Chewing on Shakespeare is an activity of some literary critics even if they are not Shakespeare experts. It is like the mathematician who took up Fermat's Last Theorem before it was solved. It was a way to test one’s powers against the best. What I found in dealing with my own Mt. Everest is that I had to understand or maybe finally come to understand that to explain Shakespeare I had to add melodrama as a fully realized genre of literature, along with tragedy and comedy, rather than a debased version of a genre limited for the popular arts that arrived with the Romantics. It was, to me, a revelation.
Read MoreSamuel Johnson's "The Life of Richard Savage"
Samuel Johnson should be best known as the father of modern literary criticism. Before him, there were mostly what we would today call works of literary theory, such as Sir Philip Sidney’s “Art of Poetry”, which explained the nature of literature. That had mostly been the case in literary studies since antiquity. Commentary was reserved for the Bible and the works of theologians. Johnson, on the other hand, made observations about the author and about lines within the texts of Shakespeare and all the other major poets in English in the century before he wrote so as to make the texts more accessible and therefore pleasurable for the reader and so led to the false conclusion that criticism was a parasitic discipline that lived off the literature upon which it commented rather than was the application of the personality, wisdom and wit of the commentator to make these secular texts come alive by providing comments on them.
Read MoreHumanist and Scientific Formats
Literary journalists rely on tired tropes to hold together the points they make as the themes of essays about one or another of the subjects they decide to write about . They need to have points because their high school English teachers said so, even though newspaper type reports or encyclopedia entries or recipe books may not have them, nor do memoirs or diaries or clinical records. But literary journalists do make points and those therefore can be obligatory references to a theory or a touchstone that lets the reader know how the writer is placed among the ideologies and interests and pursuits that define the writer, or else just to provide some apparatus to help hold the thing together. I am reminded of this by my catching up with past issues of the New York review of Books and finding that so many of its ideas are unnecessary or simply canned. There is an article that reminds the author that she is a Feminist, or else that imperialism was a bad thing, or that an author was underrated when all that was meant in the claim was that an author was not properly rated rather than was upped higher on a ruler presumed previously ranked.
Read MoreA Spielberg Masterpiece
Before turning to why Stephen Spielberg in his new version of “West Side Story” has created a gem and is successful at, once again, reviving movie musicals, after a considerable lapse, all the way back to “Chicago”, from 2002, because “LaLa Land”, from 2016, was a failure whether because the two stars had no chemistry or because the music was so poor, or because the genre of musical comedy, like the genre of the western, is just dead, the movie audience not relating to such vehicles, a more general point needs to be made. The first decade and a half of the talkies presented musicals as spectacular and artificial events and included futuristic mock resorts, such as in the Astaire-Rogers movie, “Top Hat”, from 1935, where the two played the Picolino, or else used the production of a musical as the excuse for offering up to the audience fanciful sets and costumes and masses of chorus girls and boys, as happens in dance number in “Gold Diggers of 1935”. Perhaps the last of these was Astaire dancing with Eleanor Powell in “Broadway Melody of 1940” where the set for the biggest event was said to have been the most expensive movie set manufactured up to that time, unless one includes from 1946 “Till The Clouds Roll By” a biopic about Jerome Kern which uses the starpower of MGM to do a medley of Kern’s greatest hits, topping it off with Frank Sinatra singing “Ol Man River” while wearing a baggy double breasted white suit with overly large lapels. Later renditions of that song sung while wearing formal wear rather than the dress of a stevedore became something of a joke. Something different was already available in the 1943 ”Meet Me in St. Louis” but it was a period piece and so might overlook that a convention of movies had turned the corner.
Read MorePower Is What It Seems To Be
What is power? Max Weber defined it as the ability to get people to do what they don’t want to do while influence is to be defined as the ability w to convince people to do what it is you want them to do. Employers have power over employees because they can fire them and so those who have unequal power will do what the boss wants because the employee wants his or her paycheck. A priest has power because a member of the laity believes there are serious consequences if the churchman decides the member to be engaged in sinfulness. On the other hand, a charismatic churchman can lead a follower to prefer to do what the churchman thinks is the right thing. That is influence rather than power. So far so good. The difficult question about power is whether all the different kinds of power are versions of the same thing or process, to be known properly as power itself, or whether each form of power is independent of one another and arises out of the particular process under observation. In that case, and here I follow Weber in his view of power, there is no need to even any longer use the term “power” except as a metaphor for some of the consequences of deploying some of the traits of the process under examination. An employer has power because he or she can fire someone when firing people is just an aspect of being in an employment arrangement in the first place just as social power is just a fanciful way of saying that men will disparage ugly women and so in this way men have power over women. Moreover, whether to think or not that there is an essential quality called power has consequences for understanding how society operates and also taking sides on particular controversies.
