the implicit view that a lack of evident political or moral manifesto in Shakespeare's work is properly regarded as a deficiency or an indicator of shallowness.  This is a cramped view of humanity and art and the relationship between the two.  I just saw an excellent production of Twelfth Night and, some years ago, I saw an excellent production of Shaw's Major Barbara on Broadway, and I can say without hesitation that the frothy Twelfth Night was the more life-affirming of the two.

No, I know what Shaw means about the language.  There are so many lines and speeches and moments when you're prompted to say, "Oooo, that's good," and surrender to seduction.  "Even so quickly may one catch the plague?  Methinks I feel [these plays'] perfections With an invisible and subtle stealth To creep in at mine eyes.  Well let it be."  Let it be, indeed!

At least for me.  Regardless of whether or to what extent Kent's translations or something like them come into regular performance, I will insist that I, for $70 a ticket plus a regular charitable contribution, continue to be allowed to be seduced by original Shakespeare in a fairly intimate audience of fellow Midwestern, middle-brow types who have perfectly admirable aspirations to learn more and read more and acquaint themselves more with classic literature than they have done, and I hope that our public schools continue to seduce teenagers with Shakespeare, as I was seduced when I was in high school (by Romeo and Juliet, A Winter's Tale, Henry V, and Hamlet).  Meanwhile, if you want to have an analogous experience to that of an Elizabethan seeing a Shakespeare performance, I would recommend modern entertainments.  For larger-than-life drama, try a Martin Scorsese movie or a play like Tracy Letts's August: Osage County.  For tragedy, watch The Wire.  For wit, watch 30 Rock.  For Shakespeare, I'll continue to watch, and read, *Shakespeare*!

Cheers.

- jhildner

June 8, 2009 at 6:49pm

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Thanks, jhildner, for your thoughtful comments. You are the first person to look critically at my work who admits to  reading it.

Twelfth Night was my first experiment with translating. I completed it 8 or 9 years ago, so I cannot recall why I made any particular decision (2711 lines times several decisions per line = ? decisions), but I do recall fretting over the two lines you questioned. I suppose I figured that "damask" without "rose" would not be too meaningful to most audience members. I guess "damask" sounds sexy, but I think of tablecloths when I hear the word. The craziest line in the play to find agreement on was Feste's "But when I came unto my beds...with tosspots still had drunken heads." The record for disagreement occurs in "Romeo and Juliet."  "A New Variorum Edition of Romeo and Juliet" devotes 28 pages of extremely fine print to decoding "That runaways' eyes may wink" with each interpretation weirder than the one before it. In these cases, I hunt for compromises that are not too taxing for the audience.

Of course John McWhorter and I disagree with you that Shakespeare is "fully within the reach the reach of literate English speakers with moderate aid and effort." We feel that he is barely within the reach even after intensive study. But now you and I have circled back and are simply restating our theses. Obviously, we disagree.

Several people told me they laughed outloud when they read my translation of the Sir Topas scene. The Dogberry scenes in Much Ado got a similar reaction. That thrilled me because it meant the scenes were funny even without the double-takes, bawdy gestures, comic faces, and nutty stage accents that actors pile on to keep Shakespeare lively. These readers laughed at what the characters were saying, not how they said it. I hope you found it funny too.

By the way, many high school productions are chopped down, modernized versions of the plays. And many educational publishers offer simplified versions of the plays that are not real Shakespeare but still meet the curriculum standards laid down by boards of education. College instructors complain they cannot get students to read Shakespeare. Students watch abridged film versions and read crib notes to get by. I sense a lot of resistance to Shakespeare growing out there.

Kent Richmond

- kcrichmond

June 10, 2009 at 3:35am

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Jack: an update:

I have been so busy lately with the demands of what I laughingly call the real world, that other doings have abated. Nevertheless, I'm getting to the Club House turn of Book 11 and expect to be done shortly, although probably to be beaten by a nose by either Northern Dancer or Silky Sullivan.

Will keep you advised,

A true Dysutopian

- basman

June 11, 2009 at 11:32am

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That's ok, I have been busy too.

Let's aim for late next week sometime.

The real world, alas, is all to real, at times.

- jacksondyer

June 11, 2009 at 9:20pm

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That's ok, I have been busy too.

Let's aim for late next week sometime.

The real world, alas, is all too real, at times.

- jacksondyer

June 11, 2009 at 9:20pm

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I think I missed an o somewhere in my previous post.

wll if I did here it is, "o" as in "all too real."

- jacksondyer

June 11, 2009 at 9:21pm

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Okay, just check back in  a few days. I'll let you know when I am done.

Thanks.

- basman

June 12, 2009 at 11:15am

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okay, I finshed reading Utopia.

I'll be weak , though not hopeless, on context, influences--before and after-- and that kind of thing, but not bad on focusing on the actual text and its many ambivalences.

I'm going to ask you in the first instance to suggest a method of proceeding.

My only suggestion woould be to jump right into Book 1, but I think we need an angle of approach, if we are to do that.

- basman

June 15, 2009 at 11:38am

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My interest in the topic of Utopia centers on the question of why we seem to feel more comfortable with dystopias than with utopias.

I like to find to look closely at the text to see how More both endorses the utopian ideal yet undercuts it at the same time. This is also true of utopian novels like Hawthorne’s “The Blithedale Romance, and Amos Oz’ “Elsewhere Perhaps” two novels I would also like to read sometime. (An aside: I just reread Philip Roth’s “The Dying Animal” which in this context also reads as a kind of dystopia which even goes so far as to blame the Puritan’s quoting Hawthorne for blocking the establishment of a utopian paradise in the New World.)

I will offer a more extensive introduction on this topic in a couple of days.

- jacksondyer

June 15, 2009 at 8:44pm

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I think the way you frame it--I like to find to look closely at the text to see how More both endorses the utopian ideal yet undercuts it at the same time...gets right at the heart of things.

So I'll wait to see what you send and then replay as best I can.

I'll just say now:

Stanza 111

There would still remain the never-resting mind,

So that one would want to escape, come back

To what had been so long composed.

The imperfect is our paradise.

Note that, in this bitterness, delight,

Since the imperfect is so hot in us,

Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

- basman

June 15, 2009 at 10:27pm

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Hi Itzkig, thanks for the Stevens quote; I’ll address it in my post.

I apologize for not posting yet, but I have been extremely busy and will try to do so this weekend.

- jacksondyer

June 17, 2009 at 8:55pm

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Take your time Jack.

We should not feel under pressure to do this, only under pleasure.

- basman

June 18, 2009 at 12:50pm

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'We should not feel under pressure to do this, only under pleasure.'

Sounds good.

Jack

- J. Dyer

June 18, 2009 at 3:54pm

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Which edition of the book are you using, Itzig?

- J. Dyer

June 19, 2009 at 1:59pm

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1. Note to self: it's dystopian, not dysutopian.

2. Jack, given 1, you may have your work cut out for you.

3. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, Cambridge University Press, edited by George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams, hard cover.

- basman

June 19, 2009 at 3:58pm

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General comments:

If I am to believe the account of some contemporary political philosophers, like Alan Bloom, the ancient view of utopia (the just, or good, place, the ideal city) postulated by Plato in the Republic wasn’t supposed to be taken seriously since it was used by him as an example in order to teach about the nature of justice and not offer a blueprint for an actual society.

By contrast the modern idea of the ideal city (Utopia) which goes back to Francis Bacon’s “The New Atlantis” 1623, was meant as a blueprint for the creation of an actual utopian society. (Many modern writers from Rousseau and Marxist writers on have followed the Baconian lead in supposing that such a society could and should be made actual.

Thomas More’s own views as set down in “Utopia” 1516 seem to fall in between those of Plato in as much as his book is a playful fantasy and those of the later modern thinkers who believed in its actualization.

Utopia is a playful as well as very serious work. The playfulness is in evidence in the use of language. Name places in the Utopia beginning with its title are negations of the objects named: No Place, Dry River, etc. (the use of the Greek language for naming is also important as I will show later on. The work was written in Latin by Thomas More.)

More wrote his book at a time when he was still primarily a Christian humanist who believed in toleration. Later on he will persecute Protestants it was claimed that he used torture against his religious enemies and he denied the charge. He was as is well known martyred by Henry Vlll in 1535.

The More that I will be concerned with is the ‘humanist’ More of 1516, a man who seemed to have disliked fanaticism, and no the later More.

In any case, before addressing More’s book directly asking questions about his intentions as well as about the nature of Utopian thinking, I will say a couple of words by way or response to the Wallace Stevens stanza you posted above:

Stanza 111

“There would still remain the never-resting mind,

So that one would want to escape, come back

To what had been so long composed.

The imperfect is our paradise.

Note that, in this bitterness, delight,

Since the imperfect is so hot in us,

Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.”

Steven’s thought in the context of his long poem is beyond the scope of this discussion. However, his view that the “imperfect is our paradise” doesn’t tell us much about why it is that “the never resting mind” should insist on dreaming about the perfection. Why have humans since antiquity postulated one paradise after another: Gilgamesh, Garden of Eden, the Phaeacian community in Homer’s Odyssey, etc.

It seems to me that it’s the restive mind which is responsible for such fictions.

The question then I want to explore is why it is that the same “never resting mind” yearns for and rejects those ideal societies it conjures up.  

Thomas More’s Utopia it seems to me is a good place to start.

- J. Dyer

June 21, 2009 at 3:05pm

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okay, I have this.

Let me try to respond in short due course.

- basman

June 22, 2009 at 9:58am

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Take your time, Itzig. I won't be able to reply till the weekend at the earliest.

- J. Dyer

June 22, 2009 at 12:08pm

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INTRODUCTION

Jack, thanks for your general comments.

I think differently about the relation between Stevens’s lines and UTOPIA than I did when I first cited them. Then, I had a preliminary view of More’s Utopia that went to what I thought might be his ambivalence about its ultimate attractiveness, as though he meant to subvert its ideal even while painstakingly erecting it down to some of its very last details. In that preliminary view, Stevens’s paradoxical lauding of bitterness’s delight, of our paradisiacal imperfection, seemed a way of getting at what have might have fed  one side of More’s ambivalence. But I have moved away from that view to one that upends the relation I was positing to myself. And the view I now take of UTOPIA perhaps can be an entry way to what you say is of interest to you—and I trust you don’t me quoting you not to argue against you, but rather to state a common theme—“The question then I want to explore is why it is that the same “never resting mind” yearns for and rejects those ideal societies it conjures up.”

The best way I can think of exploring that question is by trying to have a hard look at Utopia as a text and discuss why I think that not only is it—apart from harboring More’s playfulness—as you say, “a very serious work”, but, ultimately, I’d try to suggest, a work of tragedy. In my conception of UTOPIA, trying to account for why it’s tragic, tries to show why the imperfect is not our paradise, why in the bitterness there is no delight, why More “yearns” for it, and, finally tries to make sense of More’s final response to Raphael’s summation of his story and argument in relation to the question interesting you: (this quote is not from the text I read, but it will do):

“…When Raphael had finished his story, many things came

to my mind which seemed very absurd in the manners and

laws of that people, not only in their way of waging wars,

their ceremonies, their religion, and their other institutions,

but most of all in that which is the chief foundation of their

whole structure, the community of life and goods without

any money dealings. For by this alone all the nobility,

magnificence, splendour and majesty, the true glories and

ornaments of a commonwealth are utterly overthrown.

