David Hillman

The Gastric Epic: Troilus and Cressida

Why did Shakespeare write Troilus and Cressida? Why, that is, did he turn his attention to a story that was so overdetermined as to have become, by the end of the sixteenth century, little more than a compilation of cliches? The Trojan story was enormously popular during the decades preceding the composition of the play; the most obvious motive suggested by this popularity is the play’s crowd-drawing potential (written by an already-famous playwright, reworking material that was all the rage in contemporary London). Yet this motive is called into question not only by the strangely arcane, difficult nature of the play itself, but also by the preface to the 1609 Quarto, which claims that the play was ‘neuer stal’d with the Stage, neuer clapper-clawd with the palmes of the vulgar’;2 in fact, Troilus and Cressida may not have been written for the popular theatre at all, and there are no records of its having ever been performed during Shakespeare’s lifetime. But the pervasiveness and massive popularity of the Matter of Troy, the fact that ‘no traditional story was so popular in the Elizabethan Age as that of the siege of Troy and some of its episodes’ may nevertheless have been a decisive factor in Shakespeare’s turn to this material.3 For in placing these endlessly reiterated and textualised heroes on stage, he could not help but embody them;4 and the limning of these rhetoricised figures in flesh and blood presented an opportunity to wrestle with the issue that, I will argue, lies at the very heart of the play: the question of the relation between language and the body out of which it emanates. Both within the play and in the cultural milieu in which it was written, Troilus and Cressida enacts a restoration of words, and of the ideals created out of them, to their sources inside the body, a resistance to an ongoing historical process of textualising the body.

The Body, Pain and Violence

Book synopsis: This Companion offers the first systematic analysis of the representation of the body in literature. It historicizes embodiment by charting our evolving understanding of the body from the Middle Ages to the present day, and addresses such questions as sensory perception, technology, language and affect; maternal bodies, disability and the representation of ageing; eating and obesity, pain, death and dying; and racialized and posthuman bodies. This Companion also considers science and its construction of the body through disciplines such as obstetrics, sexology and neurology. Leading scholars in the field devote special attention to poetry, prose, drama and film, and chart a variety of theoretical understandings of the body.

Freud's Shylock

The name “Shylock” never once shows up in all of Freud’s published writings. Yet amongst all Shakespeare’s characters, the compelling figure of the Jew of Venice is one who, for a number of reasons i shall outline, one might assume to be a particularly likely candidate to make his way into the psychoanalyst’s thinking. Perhaps it was merely the character’s unusual opacity—what William Hazlitt called the “hard, impenetrable, dark groundwork of the character of Shylock” (1980, p. 2)— that gave Freud pause in addressing this figure, who pushes, almost willfully, against the very bounds of explicability; but i am going to suggest here that the absence of Shylock from the psychoanalyst’s work may in fact be a function of the richly over-determined nature of the matters Shylock evokes. Shakespeare’s Jew, i argue in the first part of this essay, brings into too close a proximity a number of overlapping elements with which Freud was preoccupied, especially circa 1912, when he was writing “The Theme of the Three Caskets”—the place we might most obviously have expected to find some mention of Shylock.1 These include: possessiveness and paternity (especially his own, vis-à-vis daughters); anality and the concept of “character”; Jewishness and its relation to gentility, particularly (at this point) in regard to the psychoanalytic community; and more generally religion and its relationship to neurosis. These are all topics that, in isolation, Freud took on, often with daring insight; but the character of Shylock brought them into a