Read MoreJane Austen's Sexual Morality
“Sense and Sensibility”, which is the first of Jane Austen’s novels, is a fully developed work. It has the brittle and humorous dialogue, the vivid characterizations, the plot twists, and the deep penetration into the social life of the time, that mark all of Austen’s completed novels, even if there are later novels that include even deeper and more complex people than is the case in “Sense and Sensibility”, such as Fanny Price in “Mansfield Park'', or themes very different from supposedly sunny Jane Austen, such as when death and despair provide the tone for “Persuasion”, the last of her novels. In “Sense and Sensibility”, Jane Austen had already established herself as the best author since Shakespeare. Moreover, “Sense and Sensibility” is clearly grounded in and expressed in its moral lesson and so the novel has the weight that other of her novels have about the meaning a reader is to infer and to contemplate, even if this meaning is one that current readers might find uncomfortable or even repugnant.
Read More"Wings"
I want to praise “Wings'', the silent war movie that was released in 1927 and won the very first Oscar award for best picture, not because the movie offers hidden depths despite what popular culture offers as fluff and evasions, rewarding audiences a faux tragedy when it is really a melodrama, nor because the movie can be “unmasked” so as to reveal how a popular product has been concocted to “fool” its audience so that the audience feels pleased with itself so that it had a few laughs and a few smiles without getting into anything but an illusion of love and war, a way to pass the time while eating the popcorn, “Wings'', all in all, a childish “art”. Rather, “Wings'' is genuine at being what it is: a set of straightforward feelings of sexual attraction, male friendship, the dangers and ironies of war, and a final reconciliation, so that this is the way life is lived however much the rough spots have been smoothed out, and so worth calling “art” even if it is less falutin’ enough to think it more closely akin to vaudeville than to the great tragedians-- except that Shakespeare was, in fact, quite adept at tugging heartstrings and having an audience hiss the villians. “Wings” has scenes and images and plot lines that move the audience and remain with them and make them the better for having done so. The movie accomplishes simplicity, which is no mean feat, given the turgid and muddied plots seen in any number of novels and movies where things take a long time getting started and are left in their lumpiness, as is the case with the Oscar nominees found in this present year, including “Nomadland'', which is about losers glorified by the actors and screenplay, or “Manx”, which tries and fails to be like Orsen Welles.
Read MoreApparant Meaning and Actual Meaning
Here is a difficult and deep literary question. What is the difference between apparent meaning and actual meaning and how do texts make use of that distinction? The actual meaning of a text is what critics will say is the accurate meaning even if people are misled to think the text is otherwise, as when readers have a sense of what they are getting at, what the text is communicating, even if the text has not been sufficiently analyzed so as to find what it actually means by looking at its words, phrases, images, and all the other apparatus through which critics or just careful readers interrogate a text. An ordinary communication exemplifies the difference of the two meanings. You get a sense that a beloved loves you even if the spouse sends you unclear or stunted signals. A person won’t rely on the words rather than appreciate the meanings of the words, consulting the intentions rather than the words themselves. The same thing happens if people swear an oath to God. It doesn’t mean that God will punish the person for having broken the oath, but a person has just indicated that they will speak truthfully by whatever one holds dear, such as a mother’s grave. The intention is more important than the formula of words even as in literature a reader can get a sense that people seem polite in Jane Austen because they use what seem to us today to be cordial words, when in fact, critics would say, Austen characters are very cutting with one another, some readers preferring politeness to incisiveness, and so separating “Janites”, as they were and are called, from the darker Austen considered by some critics. While, then, there is evidence in the text that leads people to misinterpret the text, and so the text gives off an apparent meaning, there is also and better evidence which justifies the actual text, which is the accurate or, at the least, the more accurate text as constituting the actual text.