Yet since I knew he was wearied with his tale and I was not

certain that he could brook any opposition to his views,

particularly as I remember that he had censured others on

account of their fear that they might not seem to be wise

enough, unless they found some fault with other men s

inventions, therefore I praised their way of life, and his

speech, and took him by the hand and led him in to supper,

first saying that we would have another opportunity of

thinking more deeply on these topics and discussing them

with him more fully : and I wish this might some day come

to pass.

Meanwhile, though in other ways he is a man of

most undoubted learning and of great knowledge of the

world, yet I cannot agree with all that he said ; but I readily

admit that there are many things in the Utopian common

wealth, which it is easier to wish for in our own states than

to have any hope of seeing realized….”

The essence of my view takes a slightly different path than your question suggests. For what I want to say is that UTOPIA is, among other things, a meditative drama of complex irony of tragic proportions.  More, the character who searches for the meaning of who he, is finally reduced by the power of Raphael’s indictment of England and his positing of Utopia as an ideal comparison to a kind of numb incoherence and bemusement, mumbling his manuscript about reforms here and reforms there. The tragedy is entangled with the reader’s realization that Utopia can never be achieved, that its ideal, even though a tempered ideal, exists in a perverse and tragic relation to its inaccessibility. So what is yearned for is not so much rejected as it, for More, can never be achieved: we are too compromised. What follows from that is that Raphael’s savage litany, begun in Book 1, implicated in every detail of Utopian life, and reaching its overpowering crescendo at the end of the description of “RELIGIONS OF THE UTOPIANS”, and before More’s Book 11 ending response, will continue unabated. There is no reformist middle ground between Utopia and the human hell of Sixteenth Century human life it stands in contrast with.

I’d propose to begin then with an examination of, from these perspectives, the debate in Book 1 between More and Raphael, with a little input from Giles, on the question of why Raphael, given his learning and experience, does not serve as an advisor to the king. In that debate, I think, among other things are planted the seeds that grow into the description of Utopia and what I read as UTOPIA’S tragic irresolution.

I of course mean not to be dogmatic of what I have come to think about UTOPIA, as mine is just one possible reading of it, which I can even foresee being moved off of. I think though that by discussing the work as a text, we can get some purchase on the question that interest and that you posed in your opening remarks.

So before I go forward trying to support my reading of UTOPIA, I want to make sure that this approach to the work is okay with you and that you feel can lead to a  fruitful discussion.

If you are okay with this, then I’ll make some comments on that Book 1 debate along the lines indicated.

- basman

June 22, 2009 at 6:45pm

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one more time slightly more polished

INTRODUCTION

I think differently about the relation between Stevens’s lines and UTOPIA than I did when I first cited them. Then, I had a preliminary view of More’s Utopia that went to what I thought might be his ambivalence about its ultimate attractiveness, as though he meant to subvert its ideal even while painstakingly erecting it down to some of its very last details. In that preliminary view, Stevens’s paradoxical lauding of bitterness’s delight, of our paradisiacal imperfection, seemed a way of getting at what have might have fed  one side of More’s ambivalence. But I have moved away from that view to one that upends the relation I was positing to myself. And the view I now take of UTOPIA perhaps can be an entry way to what you say is of interest to you—and I trust you don’t mind me quoting you not to argue against you, but rather to state a common theme—“The question then I want to explore is why it is that the same “never resting mind” yearns

for and rejects those ideal societies it conjures up.”

The best way I can think of exploring that question is by trying to have a hard look at Utopia as a text and discuss why I think that not only is it—apart from harboring More’s playfulness—as you say, “a very serious work”, but, ultimately, I’d try to suggest, a work of tragedy. In my conception of UTOPIA, trying to account for why it’s tragic, tries to show why the imperfect is not our paradise, why in the bitterness there is no delight, why More “yearns” for it, and, finally tries to make sense of More’s final response to Raphael’s summation of his story and argument (and in relation to the question interesting you): (this quote is not from the text I read, but it will do):

“…When Raphael had finished his story, many things came

to my mind which seemed very absurd in the manners and

laws of that people, not only in their way of waging wars,

their ceremonies, their religion, and their other institutions,

but most of all in that which is the chief foundation of their

whole structure, the community of life and goods without

any money dealings. For by this alone all the nobility,

magnificence, splendour and majesty, the true glories and

ornaments of a commonwealth are utterly overthrown.

Yet since I knew he was wearied with his tale and I was not

certain that he could brook any opposition to his views,

particularly as I remember that he had censured others on

account of their fear that they might not seem to be wise

enough, unless they found some fault with other men s

inventions, therefore I praised their way of life, and his

speech, and took him by the hand and led him in to supper,

first saying that we would have another opportunity of

thinking more deeply on these topics and discussing them

with him more fully : and I wish this might some day come

to pass.

Meanwhile, though in other ways he is a man of

most undoubted learning and of great knowledge of the

world, yet I cannot agree with all that he said ; but I readily

admit that there are many things in the Utopian common

wealth, which it is easier to wish for in our own states than

to have any hope of seeing realized….”

The essence of my view takes a slightly different path than your question suggests. For what I want to say is that UTOPIA is, among other things, a meditative drama of complex irony of tragic proportions.  More, the character who searches for the meaning of who he is, is finally reduced by the power of Raphael’s indictment of England and his positing of Utopia as an ideal comparison, to a kind of numb incoherence and bemusement, mumbling into his manuscript about reforms here and reforms there.

The tragedy is entangled with the reader’s realization that Utopia can never be achieved, that its ideal, even though a tempered ideal, exists in a perverse and tragic relation to its inaccessibility. So what is yearned for is not so much rejected as it, for More, can never be achieved: we are too compromised, too imperfect, too fallen.

What follows from that is that Raphael’s savage litany, begun in Book 1, implicated in every detail of Utopian life, and reaching its overpowering crescendo at the end of the description of “RELIGIONS OF THE UTOPIANS”, and before More’s Book 11 ending response, will continue unabated. There is no reformist middle ground between Utopia and the human hell of Sixteenth Century human life it stands in contrast with.

I’d propose to begin then with an examination of, from these perspectives, the debate in Book 1 between More and Raphael, with a little input from Giles, on the question of why Raphael, given his learning and experience, does not serve as an advisor to the king. In that debate, I think, among other things, are planted the seeds that grow into the description of Utopia and what I read as UTOPIA’S tragic irresolution.

I of course mean not to be dogmatic as to what I have come to think about UTOPIA, as mine is just one possible reading of it, which I can even foresee being moved off of. I think, though, that by discussing the work as a text, we can get some purchase on the question that interests as  posed in your opening remarks.

But before I go forward trying to support my reading of UTOPIA, I want to make sure that this approach to the work is okay with you and can lead to a fruitful discussion.

If you are okay with this, then I’ll make some comments on that Book 1 debate.

- basman

June 22, 2009 at 6:58pm

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I downloaded your post and I'll try to repond later today or tomorrow, Itzig. I am sorry for the delay, but have been pretty busy.

- J. Dyer

June 27, 2009 at 1:23pm

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Jack, make taking your time your number one  priority.

- basman

June 28, 2009 at 12:27am

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Hi Itzig, I hope you are still there. I enjoyed reading your preliminary views of Utopia.

I am not sure I understand the following proposition, though:

“There is no reformist middle ground between Utopia and the human hell of Sixteenth Century human life it stands in contrast with.”

Where in the text does More suggest that 16th century life is a “human hell?” Why do you think it is?

On the other I am in agreement with your proposal to begin

“….with an examination of, from these perspectives, the debate in Book 1 between More and Raphael, with a little input from Giles, on the question of why Raphael, given his learning and experience, does not serve as an advisor to the king. In that debate, I think, among other things, are planted the seeds that grow into the description of Utopia and what I read as UTOPIA’S tragic irresolution.”

This it seems to me is important since More himself was a willing advisor to a king and believed that scholars like Raphael should enter the realm of public service (what we today call the sphere of politics).

The discrepancy between More and Raphael that you noticed is one of the indications that the latter character was not a stand in for More himself.

Raphael unlike the other personages mentioned in Book One is wholly fictitious.

His name is also odd since Raphel means “the health of god” or some such thing. “rofe” (accent on the last letter) is the modern Hebrew term for a Doctor. Also while his first name is Hebrew his last name is Hythloday which is often translated as “knowing trifles.”

There is more irony concerning Raphael. Briefly, he is said to have voyaged with Amerigo Vespucci. Today the explorer is held in high esteem but in 1515 when More composed the book he was taken to be a charlatan. (The books he was supposed to have written were though because of their inconsistencies to be a lie. It was only later discovered that Amerigo did not write them (he had been dead when they were published). Truer accounts of his achievements came to light after More’s publication of Utopia.

Now one other textually interesting comment and I’ll be done: More it is by scholars composed book 2 before he composed Book 1. To my mind this information is crucial. Most of us will read the book in the order they were edited by the author himself but knowing this the question of authorial intention becomes more urgent. Was More trying to soften the radical nature of his text?  Did he change his mind about Utopia? Most scholar I have consulted seem to believe that all the textual ironies and ambiguities are meant to conceal More own real thinking on the issue. We do know, though, that in later life More was sorry to have published it. This was after he became more dogmatic (fanatical) about religion.

Hence the background information is tantalizing since it clarifies some issues it obscures others.

In any case I am open to the suggestion that Utopia can be read as a “tragedy” and will interested in seeing how you arrived at such an insight. Seeing Utopia as a tragedy presupposes that utopias are something desirable in the first place.

One more note. I have, alas, been very busy and will continue to be so till about the middle of July, (and perhaps even sooner), afterwards I will be able to devote more time to our discussions. If this is ok with you, let’s proceed.

My own plan is to take onto consideration your readings of the text but to proceed methodically with my own readings which will be also bases on a close reading of the text while taking account of the historical background.

Btw: I will be using the Penguin edition but will be quoting from an online text in order to save time.

Here is a link to that edition:

www.gutenberg.org/.../2130-h.htm

- J. Dyer

June 28, 2009 at 8:37pm

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Thanks Jack, and very much, and let me and try and get your edition and let's work commonly from that one.

- basman

June 28, 2009 at 10:10pm

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Jack I'm going to work toward your mid July "availability".

- basman

July 1, 2009 at 1:40pm

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...Here is a link to that edition:

www.gutenberg.org/.../2130-h.htm...

Have this now.

- basman

July 7, 2009 at 11:10am

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Jack : I have recounted more of the text than I intended to, but I am doing it in the service of trying to support my introductory characterization of UTOPIA. In doing so I tried to begin to answer your questions going to that characterization as well as presenting my recounting and generous helping of textual quotes in the context of that characterization. I of course welcome any contra reading you put forward and engaging your comments and own view of the work. I also propose to continue in this vein to the end of Book 1 and then try a more overarching approach to Book 11 consistent with my view of the fiction and in response to your own interpretation and comments.

