Shakespeare William - Shakespeare closely read: a collection of essays: written and performance texts

Shakespeare Closely Read; A Collection of Essays

Shakespeare Closely Read; A Collection of Essays

Written and Performance Texts

Edited by Frank Occhiogrosso

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Madison Teaneck

Published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Co-published with The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

International Shakespeare Conference (2008 : Stratford-upon-Avon, England)

Shakespeare closely read : a collection of essays / written and performance texts edited by Frank Occhiogrosso.

p. cm.

Papers presented at the 2008 International Shakespeare Conference at Stratford-upon-Avon.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61147-014-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-61147-015-4 (ebook)

1. Shakespeare, William, 1561616Dramatic productionCongresses. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1561616Stage historyCongresses. 3. Shakespeare, William, 1561616Film adaptationsCongresses. 4. English dramaEarly modern and Elizabethan, 15001600History and criticismCongresses. I. Occhiogrosso, Frank, 1943 II. Title.

PR3091.I58 2008

822.3'3dc222011014187

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to the memory of my beloved father

and mother Salvatore Occhiogrosso ( 19161971) and

Elvira Morello Occhiogrosso Whittier ( 19131993)

A cknowledgments

I wish to thank the International Shakespeare Conference for its invitation to me to propose the seminar from which these essays come, as well as all of my colleagues in that seminar, especially its leaders Jay Halio, John Drakakis, Reg Foakes, and Tom Clayton. Thanks also to Iska Alter and Scott Newstok for their support. I am also grateful to Drew University for its grants to help me in the preparation of the manuscript of this book, especially Jonathan Levin, dean of the College, Wendy Kolmar, associate dean, Richard Greenwald, dean of the Caspersen School of Graduate Studies, and Robert Weisbuch, president of Drew University. Finally I thank all my colleagues in the English Department, my students, and my wife Jane, without whose love and support I would be sweeping the streets of Madison.

Introduction

I

What is close reading? Where does it come from? What does it accomplish or HAS it accomplished? Where is it now? Where, if anywhere, is it going?

Close reading is of course the principal technique or methodology of the New Criticism, which flourished from the 1930s to the early 1960s. The New Critics argued for the primacy of the text rather than the historical or biographical context of the work (or the poem, as some insisted on calling every kind of literary text). And if the text is primary, then close reading is the logical mode of approach: a careful examination of all aspects of the form of the work (hence the term formalism, used by many as a synonym for the New Criticism) but primarily the language of the textimagery, wordplay, figurative language, allusion (mythical, historical, literary), even grammar and syntaxevery aspect of the language of the text that can be seen to go beyond mere definition, to carry the text beyond simple communication. Or to put it another way, the New Critics close reading is designed to bring up into higher relief those formal aspects of the text that justify the statement, made often then and since, that in great literary texts form and content are one. Interpretationreading for meaningis the end of the critical quest, and close reading is the means to that end.

Among the founders and key practitioners of the New Criticism several familiar names loom large. John Crowe Ransom actually coined the term in the title of his book The New Criticism ; the critical philosophy he espoused and endorsed was new by virtue of its difference from the historical and/or biographical approaches that preceded it. But by the time Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren published their enormously influential Understanding Poetry in 1938, the New Criticism had become more than just a philosophy; it was now a methodology, and one to which close reading of the text was fundamental. Ren Wellek and Austin Warren, William Empson, I. A. Richards, and William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley all went further in establishing New Criticism and close reading. But it was perhaps Cleanth Brookss classic The Well Wrought Urn (1947) that established so many of the terms (even if it did not invent them) that came to become part of the standard practice of the mode, some of the things close readers read closely for: paradox, ambiguity, tension, ironyperhaps above all pattern . Taken collectively, the founders of the New Critical practice of close reading fastened reader attention on those patterns in the language that have made us aware of literary languagesor any languagespropensity to go beyond its nominal function simply to describe or communicate. They made us aware of languages propensity for nuance, or for what they made famous as the distinction between denotationthe dictionary definition of the wordand connotationthe nuance, the suggestion, the association of more than just the literal. They made us keenly aware of what words bring with them when we use them, in obvious cases like metaphors, which, because they are comparisons, are automatically making connections, but also in the case of images, which, when connected to other images to form patterns, create in us a sense of the verbal shape of a poem or story. In his famous essay on Donnes The Canonization, Brooks, in the essays very title, The Language of Paradox, makes us keenly aware that language, at least as much as paradox, is and must be at the center of our attention in reading that poemand many others.

And this is an important point about New Criticism and close reading: that some things once considered central have been left behind, but something else persists and is indeed as important to criticism today as it ever was. If we no longer pay as much attention as we once did to paradox, we still pay a good deal of attention to close reading.

In the more theorized critical schools that followed in the wake of New Criticism, as has often been pointed out, close reading is often the starting point for much of the cultural/historical commentary that follows. Many a piece of Feminist criticism begins with those words or phrases that have blatantor subtleimplications for gender that are either intended or unintended by the author. Many a Marxist critique likewise reads language closely for its class implications. Perhaps nowhere is close reading more essential than in Deconstruction, where the tendency of the language to reverse itself, to set up a play of contradictory voices, is notable only through an extremely scrupulous reading of the text. And although Deconstruction, like New Criticism, was rejected by, among others, the New Historicism because it makes of the text a hermetically sealed unit untouched by historical or cultural forces, the first thing a New Historicistor any Historicistdoes is read the text closely in order to establish precisely the language that contains the historical implications that are central to his/her study.