Read MoreShakespearean Excess
Among those authors that have contributed to “the great works of the Western imagination”, the position of Shakespeare is well known and assured, however much his plays require allowances that need not be granted to other authors, whether they work in drama or in poetry or in novels. Other great works are complete in themselves, benefiting from an exquisite unification of their parts though a generic device of the author’s own choosing. The device of a journey through hell and then purgatory and heaven supplies a unity for the stories Dante, the character, has told to him and the various awful settings in which those often first person narratives take place. Indeed, the device, the architecture of the afterlife, is the most memorable conceit the author Dante leaves us with, far more telling than the stories of major and minor miscreants and the poetry of the description of those people and places. For his part, Chaucer crafts tales that are gems of multilayered meanings and intersections of plot motifs and narrative devices, those arranged in a format, the journey of travelers, which need not strain for unity or overall dramatic structure, even if one can claim that, indeed, there is an arc in “The Canterbury Tales”, moving them, one might say, from concerns of everyday life to matters of the soul. Certainly, Milton is always full of his own Miltonic seriousness, clearly a presence that combines the author’s personality with a form for his artistic presentation. Mark Van Doren found this a weakness. Milton never gave you a breather, was always high minded. Van Doren liked Cervantes for taking time to provide bathroom breaks for his characters. I like the redactors of the Old Testament who never let on to whether their characters (Ruth, David, Joseph) ever themselves caught on to the complexity of their own motivations and their own situations. That is the unity of tone, more important than is the intermittent presence of God, that holds the narrative books of the Old Testament together.
Read MoreWhy Jane Austen Loves Romance
Love stories about the adventure of courtship and love are so popular, such a standard sub-genre of the genre of domestic histories, that people think it has always been the case. Yes, there are sexual and lustful couplings as well as fits of passion in the Bible and in Greek and Roman romance but there was something new that happened in the early Nineteenth Century, rightly beginning with what is called the Romantic Period, that does engage people with love and courtship as being a pivotal matter, as is elaborated by Goethe’s Werther, by Mozart’s trilogy of “The Marriage of Figaro”, “Così Fan Tutti” and “Don Giovanni'', all dedicated to the idea that love was revolutionary in that it unsettled social relationships and also made love independent of ordinary social relationships, nevertheless until that time everyone understanding that people were still attracted to but opposed to the lovers in Dante because the two are entwined but wafted about by the currents of the wind, and so therefore not the right way to be. Jane Austen, for her part, is preoccupied in every one of her books with how people will create a marriage out of elective affinities, as Goethe put it, rather than for some other reason or to deal with some other subject so as to fill out a novel. Jane Austen could have written about the improvement of agriculture, as was indeed a social development in the area of which he lived as well as a theme of the time, or the state of politics, about which her mentor William Shakespeare had more than dabbled and whose contemporary perturbations, as with the Warren Hastings Impeachment, Austen had followed. But instead she did focus on this new found topic of romance, which just a few generations ago Samuel Johnson had only gingerly advanced the idea that people should consider how well they can get along with the people they marry rather than just the fact that they might carry with them property or wealth or social position. And here Jane Austen is presenting the aim of her stories as treating marriage as people so deeply emotionally involved with their spouses so as to be the be all and end all of their purposes in life, however much the pursuit of romantic happiness has to overcome many hurdles of disparate wealth or personality. The pursuit of happiness, that Eighteenth Century idea, had been limited, in the early Nineteenth Century, to the pursuit of romance. How did this happen to a person remarkably circumspect about the traditions of society and who embodied a Conservative political philosophy which led her to believe that people, like as not, were better off to marry to people of their own class rather than try to cross over as spouses with people of different social backgrounds?
Read MoreModern Taboos
Taboos are usually associated with ancient ways, sometimes religious, whereby people are separated with one another because they are so horrified by their physical or social conditions. Women were separated into their huts during their periods because the women were regarded as unclean, possibly because, as has been said, that women have a wound that never heals. Jews and Muslims did not eat pork perhaps because it was diseased but more likely because it separated these groups of people from other groups of people. Taboos are therefore irrational in that they are responses to fear and without the need to explain why these taboos are. Durkheim updated that idea when he said that people ostracized or did worse to people who behaved differently rather than violated rituals when people violated norms as to sexual practices, beliefs and, as Goffman added, personal disfigurement.
I want to suggest a different way to understand the way peoples are separated from other groups of people in the modern way but this time for reasons that are very rational. People are separated by keeping secret to the deviants that they are not pretty or handsome, that they are not very able at their work, or that even if they are just not very nice people. These verbal separations are accomplished so as to provide people with respect, so as not to hurt them, and so become or remain part of the community at large, and so is a progressive rather than a deeply unnecessary set of practices.
Read MoreEmpiricism in "A Winter's Tale"
Shakespeare’s “A Winter’s Tale” starts out with a scene that the audience takes will be a leisurely exposition of who is who. It begins with fulsome praise by a resident king to a visiting one, and then shifts to an even more fulsome praise by the resident queen to the visiting king. And then the audience begins to notice something, or has been prepared to notice it by having prepared for this visit to the theatre by reading the text (something, it need hardly be said, that was not done in Shakespeare’s day, though that would have meant an appreciation of the scene rested solely on its stagecraft). The mutual statements of love become much too fulsome, crossing some kind of line into being inappropriate. The Queen’s husband no longer likes what he hears and you see him and hear him in a few lines deliberating about what is going on and coming to the conclusion that his wife has indulged in adultery with his best friend. He turns on her and denounces her and that is what sets the play in motion: a set of suspicions that are turned into a conviction and which he then proceeds to act upon, making plans to murder the erstwhile cuckold maker. A lot has been compressed into that scene and it sets an audience reeling, wanting to know how things will further escalate and unravel, and there are enough surprises ahead, enough plot twists, to satisfy anyone’s sense that good plays often are continually turning the tables.