Please let me know what you think about any of this, substance and procedure?

_____________________________________

In Book 1, after Raphael talks about his far flung travels, including Utopia which More does not go into until Book 11, Giles is moved to ask Raphael why he does not enter some king’s service. With his learning and experience, Giles says, Raphael would be entertaining and helpful at a counsel board and any prince would be happy to have him. Then Giles introduces a theme that runs through the debate about Raphael so serving; so serving will be in Raphael’s interest, “advancing it agreeably” and at the same time be of great “use to all your relatives and friends”.

One way to characterize the theme is the difference between conventional and radical reasoning, but it really serves to set up More’s more compelling argument. My argument is that this debate sets up the dominant thematic question raised by UTOPIA and which, I will try to contend, underscores my argument for it as a tragedy: is amelioration short of the radical revision Utopia demands possible.

Raphael’s thematic response to this inducement is his freedom from material obligation and necessity—money and pride being, as is made clear at the end of Book 11, the root of all evil. He gave away his entire estate when he was young and healthy, what most only give away in their old age or after death. So neither for his own material sake nor to do materially right by the objects of is bounty need he “‘enslave myself to any king what ever’”

That response ushers in a sub theme of the distinction between servitude and service: for Raphael, a “difference that is only a matter of one syllable”. Giles argues conventionally, “I *do not see any other way* in which you can be so useful, both in private to your friends and to the public, and by which you can make your own condition happier” (emphasis mine). Raphael argues, seeing another way, such a life would be repellent to his spirit and trammel his freedom to live as he pleases. He disdains, he says court life and currying favor with power. Raphael seeks neither nor wealth nor power.

More then lends the debate gravity. Bracket your enjoyments, he tells Raphael, and counsel in the interest of inciting “just and noble actions”. Raphael’s gifts would make him an extraordinary counselor and hence he is subject to an extraordinary moral duty.

Raphael counters with his observation of two mistakes by More: one, More too highly estimates Raphael’s capacities; and two, even with his own abilities stipulated, the world is too fallen for them to be of any use, his impotence a measure of how irredeemable things are. Raphael would be “bartering” “his peace of mind for some ruler’s convenience”; princes prefer the arts of war to the good arts of peace, bound on imperial adventure; counselors, all vain, tell the king what he wants to hear, courting his favor, and will not brook opposing arguments. Opposing arguments challenge their very being and will use any means to discredit them ranging from ridicule to appeals to precedent and past practices.

Conventionality is manifest in Giles and More who serve in lesser and greater gradations as foils for its limitations. Knocked astride by Raphael’s vehemence, More responds: “‘What !’ I asked, ‘Were you ever in England?’” In light of what Raphael recounts, described below, even More sounds like a naïf in asking the question.

Raphael, answering yes, then launches into a case in point: his visit the Archbishop of Canterbury, “not long after the rebellion in the West was suppressed, with a *great slaughter of the poor people that were engaged in it*” (emphasis mine). He dines with Morton, painted as a wise and accomplished man in the king’s high service, and a learned layman in the law.

The subject arises as to why the exceptionally widespread execution of thieves does not deter thievery. Hence ensues a lengthy response by Raphael that highlights some of England’s blight, why arguably it is hell on earth irredeemable by mere amelioration short of Utopia: execution is too harsh; it does not deter; the causes of theft are systemic; England whips rather than teaches, executes when it should devise reform allowing work rather men being driven to steal to assuage their and their families’ starvation; wounded and limbless soldiers from wars of imperial conquest are shunted aside; idle,  prodigal gentry bleed their tenants dry, their servants thrown away on the death of their retainers or at the first instance of their own infirmity. All of Europe keeps mercenary standing armies on retainer during time of peace who grow idle and flabby at great national cost. England’s policy of turning farm land into sheep grazing land devastates fields, houses and towns in order to get expensive wool for profit for the gentry. Thus:

“…They stop the course of agriculture, destroying houses and towns, reserving only the churches, and enclose grounds that they may lodge their sheep in them.  As if forests and parks had swallowed up too little of the land, those worthy countrymen turn the best inhabited places into solitudes; for when an insatiable wretch, who is a plague to his country, resolves to enclose many thousand acres of ground, the owners, as well as tenants, are turned out of their possessions by trick or by main force, or, being wearied out by ill usage, they are forced to sell them; by which means those miserable people, both men and women, married and unmarried, old and young, with their poor but numerous families (since country business requires many hands), are all forced to change their seats, not knowing whither to go; and they must sell, almost for nothing, their household stuff, which could not bring them much money, even though they might stay for a buyer.  When that little money is at an end (for it will be soon spent), what is left for them to do but either to steal, and so to be hanged (God knows how justly!), or to go about and beg? and if they do this they are put in prison as idle vagabonds, while they would willingly work but can find none that will hire them; for there is no more occasion for country labour, to which they have been bred, when there is no arable ground left.  One shepherd can look after a flock, which will stock an extent of ground that would require many hands if it were to be ploughed and reaped.  This, likewise, in many places raises the price of corn.  The price of wool is also so risen that the poor people, who were wont to make cloth, are no more able to buy it; and this, likewise, makes many of them idle: for since the increase of pasture God has punished the avarice of the owners by a rot among the sheep, which has destroyed vast numbers of them—to us it might have seemed more just had it fell on the owners themselves.  But, suppose the sheep should increase ever so much, their price is not likely to fall; since, though they cannot be called a monopoly, because they are not engrossed by one person, yet they are in so few hands, and these are so rich, that, as they are not pressed to sell them sooner than they have a mind to it, so they never do it till they have raised the price as high as possible….”

The same practices, says Raphael, to his dinner companions, applies to other livestock which are exorbitantly priced, with cottages being town down and farming I decay and nobody left to breed cattle. The rich do not breed cattle but buy them lean, fatten them and sell them dear, ultimately lessening the supply driving prices higher. Thus England faces ruin “by the crass avarice of a few”.  

The resulting hideous poverty exists side by side with wanton luxury, ostentatious dress, gluttony and degenerate gaming and idleness. Raphael’s ameliorative advice, rather Utopian, is to banish the avaricious gentry and idle rich, have them restore what has fallen fallow and ruined or let them rent to some who will rebuild, restrict the rich from effectively cornering markets and exercising monopoly power. Let farming and the wool manufacture be restored to increase employment. Without such measures lectures Raphael to his guests it is futile to boast of the severity in punishing theft, which punishment is neither just nor practical:

“…If you do not find a remedy to these evils it is a vain thing to boast of your severity in punishing theft, which, though it may have the appearance of justice, yet in itself is neither just nor convenient; for if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this but that you first make thieves and then punish them?...”

Morton cuts off the lawyer’s response, which is couched in lawyer-speak:

“…You have talked prettily, for a stranger,’ said he, ‘having heard of many things among us which you have not been able to consider well; but I will make the whole matter plain to you, and will first repeat in order all that you have said; then I will show how much your ignorance of our affairs has misled you; and will, in the last place, answer all your arguments.  And, that I may begin where I promised, there were four things—’  ‘Hold your peace!’ said the Cardinal…”

He asks Raphael to continue. Raphael, continuing with utopian suggestions, rejects the extremes that all crimes are equal or that the slightest violation should beget “the sword in punishment. It is absurd to execute thieves and hence to punish murder and theft alike. Thieves should be made to make restitution and then do hard labor once theft isn’t a systemic consequence, whipped only if they  are idle or transgress further even while they are fed and looked after decently. Raphael continues this account offering a host of rules and practices which inform a humane more sensible treatment of thieves as More the author, not necessarily the character sees it.

I’ll conclude this at this point by noting, as significant to my overall argument, that Raphael says this policy of treating thieves should be instituted in England. To this the lawyer replies, “ ‘That it could never take place in England without endangering the whole nation.’”. “As he said this he shook his head, made some grimaces, and held his peace, while all the company seemed of his opinion…”

Morton says:

“…’That it was not easy to form a judgment of its success, since it was a method that never yet had been tried; but if,’ said he, ‘when sentence of death were passed upon a thief, the prince would reprieve him for a while, and make the experiment upon him, denying him the privilege of a sanctuary; and then, if it had a good effect upon him, it might take place; and, if it did not succeed, the worst would be to execute the sentence on the condemned persons at last; and I do not see,’ added he, ‘why it would be either unjust, inconvenient, or at all dangerous to admit of such a delay; in my opinion the vagabonds ought to be treated in the same manner, against whom, though we have made many laws, yet we have not been able to gain our end.’…”

This diffidence fore-echoes and anticipates More the character’s own diffidence at the very end of Book 11:

“…When Raphael had thus made an end of speaking, though many things occurred to me, both concerning the manners and laws of that people, that seemed very absurd, as well in their way of making war, as in their notions of religion and divine matters—together with several other particulars, but chiefly what seemed the foundation of all the rest, their living in common, without the use of money, by which all nobility, magnificence, splendour, and majesty, which, according to the common opinion, are the true ornaments of a nation, would be quite taken away—yet since I perceived that Raphael was weary, and was not sure whether he could easily bear contradiction, remembering that he had taken notice of some, who seemed to think they were bound in honour to support the credit of their own wisdom, by finding out something to censure in all other men’s inventions, besides their own, I only commended their Constitution, and the account he had given of it in general; and so, taking him by the hand, carried him to supper, and told him I would find out some other time for examining this subject more particularly, and for discoursing more copiously upon it.  And, indeed, I shall be glad to embrace an opportunity of doing it.  In the meanwhile, though it must be confessed that he is both a very learned man and a person who has obtained a great knowledge of the world, I cannot perfectly agree to everything he has related.  However, there are many things in the commonwealth of Utopia that I rather wish, than hope, to see followed in our governments….”

I quote this at length again because I find that in it lays the basis for what UTOPIA finally means given all that goes before.

- basman

July 7, 2009 at 1:44pm

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p.s. one indavertant omission:

I had meant to make the point that even when an archetype of England's legal establishment ,who can't get over himself and embodies all the reasons for Raphael's scorn of  lawyers' preening mendacity and manipulative self seeking, outright rejects Raphael's utopian tinged, ameliorative theft punishment suggestions, and even when the estimable Archbishop himself is only cautious and rather stinting as to them, albeit more open minded, in context Raphael's suggestions only make sense after systemic reforms in England happen so as to eliminate the systemic causes of theft he devastatingly outlines, and which, as noted, in my view, underscore the English "hell on earth" and the tragedy at the need for a Utopian ideal that can never be achieved,

- basman

July 7, 2009 at 2:33pm

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Itzig, I just saw your posts.

Thanks, will download them and try to respond next week.

- J. Dyer

July 7, 2009 at 11:56pm

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Good, but take all the time you need to.

- basman

July 8, 2009 at 9:15am

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Itzig, I finally had time to read your reply carefully. I am still formulating my complete reply. For now

I will offer my view about with the way the utopian society is delineated in More (and in most books about the subject that I have seen) and show that it’s the formulation of such societies which make it seem that they are unattainable.

Now, because such ideal social structures are  counterfactual the author has to find some way of separating the existence of such a fantastic world from the one in which live. Such separations are either temporal (by placing the Utopian in a remote and inaccessible past or future) or spatial as in More’s account.

It is also often rejected because our very humanity it is said is incompatible with such an idealized social structure. This I take is your view and why you see such a situation as a “the tragedy at the need for a Utopian ideal that can never be achieved”

I see this a little different since to my mind it is not certain that our humanity precludes utopias, rather the way these utopias have been represented makes such an assumption inevitable. It is not the utopia itself which can never be achieved rather it’s their representations which makes such a belief inevitable.

The problem in constructing a utopia is both one of how to get there from here (which is a mechanical problem) as well as a problem of how best to sustain such a project once it has been constructed.

Here is the dilemma: utopias are constructed by some lawgiver who is a man of spirit. In More’s account it is Utopus who conquered the island and tamed it:

“But they report (and there remains good marks of it to make it credible) that this was no island at first, but a part of the continent.  Utopus, that conquered it (whose name it still carries, for Abraxa was its first name), brought the rude and uncivilised inhabitants into such a good government, and to that measure of politeness, that they now far excel all the rest of mankind.”

Now the man (in this case we are speaking of males) or men of spirit create utopias do so by taming or making them subjects fit to be ruled. In spirited soul who creates utopia ends up with a de-spirited population what one critic of Socrates first account of the ideal State in the Republic calls the city of sows.

More’s text, though probably not More himself hints at this through his discussion of war, mercenary armies and thievery in Part One. (I’ll come back to this point later on.)

Hence utopias are imagines as constructed by people of spirit to be lived in by docile subjects.

Why is this so? Why are Utopias imagined in such a way?

I believe that this has to do with the fact that the account is always offered by an outsider. (Sometimes as with Rafael and outsides who as you said seeks “neither wealth nor power.” Hence, someone who is without the kind of spirit necessary t found such a community. He is someone has not grown up in such a society and can’t imagine a utopia full of spirited people. This is why we get no believable account by Raphael of the subjective life of any individual in such a State. (Only in dystopias do we get accounts of individual subjectivity but always in revolt against his or her society.)

What is always missing from utopian society is politics in the original sense of the word, where people of a community come together and debate how best to govern their city or State. Politics is always reduced to administration.

Is this a sign that the utopic vision and the political are tragically at odds?

I believe that there is evidence even in More’s text that this is the case.

I will come back to this issue as well as answer you post more fully in my next post as it is now getting late.

- J. Dyer

July 13, 2009 at 12:50am

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Jack I just saw your post and, skimming it,  it looks interesting. I haven't yet considered it carefully. I will and will await what further post you mean to make in response to me befoe replying.

Thanks,

- basman

July 13, 2009 at 9:17am

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I raised the issue of Utopias being established by men of spirit (adventures people, law givers, etc…) so that ordinary people can lead a life of routine.

I inted to look at part one for clues that More is indeed aware that this is the case.

Now, Utopia is not easily classifiable; while part two is obviously fiction part one, though, deals with actual social ills in the England of More’s day. Moreover most of the characters, aside from the ‘charcter’ Hythloday, mentioned in part one were actual people.

The narrator is More himself, though a More who is different from the author.

The narrator is portrayed as a man of action as well as an intellectual interested in social issues.

He goes to Bruges on a kingly mission and from there to Antwerp where he engages in an intellectual discussion that is meant to suggest Plato’s Republic.

It is here that we meet Raphael Hythloday a travelers who is said to be like Plato presumably because like Plato he travelled in order to acquire knowledge. Moreover, travels unlike those of Palinurus, Aeneas’ pilot, are purposeful.

Now the name Raphael Hythloday seems to incorporate a trilingual pun: “Raphael” (god heals in Hebrew) “Hyhtlos or huthlos,” nonsense (in Greek), and “day” god (in Latin). One can interpret the name to mean “god heals through nonsense.” I read this to mean that Hythloday is the bearer of fiction (nonsense) which enlightens or heals. (More’s friend Erasmus had written “In Praise of Folly” in More’s home in England and nonsense like folly are bearers of wisdom for the authors.

Now Raphael is also said to be more interested in Greek learning than in Latin:

“This Raphael, who from his family carries the name of Hythloday, is not ignorant of the Latin tongue, but is eminently learned in the Greek, having applied himself more particularly to that than to the former, because he had given himself much to philosophy, in which he knew that the Romans have left us nothing that is valuable, except what is to be found in Seneca and Cicero.”

This again takes us back to Plato, the Greek philosopher and especially to the Republic in which a dialogue about an ideal State is discussed. Notice also that both the Republic and the discussion in More’s book are held in commercial areas: the Piraeus of Athens (the harbor) and Bruges-Antwerp also commercial centers.  In the Republic the discussion is held in the home of an aged businessman, a kind of nouveau riche figure, while in More’s treatise it is held in a garden:

“After those civilities were past which are usual with strangers upon their first meeting, we all went to my house, and entering into the garden, sat down on a green bank and entertained one another in discourse.”

More being a Christian the idea of a Garden cannot but be also an allusion to the Garden of Eden (an ideal place)

It is here, at a remove from the actual world that they hold forth on questions of justice and the ideal State.

Before the discussion begins, the narrator, More, tells us about Raphael’s travels which is meant as a lead in both the discussion on justice and to Raphael’s account of his journey to Utopia-Nowhere.

Now, what motivates the people to discuss issues of justice is, the narrator, More’s and others questioning of Rapheal’s character both directly and indirectly:

First Peter Giles:

“ “I wonder, Raphael, how it comes that you enter into no king’s service, for I am sure there are none to whom you would not be very acceptable; for your learning and knowledge, both of men and things, is such, that you would not only entertain them very pleasantly, but be of great use to them, by the examples you could set before them, and the advices you could give them; and by this means you would both serve your own interest, and be of great use to all your friends.””

Notice the stress on “personal interest” in the question. Raphael is at great pains to deflect from such personal concerns:

“As for my friends,” answered he, “I need not be much concerned, having already done for them all that was incumbent on me; for when I was not only in good health, but fresh and young, I distributed that among my kindred and friends which other people do not part with till they are old and sick: when they then unwillingly give that which they can enjoy no longer themselves.  I think my friends ought to rest contented with this, and not to expect that for their sakes I should enslave myself to any king whatsoever.”

Peter protests that:

““Soft and fair!” said Peter; “I do not mean that you should be a slave to any king, but only that you should assist them and be useful to them.”

To which Raphael replies:

“The change of the word,” said he, “does not alter the matter.”  

In Latin servias (service) and inservias (servitude) are very close. (Raphael actually says in Latin that the change is merely one syllable.)

That characterization of Raphael that emerges is a contradictory one:

On the one hand he is not interested in property and on the other hand he seems to Raphael seems to be a free spirit one who seems to strive for private happiness:

He tells Peter that:

““Happier?” answered Raphael, “is that to be compassed in a way so abhorrent to my genius?  Now I live as I will, to which I believe, few courtiers can pretend;”

At this point More tells him that:

“Upon this, said I, “I perceive, Raphael, that you neither desire wealth nor greatness; and, indeed, I value and admire such a man much more than I do any of the great men in the world.  Yet I think you would do what would well become so generous and philosophical a soul as yours is, if you would apply your time and thoughts to public affairs, even though you may happen to find it a little uneasy to yourself;…”

The discussion is about leading a private as opposed to public existence. (More of course, as narrator as well as the historical personage was a public figure, a courtier.)

The picture that emerges of Raphael is a contradictory one: he values freedom while showing disdain for wealth and “greatness.” Yet he also values the society of Utopia a non place where human life is reduced to routine.

Could More be telling us that it is the contradictory nature of human beings which make both the attainment of ideal societies both impossible and yet a dream which impossible to give up?

I intend to proceed with the discussion of justice in England next. At that point I will address directly your comments on these issues. I am proceeding slowly since my views are still unformed.

Fell free to counter any point you disagree with, Itzig.

- J. Dyer

July 14, 2009 at 10:07pm

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The last line should read,

Feel free to counter any point you disagree with, Itzig.

- J. Dyer

July 15, 2009 at 9:22am

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okay jack: your last was what  I was waiting for before responding.

Now I will, though I myself now will need some time.

My own view generally for however much this exercise moves slowly and requires real thought and some real work, it is highly worthwhile, interesting, thought provoking and enjoyable.

Thanks

- basman

July 15, 2009 at 11:35am

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okay jack: your last was what  I was waiting for before responding.

Now I will, though I myself now will need some time.

My own view generally for however much this exercise moves slowly and requires real thought and some real work, it is highly worthwhile, interesting, thought provoking and enjoyable.

Thanks

- basman

July 15, 2009 at 1:00pm

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"Now I will, though I myself now will need some time."

Take all the time you need.

I like our slow close readings.

- J. Dyer

July 15, 2009 at 4:32pm

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Jack I have gotten really busy unexpectedly. So please bear with me. I'll answer you as soon as the dust settles or just stops blowing in my face.

- basman

July 18, 2009 at 10:43am

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Not a problem, take your time, Itzig.

I just got the Cambridge edition of Utopia and am in the process of transferring my notes. This will take some time, at least a week.

- J. Dyer

July 18, 2009 at 11:42am

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Jack, believe me I would rather be writing about Utopia than doing the legal dreck I am mired in but I have to do what I have to do and I am really busy now. It's like The Sopranos: "you get out and they pull you back in." Anyway, please bear with me and I promise you a response as soon as I get my head above water.

- basman

July 22, 2009 at 11:36am

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I'm gonna' try for this weekend. My wife is away visitng her mother and  my kids and grandkids--still not use to saying that, "my grandkids",-- went with her so it's nice and quiet here in that sense.

I'll give it a go.

- basman

July 23, 2009 at 3:26pm

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Okay Jack, I have finally got some free time, flesh and spirit. I have read again your provocative (in the best sense) post of July 13. I’m sorry for the time lag.

I propose to do two things given my last post on UTOPIA and your July 13 post. I want to continue with my comments on the debate trying to weave in your own thoughts now having culminated in your last post. Then I want to move away from the specifics of the text to more generally try to address your last post.

I had last gotten to the diffident comments by Morton on the prospects for success in England of crime and punishment regime Raphael had been arguing for and taken from Utopia. (Page 25 of the Cambridge text)

Public fickleness is evident the company’s shifting responses all geared to please whomever holds power, here the Cardinal: “When the Cardinal had done, they all commended the motion, though they had despised it when it came from me, but more particularly commended what related to the vagabonds, because it was his own observation.” That placating of power is part of Raphael’s cynicism writ very small, and part of his argument for not joining a European court writ very small. Thus does More in the smallest of ways and with the smallest of observations underscore Raphael’s argument and what I am suggesting is the theme of UTOPIA, the tragedy of its unattainability. In relation to what you say, we need to make sure, when considering that unattainability, we are dealing with More’s text, and with the thematic argument that emerges from it as supported by it.

Thus, given the importance of the small as well as the large in UTOPIA, it is worth noting the jester: “I do not know whether it be worth while to tell what followed, for it was very ridiculous; but I shall venture at it, for as it is not foreign to this matter, so some good use may be made of it.”