Read MoreTrump in Anguish
If I were a playwright rather than a critic, I would write a play, "The Anguish of Trump", that told a tragedy in the style of Camus' "Caligula". It would show his despair and anger at having lost the presidency, much worse than previous incumbents who have lost and can solace themselves for what were their accomplishments, such as Popi having waged the Persian Gulf War, which he believed was a good thing. Even Herbert Hoover was rehabilitated in that he produced a major set of recommendations about the future of government and policy after FDR eventually left office, and Nixon, unsuccessfully, tried to rehabilitate himself. But Trump can't rest on his laurels because he never cared for them and so is simply a loser, the ultimate loser, bereft of any honor and without any graciousness. He had said nothing for five days after Election Day and presumably just fumed, and then he lashed out with accusations of fraud, none of which supplied with evidence, even his lawyers admitting there had been no fraud, and then blaming anyone he could care to for his defeat, including the claim that the pharmaceutical companies developing the coronavirus vaccines had deliberately delayed the process so that the Democrats could win the election. Trump's measures were thwarted by the permanent civil service, who supervised their ballot counting, and by judges who Republican appointed judges decided that there were no merits to keeping the voting certified. It is worth adding that certification by the states had not been previously more than paperwork, the election decided by whatever unofficial result was offered by the AP or even back to the time when the trusted Walter Cronkite declared an election decided. So we go through the legal process with utmost punctiliousness and Trump comes short. Trump stews, as is the just result of his nature, perfectly appropriate in a tragedy that tells what it is to be a person without values and so left to drift or to be battered by events, him being without a compass whereby he might right himself, and so the subject of a very Camus like theme.
Read MoreShakespeare's Greatest Melodramas
The great works of Shakespeare from “Julius Caesar” to “Antony and Cleopatra” (with the obvious exception of “Twelfth Night”) have been largely understood as tragedies, either of what Auden would call the Christian variety, in which case we understand the central characters as suffering from a fatal flaw which dooms those around them as well as themselves, or as tragedies of the Classic variety, in which case we understand the central characters as caught up in existential situations beyond their control, those including the warp and woof of nature, social relations, and the emotions of jealousy and ambition to which all people are subject, not just the tainted few. That construction of the plays is certainly true enough and, following Aristotle, in both cases people are shown as pushed beyond endurance so that they emerge scourged of pity and terror, justly having become aware of their own human, social and metaphysical limitations, the audience morally improved for having observed and grasped and engaged in these lives.
There is another way to look at this set of great works. Rather than looking at the plays as tragedies, these plays can be considered melodramas. That term need not be treated as a designation of something less than a tragedy, a tragedy manqué, in which the playwright has either not fully developed the tragic nature of his characters or where the playwright settled for placing characters in social situations where they go on too long about what are, after all, the relatively trivial travails of life, and generally exhibit their less than noble characters. The distinction between melodrama and tragedy is not so easily drawn. Lear goes on rather long windedly and his problems are indeed the social problems that are created by an old man coming to live with his relatives. Why does he have to keep all those knights with him in his daughter’s castle? He just has the pathetic conceptions of past grandeur that may descend on any old person. That is no reason to go off to the heath and bemoan his fate. Get a grip on yourself and get thee off to a nursing home.
Read MoreBertram Married A Witch
In “All’s Well That Ends Well”, a virtuous woman, acclaimed by all, is rejected by the suitor she has chosen because he regards her as insufficiently well born. Callow youth that he is, he runs off to war and is won back only by a stratagem whereby his true bride deceives him into going to bed with her and making her pregnant and giving her a ring his mother gave to him. The denouement consists of the revelation of this scheme and his surrender to her love. That interpretation, however, has to elide many of the problems the text provides for it. Bertram, the runaway bridegroom, must be made into a total cad if he is to give up a ring his mother gave him so that he can bed someone who is no more to him than a whore. He is so obstinate and cold to Helena, the doctor’s daughter who chooses him as a husband, that one wonders what she saw in him in the first place. Stage business has to be worked in if the two “lovers” are to reconcile. In one production, Helena puts a toy hobby horse between them after the last line of dialogue has been spoken to suggest that the child she will have will bind the two together. The interpretation also posits the notion that Shakespeare thought upward mobility was a reward for merit and that warfare was a silly calling, something not apparent in his great plays, and only a grand irony in “Troilus and Cressida”.