The “parasite” is an objective correlative for the company, the embodiment of their foolishness, though they have not his perspective being the object of his jesting at them. He responds “When one of the company had said that I had taken care of the thieves, and the Cardinal had taken care of the vagabonds, so that there remained nothing but that some public provision might be made for the poor whom sickness or old age had disabled from labour.”

The jester notes his indifference to beggars, how their importuning vexes him, how he will give them nothing, and that so well understood is his position that now the beggars leave him alone, knowing they are wasting their breath with him. The jester’s answer would be make a law parceling out all the beggars among the Benedictine Monasteries wherein the men could become lay brothers and then women nuns. All the company but the Cardinal take the jester seriously.

When responded to by a Friar with a pointed barb that the jester’s law will need also to provide for “us friars”, the jester says, “That is done already,’ answered the Fool, ‘for the Cardinal has provided for you by what he proposed for restraining vagabonds and setting them to work, for I know no vagabonds like you.’” The Friar takes the joke personally and tries to humiliate the fool by demeaning him by denunciations from the bible itself. The Friar keeps quoting from scripture to justify the zeal of his rage and his trading insults with the gesture, even defying the Cardinal’s attempt to rein him in: “You do this, perhaps, with a good intention,’ said the Cardinal, ‘but, in my opinion, it were wiser in you, and perhaps better for you, not to engage in so ridiculous a contest with a Fool.’” Finally the Cardinal gives up and simply dismisses the fool and changes the conversation before dismissing the whole company.

There is in this incident a telling contrast between the company’s pandering deference to the Cardinal and the Friar’s zealous defiance of him, which defiance has him, as the Cardinal notes, trading insults with a professional fool. There is also therefore a telling irony between the Friar’s self deluded, self important notion that he is doing God’s work in insulting the Fool and the reality that he is lowering himself beneath the fool and betraying himself as a fanatical ass. And behind that contrast lays More’s withering indictment of church corruption that does not even know itself. For the fool’s jests in likening Friars to vagabonds who should be arrested is meant as truth. The idea is that in the Cardinal’s powerlessness to stop the Friar’s tirade, a kind of insane scripture quoting zealotry that masks a real and self comprehending villainy, there is no answer to the abuse. The Cardinal, powerless here, ends the problem by dismissing it and in effect walking away. So I want to suggest a thematic thread knitting together this dismissal, the diffidence at Raphael’s utopian proposal for crime and punishment in England and More’s own final bemusement at Book 11’s end in being unable to accommodate Raphael’s utopian vision. That’s why, to repeat, the jester’s contretemps with the Friar, as Raphael says, “is not foreign to this matter, so some good use may be made of it.”

Raphael summarizes:

“ ‘Thus, Mr. More, I have run out into a tedious story, of the length of which I had been ashamed, if (as you earnestly begged it of me) I had not observed you to hearken to it as if you had no mind to lose any part of it.  I might have contracted it, but I resolved to give it you at large, that you might observe how those that despised what I had proposed, no sooner perceived that the Cardinal did not dislike it but presently approved of it, fawned so on him and flattered him to such a degree, that they in good earnest applauded those things that he only liked in jest; and from hence you may gather how little courtiers would value either me or my counsels’.”

The argument then shifts back to the central issue which stands, I am suggesting, as an example of the impossibility of attaining Utopia: Raphael’s service as a counselor. More argues (bottom of page 28 Cambridge text) Raphael can overcome his aversions to court life, wisely advise the King and do mankind some good, the greatest imperative of a good man’s duty. Considering my argument about UTOPIA generally and this debate as a stalking horse for More’s overriding theme consider here More’s words to Raphael:

“‘Plato thinks that nations will be happy when either philosophers become kings or kings become philosophers.  It is no wonder if we are so far from that happiness while philosophers will not think it their duty to assist kings with their counsels.’ ”

and Raphael’s response:

“‘They are not so base-minded,” said he, “but that they would willingly do it; many of them have already done it by their books, if those that are in power would but hearken to their good advice.  But Plato judged right, that except kings themselves became philosophers, they who from their childhood are corrupted with false notions would never fall in entirely with the counsels of philosophers, and this he himself found to be true in the person of Dionysius.’ ”

To More’s lament that we are so from Utopia when philosophers will not counsel kings, Raphael says, with a diagnosis deepening the sorrow of it, if kings would heed good counsel, good counselors there would be. Raphael then gives the example of the court of the King of France struggling with how to recover Naples while holding Milan and then subdue all Italy and then conquer a whole list of other nations. Hence go a series of differing Machiavellian proposals in aid of answering the questions raised by (for More the author) a corrupt and despicable premise—the aggrandizement of power through imperial conquest.  Raphael says in plaintive hopelessness (and providing I think a powerful ground for may argument):

:…if so mean a man as I should stand up and wish them to change all their counsels—to let Italy alone and stay at home, since the kingdom of France was indeed greater than could be well governed by one man; that therefore he ought not to think of adding others to it; and if, after this, I should propose to them the resolutions of the Achorians, a people that lie on the south-east of Utopia, who long ago engaged in war in order to add to the dominions of their prince another kingdom, to which he had some pretensions by an ancient alliance: this they conquered, but found that the trouble of keeping it was equal to that by which it was gained; that the conquered people were always either in rebellion or exposed to foreign invasions, while they were obliged to be incessantly at war, either for or against them, and consequently could never disband their army; that in the meantime they were oppressed with taxes, their money went out of the kingdom, their blood was spilt for the glory of their king without procuring the least advantage to the people, who received not the smallest benefit from it even in time of peace; and that, their manners being corrupted by a long war, robbery and murders everywhere abounded, and their laws fell into contempt; while their king, distracted with the care of two kingdoms, was the less able to apply his mind to the interest of either.  When they saw this, and that there would be no end to these evils, they by joint counsels made an humble address to their king, desiring him to choose which of the two kingdoms he had the greatest mind to keep, since he could not hold both; for they were too great a people to be governed by a divided king, since no man would willingly have a groom that should be in common between him and another.  Upon which the good prince was forced to quit his new kingdom to one of his friends (who was not long after dethroned), and to be contented with his old one.  To this I would add that after all those warlike attempts, the vast confusions, and the consumption both of treasure and of people that must follow them, perhaps upon some misfortune they might be forced to throw up all at last; therefore it seemed much more eligible that the king should improve his ancient kingdom all he could, and make it flourish as much as possible; that he should love his people, and be beloved of them; that he should live among them, govern them gently and let other kingdoms alone, since that which had fallen to his share was big enough, if not too big, for him:—pray, how do you think would such a speech as this be heard?’”

To which More must answer as he does “’Not very well I’m sure’, said I.”

That example then gets replicated in the following hypothetical about treasury filling. And after canvassing all the advice rooted in corrupt and manipulative schemes, hoisting up old never used laws, leaning on judges, following the maxim “a king who must maintain an army can never have too much gold”, Raphael plaintively asks:

“ ‘Now what if, after all these propositions were made, I should rise up and assert that such counsels were both unbecoming a king and mischievous to him; and that not only his honour, but his safety, consisted more in his people’s wealth than in his own; if I should show that they choose a king for their own sake, and not for his; that, by his care and endeavours, they may be both easy and safe; and that, therefore, a prince ought to take more care of his people’s happiness than of his own, as a shepherd is to take more care of his flock than of himself?’”

and so on with his litany of utopian prescriptions.

And here More, character and author, gets to the heart of the argument and the tragic dilemma:

“ ‘No doubt, very deaf,’ answered I; ‘and no wonder, for one is never to offer propositions or advice that we are certain will not be entertained.  Discourses so much out of the road could not avail anything, nor have any effect on men whose minds were prepossessed with different sentiments.  This philosophical way of speculation is not unpleasant among friends in a free conversation; but there is no room for it in the courts of princes, where great affairs are carried on by authority.”  “That is what I was saying,” replied he, “that there is no room for philosophy in the courts of princes.’”

So against More’s own lament on the absence of, but need for, a philosopher king, Raphael drives home the tragic conclusion, “ ‘That is just what I was saying’…’There is no place for philosophy in the councils of kings.”

I will stop here my plodding through this debate and will deal with its concluding arguments in my next post. But I want to take up generally some of what you say in your July 13, 2009 post.

I agree with the way you nicely put it that “because such ideal social structures are  counterfactual the author has to find some way of separating the existence of such a fantastic world from the one in which live. Such separations are either temporal (by placing the Utopian in a remote and inaccessible past or future) or spatial as in More’s account.” But, as mentioned, I’d want to distinguish between what arises strictly from More’s text or other texts on the one hand and the world itself on the other. In that distinction and dealing just with the former, I see the issue quite differently than you. You say it’s not our humanity that precludes utopias, but it’s their representation that makes the assumption of unattainability foregone.

In light of More’s UTOPIA, I have some difficulty taking your argument in. My contention is that More paints an England (and Europe) that is a kind hell on earth, and that he posits Utopia as a kind of heaven on earth. What drives England to hell, I want to suggest, is the nature of humanity marked by pride driving vanity and self seeking driving money as evil’s root driving indifference and contempt by the powerful and rich for the miserable many. More’s Utopia is from what I read about it is built as an antithesis in many ways of England including such details as the four hospitals, the medical care, the respect and reverence for the elderly and the ill, and even the cleanliness and order of the streets and in all of its, Utopia’s many details. So on my reading of More’s text, the issue is not the representation of Utopia, it is the blackly foul conditions which beset England and Continental Europe.

More gives his Utopia a genesis, a conqueror Utopus who is a law giver, to give his place of the mind concrete resonance, to suggest double mindedly that it is in his fiction a real place, which cannot, my argument is, be gotten to. In asking, as you do, how do we get there, my answer is that it is, for More, it is by adopting his radical vision embodied by Utopia, which as the debate in Book 1 shows, is not ever going to happen.

I’ll only offer these few comments for the moment though I find your ideas, even if I disagree with them, perceptive and thought provoking. My idea is to plod through the short last bit of Book 1 and then engage your arguments on a more overarching scale as rooted in or anchored by the text.

- basman

July 26, 2009 at 3:10pm

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... a real and self comprehending villainy...

should read ".. a real and unself comprehending villainy..."

- basman

July 27, 2009 at 12:57pm

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I just downloaded and printed out your response, Itzig.

It’ll take between a week or two before I have to answer you in detail.

In the meantime, since I am not sure I am clear about the way you use the term “tragedy” I wonder if you could be more specific.

Which definition of tragedy do you have in mind when you say that you read More’s Utopia as a “tragedy?”

Also from whose point of view do you see the particular definition you are using articulated? Is it from More’s point of view (the author), or from More the character, or from Raphael’s? Or do your see its presence in the text a latent manifestation which hasn’t yet entered the conscious awareness of the author?

- J. Dyer

July 29, 2009 at 4:20pm

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Trust you to go to the heart of my argument and ask me to explain it.

The nerve!

:-)

1. I will tell you a little of what I mean by tragedy in a few days--we are having a long weekend this weekend; and  

2. I'll await with relaxed anticipation your posting; please provide it only in your own good time..

- basman

July 30, 2009 at 10:02am

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Appetizer only about tragedy.

Comedy, someone said, moves towards a happy ending which evokes the reponse "this should be" and that the society emerging at at the conclusion of comedy is a pragmatically free society which repesents a kind of moral norm.

- basman

July 31, 2009 at 3:07pm

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Main course:

This is the position I'd/I'll try to defend about tragedy and UTOPIA as a tragedy.

While comedy evokes the reponse "this should be" in representing the movement to a happy ending in the representation of a free society embodying a moral norm, tragedy, its antipode, is the mimesis of terrible loss wrought by the blasting of moral norms and the conferral of dignity and value on what has been lost. Tragedy is mimesis of the means and meanings of that loss.

I don't see the tragic in UTOPIA as a "presence in the text a latent manifestation which hasn’t yet entered the conscious awareness of the author." For me the tragic is More the author's theme; his character More's befuddlement, his moral impotence, his bemusement, the shattering of his ameliorative impulses, in the face of Raphael's  (in effect speaking for More the author) blistering indictment exemplifies  what even the best of men, More the estimable character, canot even confront let alone surmount, the living hell of a blasted humanity borne out in every execrable detal of life in England and Europe that Utopia stands contrary to.

That's what I want to contend in any event.

- basman

August 1, 2009 at 4:57pm

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p.s.

O yeas, one more thing: what I just said ties into what I had said about Stevens's lines in my lead off post. Rather than, in UTOPIA, the imperfect being our paradise, which was how I was tending first  to think about More's work, the subtle undercutting of a supposed ideal in favour of the hurly burly excitement and stimulation of paradisiacal imperfection, of what hot greatness comes of flawed words and stubborn sounds, the imperfect  in UTOPIA is the tragically bereft leaving of men, women and children, the lame, the sick and the elderly, the poor and the weak, in the grip of a grindingly terrible existence, shorn  of their humanity while princes and aristocrats and the idle rich use and then abuse them unconscionably for their own power, gain and pleasure. Amelioration is useless against such villainous profligacy I want to say More says. The radical vision of his Utopia is his prescription but is Erewhon so to speak.

- basman

August 1, 2009 at 5:17pm

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p.s. Talking about tragedy, here's something I have been thinking about lately. My thought is that one way of understanding the  tragic is understanding  the impossibility of amelioration in the resolution of, or even just the staunching of, what breeds terrible loss, the impossibility of any kind of a middle way, excluded not by illogic but by the overwhelming forces, whatever their source--nature, the fates, sheer contingency, human nature-- that wreak terrible loss. Any tragedy, any work of literature really, envisions a world; and theme is the nature of that world as reflected in human actions, causes and effects.

I'll stop now as I guess that this is enough pontificating for a good while, and, in any event, I don't want to get too far removed from UTOPIA itself.

- basman

August 3, 2009 at 12:46am

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Itzig, I read your views on tragedy very closely and I am still unsure what you definition of tragedy is.

You oppose in binary fashion tragedy to comedy and then proceed to restate your view that More’s Utopia is a tragedy.

I believe that you intend the following to be you central point about tragedy (and comedy).

“While comedy evokes the reponse "this should be" in representing the movement to a happy ending in the representation of a free society embodying a moral norm, tragedy, its antipode, is the mimesis of terrible loss wrought by the blasting of moral norms and the conferral of dignity and value on what has been lost. Tragedy is mimesis of the means and meanings of that loss.”

But most comedies from the ancient Greeks and Romans to Shakespeare comedy hardly followed a movement towards a happy ending “in the representation of a free society embodying a moral norm,…”

Aristophanes’ comedies can be pretty brutal and end on a somber note, (The Clouds, for example).

Similarly, the “moral norm” in many Shakespeare’s’ comedies are hardly moral:  For example, 'Twelfth Night,” “The Merchant of Venice” do not end on a harmonious note.  Nor are the societies represented “free” in any meaningful sense.

Same with Moliere.

Tragedy on the other hand can be limited to a “terrible loss wrought by the blasting of moral norms and the conferral of dignity and value on what has been lost.”

Often it is the very “moral norms” which lead to a tragic end. Sophocles’ Oedipus, as well as his Antigones are examples. So to is King Lear where a King’s pride rather than defiance of “moral norms” precipitates a tragic outcome.

What I am looking for is a definition of tragedy which applies to more than just this one text.

 Be that as it may, I will post on Utopia in more detail by this weekend

- J. Dyer

August 3, 2009 at 10:55pm

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Thanks Jack for your well taken comments. Let me give them thought and try to refine what I am trying to say about tragedy.

And I look forward at your convenience to your further specific comments on UTOPIA.

- basman

August 3, 2009 at 11:57pm

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p.s. what if anything  is your defintion of tragedy?

- basman

August 4, 2009 at 11:35am

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"By the way, what happened the discussion of the essay on Thomas More by James Wood? I saw some time back that basman was going to post on it but then I never saw his musings."  LR

I am ready to start discussing the Wood essay any time.

I have been slowly posting on More's Utopia, here

blogs.tnr.com/.../should-we-have-to-read-the-bard-before-hearing-him-more-on-shakespeare.aspx

And there is no reason why we can’t also discuss the essay on the same thread.

- J. Dyer

August 8, 2009 at 11:20am

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"p.s. what if anything  is your defintion of tragedy?"

I'll get to that at some point, Basman, However, since I am not arguing that Utopia is a tragedy so it's not necessary that I offer a definition of the genre.

- J. Dyer

August 8, 2009 at 11:21am

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Not necessary, in the context of More's Utopia, that is.

- J. Dyer

August 8, 2009 at 11:22am

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...I'll get to that at some point, Basman, However, since I am not arguing that Utopia is a tragedy so it's not necessary that I offer a definition of the genre...

It's not necessary but I'd be interested in any event and especially since you said: "What I am looking for is a definition of tragedy which applies to more than just this one text."

- basman

August 8, 2009 at 1:01pm

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Tentative reworking of a conception of tragedy:

Tragedy is the mimesis of terrible loss  and of the means and meanings of that loss.

- basman

August 8, 2009 at 1:05pm

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To LR and basman, since LR wishes to post on a less used thread I propose we discuss James Wood here:

blogs.tnr.com/.../further-thoughts-on-an-untenable-distinction.aspx

- J. Dyer

August 8, 2009 at 1:09pm

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basman said:

“Tentative reworking of a conception of tragedy:

Tragedy is the mimesis of terrible loss and of the means and meanings of that loss.”

We have to distinguish the term “tragedy” which deals with a form of fiction from its uses in everyday language and conveys a meaning of loss, terrible or not.

Aristotle was the first thinker, as far as I know, to attempt an analysis of the tragic mode of representation. All other attempts at definition have either been derivative or have been set up in opposition to his view.

Central to his definition is the notion of a “tragic flaw” in the character (a noble being, in every sense) whose fate is adversely affected by fate (or the gods). In other words, the tragic hero is not innocent. His guilt though as it were happens to him and can even be unknown to him as in Oedipus’ case.

Moreover, the tragic hero suffers an irreversible affliction which is also a punishment (either by fate, or the gods.) This can happen even to a god as it did in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound”

We also have to distinguish between tragic fate and natural fate: the fact that we are mortal is not a tragedy it is what defines us.

In addition, the conception of the tragic is absent from the Jewish and Christian religious point of view since each religion believes in redemption and also because god in the monotheistic tradition is by definition just (or he can be seen as a natural fate).

The books of Job and I would argue Samuel, is closest we get to in the Bible to a tragedy in the Greek sense. Unless one also includes Satan’s fate as tragic, this to my mind is a stretch.

Hegel offered a counter definition of tragedy which revolves around the struggle of two rights. He Sophocles’ Antigone were the natural rights of local or family customs and duties are opposed to the rights of the King (the State) to proclaim laws that contradict the natural obligations of the individual to her family.

(In this sense as in others the life of More can be seen as tragic though not his book Utopia even thought when measured against his life is chock full of ironies.)

I know of no compelling definition(s) of tragedy in the latter half of the 19th or the 20th century in spite of George Steiner’s pretentious natterings on the subject.

- J. Dyer

August 8, 2009 at 3:39pm

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I should add that the absence of a new or revised theory of tragedy in the last hundred years is surprising given the death and destruction witnessed in this terrible century.

Perhaps it’s because we don’t believe in fate anymore that makes it difficult for us to take the notion of the tragic seriously.  Or it could be that we are not strong enough to look tragedy in the face any more and prefer to take refuge in the comic mode.

Still it’s something we may want to explore further at some point.

- J. Dyer

August 8, 2009 at 3:52pm

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I don’t want too get far afield but while I am waiting for your further analysis of UTOPIA, here picked at random is one of many literary glosses on tragedy

“….Aristotle defines tragedy as "the imitation of an action that is serious and also as having magnitude, complete in itself." He says, “Tragedy is a form of drama exciting the emotions of pity and fear. Its action should be single and complete, presenting a reversal of fortune, involving persons renowned and of superior attainments, and it should be written in poetry embellished with every kind of artistic expression." The writer presents "incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to interpret its catharsis of such of such emotions" (by catharsis, Aristotle means a purging or sweeping away of the pity and fear aroused by the tragic action).

The basic difference Aristotle draws between tragedy and other genres, such as comedy and the epic, is the "tragic pleasure of pity and fear" the audience feel watching a tragedy. In order for the tragic hero to arouse these feelings in the audience, he cannot be either all good or all evil but must be someone the audience can identify with; however, if he is superior in some way(s), the tragic pleasure is intensified. His disastrous end results from a mistaken action, which in turn arises from a tragic flaw or from a tragic error in judgment. Often the tragic flaw is hubris, an excessive pride that causes the hero to ignore a divine warning or to break a moral law. It has been suggested that because the tragic hero's suffering is greater than his offense, the audience feels pity; because the audience members perceive that they could behave similarly, they feel pity.

The medieval tragedy is a prose or poetic narrative, not a drama. Tragedy was perceived as a reversal of fortune, a fall from a high position. This view of tragedy derives from the Medieval concept of fortune, which was personified as Dame Fortune, a blindfolded woman who turned a wheel at whim; men were stationed at various places on the wheel--the top of the wheel represented the best fortune, being under the wheel the worst fortune. However, the wheel could turn suddenly and the man on top could suddenly be under the wheel, without warning.

A distinctly English form of tragedy begins with the Elizabethans. The translation of Seneca and the reading of Aristotle's Poetics were major influences. Many critics and playwrights, such as Ben Jonson, insisted on observing the classical unities of action, time and place (the action should be one whole and take place in one day and in one place). However, it was romantic tragedy, which Shakespeare wrote in Richard II, Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear, which prevailed. Romantic tragedy disregarded the unities (as in the use of subplots), mixed tragedy and comedy, and emphasized action, spectacle, and--increasingly--sensation. Shakespeare violated the the unities in these ways and also in mixing poetry and prose and using the device of a play-within-a-play, as in Hamlet. The Elizabethans and their Jacobean successsors acted on stage the violence that the Greek dramatists reported. The Elizabethan and later the Jacobean playwright had a diverse audience to please, ranging from Queen Elizabeth and King James I and their courtiers to the lowest classes.