Read MoreThe Incomplete Status Sequence
Social theorists have connected social structures to what literary or philosophical people regard as the existential situation, which means the universal and fundamental experience of being in the world. That ties together social scientific objectivity with the realm of humanistic experience. Karl Marx connected some of the divisions of labor with alienation, which is a deeply and ubiquitous experience that it is difficult to pin down. Emile Durkheim connected the idea of norm with the experience of anxiety, everyone concerned to achieve conformity. Georg Simmel connected multiple lives and roles with the experience of metropolitan life, people now alive with choice and variety. Here is another connection between structure and experience, one that is a variation of Robert Merton”s role theory. The purely formal structure of what I will call an incomplete status sequence explains the sense of every person in life as caught between the present and the future and, as well, an experience as life always changing and surprising, which is different from the Durkheimian view, that everything is in a permanent present so that whatever is the norm is what that seems to be as it always has been and will be. A sociological concept therefore is able to unravel what might seem the always squishy and uncertain of what is the philosophical view.
Read MoreA Taste for "Lost Horizon"
On the one hand, I think Frank Capra’s “Lost Horizon”, from 1937, is a great movie that explores everyone’s sentimental search for a place of peace and quiet. On the other hand, I think that Howard Hawks’ 1938 “Bringing Up Baby”, despite its excellent pacing and performances, is just mildly amusing rather than hilarious. This preference may be merely personal, and so just a matter of taste in that limited meaning of the word, some people having a taste for salami while others do not, but perhaps taste is much deeper than that, about the way in which I apprehend the universe, taste then becoming a very profound matter indeed.
Read MoreThe Importance of Lady Windermere's Fan
What might seem a failure of plot structure in Oscar Wilde’s “Lady Windermere’s Fan” is, in fact, a key to understanding the play. There are numerous occasions on which the characters in the know are about to break the truth of Lady Windermere’s birth to her so that she will put a stop to some very self-destructive behavior. She is about to go off with a man not her husband because she thinks her husband has been unfaithful to her with a woman who is in fact her mother and who has been supported by Lord Windermere so that she can find herself a suitable match and so put an end to her years of wandering about the Continent as a fallen woman who had apparently turned to her wiles as the way to support herself.
Read MoreComedies With Music
It is easy enough to dismiss a comedy with music as not to be taken seriously, the plot just an excuse for the music. I know people who think that Mozart’s “Cosi Fan Tutti” is just that: a farce about feigned infidelity that the viewer puts up with so as to enjoy the wonderful music. My own opinion, not at all unusual, is that the plot delves very deeply into the nature of the relations between men and women and does not decide whether their differing roles in courtship are the result of nature or nurture, but does insist that women are not given enough credit for seeing through the men they deal with. But what if a comedy with music is indeed just a confection designed as a platform for its songs? Does that mean that a musical comedy has no meaning in the sense of a heavy moral unless it is Rodgers and Hammerstein pushing their ideas about racial tolerance? I want to pursue that question about a musical comedy that is clearly a romp, Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes”, and suggest that what it puts together, if you consider its various devices of construction, is a kind of utopian community that makes the metaphysical parameters of our lives less confining. The audience might prefer to live in that condition even if only for the duration of the performance and in our memory of the performance, it adding a little lightness to what was described in “Singing in the Rain”, another of those musicals about nothing, as “the drabness of our lives”.
Read MoreSuper Tuesday
The past week in national political events has been satisfying to me because it put my candidate, Joe Biden, back in the race, and I saw the week before last that something like this was necessary-- either a Biden resurgence or a Bloomberg surge-- so that Sanders would not run off with the nomination because and I thought, as apparently did so many other people, that Sanders was the candidate most likely to be defeated by Trump. Most voters, I think, are not like me, who will support anyone but Trump, but will instead settle for the known evil rather than what they suspect to be the worse evil of a Democratic Socialist. Now we will see what happens with Biden. The week has also been satisfying because it provided a splendid example of political drama, something that happens more often than we might expect because the forces that make it a drama are arranged fortuitously rather than by the hand of a playwright. This political drama brought together engaging and distinctive personalities, noble rhetoric, a clash over issues and constituencies as well as personalities, all occurring, mostly in public view, in the course of a brief period of time that allowed for plot complications as well as for the reversal of expectations. Playwrights should do as well, and certainly Shakespeare did in “Julius Caesar'' and Oscar Wilde did in “An Ideal Husband”.
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