Christopher Marlowe's tragedies showed the resources of the English language with his magnificent blank verse, as in the Tragedy of Dr. Faustus, and the powerful effects that could be achieved by focusing on a towering protagonist, as in Tamburlaine. In Elizabethan tragedy, the individual leads to violence and conflict. A distinctly non-Aristotelian form of tragedy developed during this period was the tragicomedy. In a tragicomedy, the action and subject matter seem to require a tragic ending, but it is avoided by a reversal which leads to a happy ending; sometimes the tragicomedy alternates serious and comic actions throughout the play. Because it blends tragedy and comedy, the tragicomedy is sometimes referred to as a "mixed" kind.

The problem play or play of ideas usually has a tragic ending. The driving force behind the play is the exploration of some social problem, like alcoholism or prostitution; the characters are used as examples of the general problem. Frequently the playwright views the problem and its solution in a way that defies or rejects the conventional view; not surprisingly, some problem plays have aroused anger and controversy in audiences and critics. Henrik Ibsen, who helped to revive tragedy from its artistic decline in the nineteenth century, wrote problem plays. A Doll's House, for example, shows the exploitation and denigration of middle class women by society and in marriage. The tragedy frequently springs from the individual's conflict with the laws, values, traditions, and representatives of society….”

I’m familiar with this kind of taxonomic talk. Here, for another example, is Abrams’s from his Glossary of Literary Terms which I had had plenty of recourse to as a student.  

www.scribd.com/.../Abrams-M-H-A-Glossary-of-Literary-Terms-7th-Ed-1999

But I am trying, just trying mind you, to get at something different, provoked to do so by your earlier question. I have in fact all my adult life been trying to formulate a principled succinct definition of tragedy as a literary form without descending into helpful, perhaps indispensible, taxonomy.  I am an not a literary scholar or historian and have in fact always inclined to what we used to call practical criticism, close reading in the elucidation of texts. In this I, as a student and since, used definitions of genres and forms as aides to explication. It is in this context that I have thought and continue to think about tragedy.

Something I did about 5 years ago, a personal project, got me to the above formulation of terrible loss, which I dusted off admittedly in trying to answer your question. Good, bad or indifferent, it was a considered answer. It was an attempt to get at a succinct conceptual account at the core of the tragic in literature. In all the taxonomies, I have never seen anyone improve on the first branch of Aristotle’s conception of tragedy as, in my paraphrase of Abrams’s paraphrase, the representation of serious action eventuating in a disastrous conclusion and having scope and magnitude complete unto itself, occurring in a world. Once Aristotle gets to catharsis, dramatic unities and other such prescriptions, I reject them, on the difference between prescriptive and the descriptive. As I myself said somewhere else, a few years ago without "surveying the field so to speak" and dusted off above (as I say):

“A literary work, being a structure of ordered language, is by its nature a progression of consciousness from unawareness or some awareness to new understandings, whether that is the understanding of nothingness or futility or meaninglessness or the heart of darkness. That progression occurs regardless of whether a man wakes up one morning and discovers he is a giant insect or whether someone speaks throughout form beyond the grave; and it occurs regardless of literary genre or convention. Tragedy is the progression of consciousness of terrible loss. As literature is the soul’s education in the meaning of the world, tragedy is the soul’s education in the meanings of that loss.”

All that said, I want to repudiate my too quickly giving up of the relation between moral norms and tragedy, but I want to reformulate (subtly?) that relation. For tragic loss to be terrible and tragic, there must be a scale of values (another term for moral norms) implicated by that loss or we have no way of measuring it as terrible and hence as tragic.

Back to More?

- basman

August 9, 2009 at 10:57am

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Your view leaves out the consequences of the tragic on a community of beings and focus’ too much on the subjective consciousness of an individual. The Tragic isn’t merely a subjective representation of loss; it’s the objective record of such loss.

Oedipus’ tragedy is the tragedy of his city and his family.

There is much more to say, however, I suggest we pick it up when we discuss Wood’s essay, if you intend to participate, since he too discusses the possibility that Utopia is a tragedy as well as the possibility that it is a comedy.

I’ll next post on More’s Utopia.

- J. Dyer

August 9, 2009 at 1:00pm

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I'm not sure that my view excludes the community or any loss that any artist wants to treat.

But as you suggesr let's continue that discussion in talking about More.

In what book is Wood's essay on More found?

- basman

August 9, 2009 at 2:39pm

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Found it: James Wood. “Sir Thomas More: A Man For One Season.” in The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief. (New York: Random House, 1999), [www.luminarium.org/.../wood.htm].

- basman

August 9, 2009 at 2:43pm

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It's in "The Broken Estate:"

www.amazon.com/.../ref=sr_1_1

We can talk about it here:

blogs.tnr.com/.../further-thoughts-on-an-untenable-distinction.aspx

LR said he would join us.

- J. Dyer

August 9, 2009 at 2:52pm

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You beat me to the linking draw.

- J. Dyer

August 9, 2009 at 2:53pm

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I got side tracked with the question of tragedy, Itzig.

I'll try to post on Utopia this week, sometime.

- J. Dyer

August 10, 2009 at 10:13am

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Speaking about tragedy, and for your consideration: www.blackwellpublishing.com/.../001.pdf

- basman

August 10, 2009 at 11:35pm

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Thanks for the reference, but I'll save this site for Thomas More's Utopia.

- J. Dyer

August 11, 2009 at 10:04pm

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okay

- basman

August 12, 2009 at 9:55am

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No rush for a post--take your time--but are we still doing this?

- basman

August 16, 2009 at 9:05am

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Yes, I am still planning on continuing with my reading. I am slow down by some medical issues. I will know in a couple of days how soon I will be able to come back to this.

Sorry about the delays, basman.

- J. Dyer

August 16, 2009 at 4:52pm

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Take it easy and be well.

- basman

August 16, 2009 at 8:26pm

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I am seeing my doctor tomorrow, Itzig and I will then have a better idea of when I can resume writing here.

I'll keep you posting. For now I am limiting myself to the occasional comment on Marty's blog.

- J. Dyer

August 18, 2009 at 6:14pm

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Jack are we still doing this? I just returned my copy of UTOPIA to the library and quite late at that and sprung for the $6.80 Cdn. to buy myself a copy--not to mention the late charges. Do you have a moral obligation to me worth $6.80 Cdn. + late charges? :-)

- basman

September 3, 2009 at 1:30pm

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"Do you have a moral obligation to me worth $6.80 Cdn. + late charges?" No, I don't. I do have, though, a desire to go on with our readings. Let's try for restarting our postings towards the end of next week, Itzik.

- jacksondyer

September 5, 2009 at 12:09am

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You know I was joking about the moral obligation thing, I trust. I'm good with next week's end.

- basman

September 5, 2009 at 8:39am

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By the way: do share my sense that the new format has made the entire site significantly less interactive?

- basman

September 5, 2009 at 10:49am

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"do share my sense that the new format has made the entire site significantly less interactive?" I do, I only hope they will fix it before people start to disappear. Otherwiese, as wildboy said the only ones left will be obsessive and hateful george walton and mackenzie.

- jacksondyer

September 5, 2009 at 6:29pm

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Okay, I just finished reading the introduction and the first essay in The Broken Estate. My head is still buzzing. I came at my original doubts about Wood from the standpoint of him as a literary critic as such. The first essay is not really such literary criticism and really does not go to my inchoate concerns. It is broader and richer than literary criticism as such, more like a synthesis of intellectual history and popular philosophy blended in the course of largely taking on Peter Ackroyd’s book on More, which I have not read, with a dollop of commentary on UTOPIA thrown in. But I’ll start with the Introduction. The Introduction promises the that the differences between religious belief and literary belief will be the axes on which the following essays will turn (page xv second paragraph) and asserts the questionable propositions, if I am properly understanding them, that “Once religion has revealed itself to you, you are never free. In fiction, by contrast, one is always free to choose not to believe, and this very freedom, this shadow of a doubt, is what constitutes fiction’s reality.” (Page xv first paragraph). What stops me from rejecting the first notion outright is the phrase “has revealed” because it is not clear to me whether wood is using “revealed” in the sense of revelation or merely in the sense of “becoming aware of” and whether he means, if in the former sense, the nature of revelation means its inescapability even after intellectual rejection of what has been revealed. But even in that former sense I am fairly certain I disagree with what he says. I fail to understand after that intellectual rejection why one one cannot be secure in one’s non belief such that it is not haunted by the specter of what one once believed even if through the genesis of revelation. It seems a truism to say in fiction one is always free to choose not to believe. And I don’t see that notion of choice—which needs some unpacking in any event—so much as antithesis to religious belief as to form an antithetical contrast as such a disparate idea of belief that the categorical differences between them make them contrasting only in the most attenuated way. Firstly, and generally in any event, in principle one is always free to reject religious belief in the same sense broad sense that one is free not to chose the believe the illusion of reality a fiction projects. Then too, and more specifically, the nature of one’s “believing”, one’s willingness to suspend disbelief, is a constitutes the reader in complex and dynamic relations with his own consciousness, reality and the “believed in” illusion of reality which is not sufficiently caught by the usual metaphor of double mindedness. It is caught by some metaphor such as multi mindedness. It is also caught in concise form by the apt phrase Wood himself uses: “as if”. The religious belief Wood discusses is of a different order with no qualification allowed by as if. So really Wood conflates, I’d argue, the weak meaning freedom of choosing not to believe fiction, such as in simply putting down the book with the complex experience of reading willingly wherein one always is simultaneously reading and being self conscious that what one reads is unreal. This multi consciousness is not a choice in the sense of putting down the book or deciding simply not to engage the illusion but is the very structure of the experience of reading fiction. So Wood’s metaphor of a “shadow of a doubt” in reading may be serviceable in imaging the inescapable intrusion of reality—doubt in Wood’s terms here—but reinforces his conflation of choice and the nature of the reading experience. Wood argues—page xv, second paragraph—that the broken estate, the “old estate”—was “…the supposition that that religion was a set of divine truth-claims, and that the Gospel narratives were supernatural reports; fiction might be supernatural, too, but fiction was always fictional, it was not in the same order of truth as the Gospel narratives.” He goes on that in the nineteenth century this distinction began to blur: at the novel’s heights people felt that it could do anything; and, then, too, the Gospels began to be read by writers and theologians as a set of fictional tales; and “…fiction became an almost religious activity…” but without religion’s truth-value. There then follows on page xvi a long paragraph of examples of this merging. Wood’s learning is always impressive. But, to continue my prosaic attempt at chipping away at him, and without disputing his examples, I have trouble with these comments in relation to how I’ve indicated he says he intends to ground his essays. In short, Woods in contrasting religious and literary belief wants to mine the distinction, as he himself makes clear, between “believing in” and “believing as if” or perhaps “believing in as if”. The distinction actually is obvious enough that I’m not sure it warrants all his going on about it. Regardless, and granting him as a foundation the distinction upon which he wants to build, in Wood’s argument for the blurring of its blurring in the nineteenth century, the distinction’s very terms evade him. For in these terms what can it possible mean to say that that at its heights the novel was like a religion but without religion’s truth-value? Let’s stipulate, as Wood argues, that the nineteenth century marked a new apex—from a variety of sources— in Europe of general religious doubt and, as an instance of that, seeing the Gospels as text. Save to describe the rise of such doubt and note some of its consequences, how does what is stipulated relate to the distinction between “believing in”—which there is now less of in the nineteenth century—and how does it relate to the blurring? Coleridge’s argument that the Book of Job clinches the argument for the fallibility of the Scriptures, or the novel generating a new sense of the real and helping kill literal belief in Christ, I’d argue, are instances of such doubt and not instances of blurring. And the idea of blurring makes no analytical sense to me. Either there is “belief in” or there is not according to Wood’s own premises. If that be so, then the accretion of doubt is a point entirely separate from blurring. Similarly to say that nineteenth century artists and intellectuals had the highest hopes for the novel is far from an example of the blurring. To say that literary style or art or aesthetic values themselves constituted a religion minus its truth values is to confuse metaphor with reality. Unless these artists literally, not virtually, attended and worshipped at the church and altar of art is to confuse even great faith and hope in, say, the novel’s boon and possibilities, captured by the *metaphor* of religious faith, with “believing in”. After all, as Wood himself argues throughout his Introduction, “believing in” and “believing as if” are categorically exclusive from each other. I need to be helped to understand what it *concretely* means to say as Wood does that “…there have been writers great enough to move between religious impulse and the novelistic impulse, to distinguish between them and yet, miraculously, to draw on both.” It sounds too portentous to mean simply and prosaically that there are writers great enough brilliantly to draw on biblical sources or suggest biblical parallels and themes and symbols or make some other brilliant uses of religious materials and meanings in their art. If for Virginia Woolf the “novel acts religiously but performs skeptically”, “mystically, only to show we cannot reach the godhead, for the god head has disappeared...”, that may be a nice formulation, but it is all metaphoric and fanciful. For, on Wood’s premises, the novel does not act religiously, even though it does perform skeptically. And there is nothing mystical about it as such save for the sense in which the greatest human creativity fills use with wonder. If Wood had wanted to talk about blurring in a way that did not contradict the terms of his Introduction, he might, as one way, have touched on how actual faith arguably these days has a comparable but not identical multi consciousness that marks reading fiction. But if he meant to suggest that theme or thesis, it passed me by. I’ll wait for some comments from you guys, if you care to make them. Then I’d want to go to suggest the analytical confusion I find in Wood’s Introduction attends his first essay on More, where, for example, he reaches a pitch in his argument to say on page 13 near 2/3ds down the page: “The secular argument against More can only match the religious argument for More if it too deploys transhistorical and universal categories. The Church says, in effect: this is how More should have acted and we are well pleased with him. And we can pronounce this blessing at any time in providential history because our values are timeless; the secularist must parry: this is not how he should have acted, and we must be able to say this at any moment in profane history because the only ground on which we can denounce More is on the ground that he betrayed certain timeless and universal ideals inhuman conduct. That is to say, the religious defense of More from one belief-system, and the secular argument against issues from another and these two systems are still at war.” I’d then like to discuss that part of the essay that discusses UTOPIA as such. And then I’d suggest it would be rich and rewarding to take up some these essays one at a time both from the standpoint of their argument and as literary criticism. I don’t if anybody else’s flesh and spirit are as willing as my own here.

- basman

September 6, 2009 at 2:48pm

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edited some: Okay, I just finished reading the Introduction and the first essay in The Broken Estate. My head is still buzzing. I came at my original doubts about Wood from the standpoint of him as a literary critic. The first essay is not really literary criticism as such and really does not go to my inchoate concerns about him as a critic. It is broader and richer than just literary criticism, more like a synthesis of intellectual history and popular philosophy blended in the course of largely taking on Peter Ackroyd’s book on More, which I have not read, with a dollop of commentary on UTOPIA thrown in. But I’ll start with the Introduction. The Introduction promises the that the differences between religious belief and literary belief will be the axes on which the following essays will turn (page xv second paragraph) and asserts the questionable propositions, if I am properly understanding them, that “Once religion has revealed itself to you, you are never free. In fiction, by contrast, one is always free to choose not to believe, and this very freedom, this shadow of a doubt, is what constitutes fiction’s reality.” (Page xv first paragraph). What stops me from rejecting the first notion outright is the phrase “has revealed” because it is not clear to me whether Wood is using “revealed” in the sense of revelation or merely in the sense of “becoming aware of” and whether he means, if in the former sense, revelation sort of entails its inescapability even after intellectual rejection of the revealed. But even in that former sense I am fairly certain I disagree with what Wood says. In short, I fail to understand why after that intellectual rejection one cannot be secure in one’s non belief such that it is not haunted by the specter of former belief even if arising from revelation. It seems a truism to say in fiction one is always free to choose not to believe. And I don’t see that notion of choice—which needs some unpacking in any event—so much as antithetically contrasting with religious belief contrast as rather being such a disparate idea of belief as to make them contrasting only in the most attenuated way. Firstly, and generally in any event, in principle, one is always free to reject religious belief in the same sense broad sense that one is free to or not to believe the illusion of reality a specific fiction projects. Then too, and more specifically, in reading fiction, the nature of one’s belief, one’s willingness to suspend disbelief, constitutes the reader in complex and dynamic relations with his own consciousness, reality and the “believed in” illusion of reality. Those relations are not sufficiently caught by the usual metaphor of double mindedness. They are better caught by some metaphor such as multi mindedness. They are also caught in more concise form by the apt phrase Wood himself uses: “as if”. The religious belief Wood discusses is of a different order with no qualification allowed by as if. So really Wood conflates, I’d argue, the weak meaning of choosing not to believe fiction, such as by simply putting down the book with the complex experience of reading willingly wherein one simultaneously reads and is self conscious that what one reads is unreal. This multi consciousness is not a choice in the sense of putting down the book or deciding simply not to engage the illusion but is the very structure of the experience of reading fiction. So Wood’s metaphor of a “shadow of a doubt” in reading may be serviceable in describing the inescapable intrusion of reality—doubt in Wood’s terms here—but reinforces his conflation of choice and the nature of the reading experience. Wood argues—page xv, second paragraph—that the broken estate—the “old estate”—was “…the supposition that that religion was a set of divine truth-claims, and that the Gospel narratives were supernatural reports; fiction might be supernatural, too, but fiction was always fictional, it was not in the same order of truth as the Gospel narratives.” He then goes on that in the nineteenth century this distinction began to blur: at the novel’s heights people felt that it could do anything; and, then, too, the Gospels began to be read by writers and theologians as a set of fictional tales; and “…fiction became an almost religious activity…” but without religion’s truth-value.” There then follows on page xvi a long paragraph of examples of this merging. Wood’s learning is always impressive. But, to continue my prosaic attempt at chipping away at him, and without disputing his examples, I have trouble with these comments in relation to how he says he intends to ground his essays. In short, Woods, in contrasting religious and literary belief, wants to mine the distinction, as he himself makes clear, between “believing in” and “believing as if” or perhaps “believing in as if”. (The distinction actually is obvious enough that I’m not sure it warrants all his going on about it.) Regardless, and granting him as a foundation the distinction upon which he wants to build, in Wood’s argument for its blurring in the nineteenth century, his distinction’s very terms evade him. For in these terms what can it possiblly mean to say that that at its heights the novel was like a religion but without religion’s truth-value? Let’s stipulate, as Wood argues, that the nineteenth century marked a new apex—from a variety of sources— in Europe of general religious doubt and, as an instance of that, marked seeing the Gospels as text. Save to describe the rise of such doubt and note some of its consequences, how does what is so stipulated relate to the distinction between “believing in”—which there is now less of in the nineteenth century—and “believing in as if” and how does it relate to the blurring between them? And can there even be such a blurring given Wood’s premises? Wood cites Coleridge’s argument that the Book of Job clinches the argument for the fallibility of the Scriptures, and the novel itself generating “a new sense of the real” that helped kill literal belief in Christ. I’d argue these are instances of doubt and not instances of blurring. And as I just noted the very idea of blurring makes no analytical sense to me here. Either there is “belief in” or there is not according to Wood’s own premises. If that be so, then the accretion of doubt is a point entirely separate from blurring. Similarly, to say that nineteenth century artists and intellectuals had the highest hopes for the novel is far from an example of blurring. To say that literary style or art or aesthetic values constituted a religion minus its truth-value is to confuse metaphor with reality. Unless these artists attended and worshipped at the church and altar of art, Wood confuses even great faith and hope in, say, the novel’s boon and possibilities, captured by the *metaphor* of religious faith, with “believing in”. After all, as Wood argues throughout his Introduction, “believing in” and “believing in as if” are categorically exclusive from each other. I need to be helped to understand what it *concretely* means to say, as Wood does, that “…there have been writers great enough to move between religious impulse and the novelistic impulse, to distinguish between them and yet, miraculously, to draw on both.” That all sounds too portentous to me to mean simply and prosaically that there are writers great enough brilliantly to draw on biblical sources or create biblical parallels and themes and symbols or make some other brilliant uses of religious materials and meanings in their art. If for Virginia Woolf the “novel acts religiously but performs skeptically”, “mystically, only to show we cannot reach the godhead, for the god head has disappeared...”, that may be a nice formulation, but it is all metaphoric and fanciful. For, on Wood’s premises, the novel does not, nay cannot, act religiously, even though it does perform skeptically. And there is nothing mystical about it as such save for the sense in which the greatest human creativity fills us with wonder. If Wood had wanted to talk about blurring in a way that does not contradict the terms of his Introduction, he might, as one way, have touched on how actual faith, arguably, these days has a comparable but not identical multi consciousness that marks reading fiction. But if he meant to broach that theme or thesis, it passed me by. I’ll wait for some comments from you guys, if you care to make them. Then I’d want to go on to suggest the confusion I find in Wood’s Introduction attends his first essay on More, where, for example, he reaches a pitch in his argument to say on page 13 near 2/3ds down the page: “The secular argument against More can only match the religious argument for More if it too deploys transhistorical and universal categories. The Church says, in effect: this is how More should have acted and we are well pleased with him. And we can pronounce this blessing at any time in providential history because our values are timeless; the secularist must parry: this is not how he should have acted, and we must be able to say this at any moment in profane history because the only ground on which we can denounce More is on the ground that he betrayed certain timeless and universal ideals inhuman conduct. That is to say, the religious defense of More from one belief-system, and the secular argument against issues from another and these two systems are still at war.” I’d then like to discuss that part of the essay that discusses UTOPIA. And then I’d suggest it would be rich and rewarding to take up some these essays one at a time both from the standpoint of the sturdiness of their argument and of them as literary criticism. I don’t if anybody else’s flesh and spirit are as willing as my own here.

- basman

September 6, 2009 at 3:34pm

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Basman, I can't locate the other thread in which you posted your comments. I thought they were going to be here: http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-avenue/21st-century-governing-18th-century-tools Can you set up a link to that other thread?

- jacksondyer

September 8, 2009 at 10:33am

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the other thread is here: http://www.tnr.com/blog/alan-wolfe/further-thoughts-untenable-distinction

- basman

September 8, 2009 at 1:01pm

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