The Worst Case of Knowing the Other?: Stanley Cavell and Troilus and Cressida

and syntactically difficult, eschewing the ordinary in favour of the extraordinary, the bombastic and the abstruse—a “repudiation of assured significance” (dK, p. 19)—of the way language represents the world; if skepticism manifests what Cavell calls a “wish to transgress the naturalness of human speech,”6 Troilus and Cressida’s unnatural language—its linguistic hyper-competence—undermines our ordinary connections to the characters and events it depicts; it deliberately “sets obstacles in our way” (nCs, pp. 22–26), making it very difficult for the audience to share this world. line 2 of the play’s prologue: “The princes orgulous, their high blood chafed”; “orgulous” is a peculiar way to make contact with and engage the attention of one’s audience at the opening of a play (and note, by the way, the connection between these princes’ pride and the chafing of their blood: between, say, inflated aspirations and raised blood pressure). The language here mimics the content—it can itself aptly be described as “orgulous.” The idealism of the characters’ language may be taken to figure what Cavell might call a failure of moral understanding. a vast gap is opened up between the heightened philosophical discourse and the more likely motivations of the characters, as well as between the abstract concepts and the constant underlying substratum of degrading references to the insatiable and diseased body.7 The end-product of the over-insistence on reason or value is unrestrained passion or madness; the inflation of the language is countered by a radical deflation. alongside this, there is throughout the play a drive to generalization; a displacement from particular circumstances and situations to universals—a shift from the ordinary to the metaphysical; as anthony Dawson puts it in his introduction to his recent edition of Troilus and Cressida, “the urge to generalize hollows out the present moment” (nCs, p. 24).8 in this sense, the play can be said to depict something like the transposition Cavell discerns at the root of skepticism—a repudiation of presence in favor of cogitation, or “the attempt to convert the human condition, the condition of humanity, into an intellectual difficulty” (dK, p. 138). except that here, the original problem doesn’t seem to merit the grand label of “the condition of humanity”: it is hard not to see all the idealizing talk in the play—about principles, reason, degree, honor, value and so on—as cover stories for something much less impressive; the condition of humanity here seems merely sordid and petty, as if the alternative to escaping from the human condition from above is escaping it from below. it is as if in this instance or at this point shakespeare could not find a path back from the metaphysical to the everyday, from moral 78 Philosophy and literature concepts to contemplative modes of thought; as if the only way he could find to climb down from the high-flown rhetoric was a very long way down, into the realms of scurvy invective, rubbing our noses in the “Most putrefied core” (5.8.1) of all ideals. instead of a healing or return to ordinary language—a Wittgensteinian returning of language to its home—shakespeare gives us here an extra-ordinary language which is both exiled and debased—“Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart” (5.3.107). The language of the play is filled not only with generalizations but also with personified abstractions; concomitantly, the characters all seem to be severely flattened out, almost reified. The repudiation of the particular in this play goes hand in hand with something like a negation of subjectivity as such. shakespeare here quite uncharacteristically “decharacterizes” his legendary protagonists, who become little more than “ciphers” in the “great accompt” (Henry V, Prologue, 17) of the Trojan legend. The play’s “dependence on a prodigious literary and rhetorical legacy” makes it inevitable that it should become, as Cavell puts it in an early essay on ordinary language philosophy, “entangled in the practical problem of the freedom of the will.”9 The issue of free will for a dramatic character is, i think, an ever-present one in Cavell’s shakespeare; but perhaps never with quite this recalcitrance. We might ask: did shakespeare find himself, in coming to this overdetermined material, unable to find a satisfactory answer to the perennial Cavellian questions: “What permits me to speak in the name of these others?”10— who has the right to relate these stories? how can i make these stories, these words, mine? is there any scope for change here? The characters are all massively pre-scripted; they have become public property—public, we could say, before they have had a chance to be private. They cannot, so to speak, take their lives into their own hands; to use the play’s own word, they are “prenominate[d]” (4.5.250)—their very names allow them no room for maneuver, as they themselves seem to know (even some of the relatively minor characters seem to be in the grip of their own names; note the jokes about a jakes (a toilet) in relation to ajax, and the fact that antenor (an-tenor) is completely silent throughout the play—see se, pp. 78–79). it is all given a priori. The play’s insistence on the sovereignty of the past emerges not just in its sense of an absolute lack of freedom of will but also in its pattern of reverting to etymology as unavoidably shaping the use of words. With this in mind, one could perhaps imagine the neologisms strewn throughout the text as a kind of counterphobic measure, as if shakespeare was desperately trying to

Homo Clausus at the Theatre

Among the many far-reaching changes European culture underwent in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one of the most fundamental was the shift in the way in which the human body was understood: one predominant notion of human embodiment, in which the body was thought of as open in a positive manner, was gradually being displaced by a radically different one, which involved a significantly more closed ideal of the body — more bounded, more deeply separated from its surroundings and from other people. In conceptualising this shift it may be difficult for us fully to imagine the first view, since our post-Enlightenment assumptions are so dominated by the second: we tend to take for granted the notion that the human body constitutes a more or less sealed unit (orifices notwithstanding). After Harvey and Descartes and Locke, we tend to treat the body, in the words of the philosopher John Sutton, as ‘a solid container, only rarely breached, in principle autonomous from culture and environment, tampered with only by diseases and experts.’1 I want to point out, first, some places where this shift from the first to the second construction of embodiment can be seen; I then want to suggest that this collision, and the emergence of what Norbert Elias has termed homo clausus, were essential to the rise of early modern drama.

Shakespeare as a Way of Life: Skeptical Practice and the Politics of Weakness by James Kuzner (review)

“Presumption is our natural and original malady,” wrote Montaigne, who never ceased to be astonished by our epistemological arrogance. In typically Montaignean fashion, he implies both condemnation of and forgiveness for this mortal failing. Presumption is our “original” sin—eating from the tree of knowledge—but it is also “natural,” unavoidable. James Kuzner cites this sentence from the “Apology for Raymond Sebond” in his ambitious and provocative new book, Shakespeare as a Way of Life (87). Shakespeare, suggests Kuzner, offers us ways to mitigate Montaigne’s “malady”—to embrace its more salutary effects. Kuzner argues that Shakespeare’s works—or at least the five works discussed here—promote a cognitive disorientation. This disorientation can be helpful in its unsettling or loosening of strictures upon conventional thought regarding love, freedom, selfhood, ethics: these works imply that an overconfidence in one’s assumptions about such matters can be disastrous. Kuzner posits that reading Shakespeare can help us to practice a profound epistemological humility, an acceptance, for example, of our inability to come down securely on one side or the other of the mind-body problem; to know what love is and how much self-mastery it entails; to codify systems of law and ethics based in sovereignty and self-identity; to decide what exactly freedom might mean and what metaphors it relies upon; or to read with anything approaching full hermeneutic confidence. These five topics form the central arguments of the book’s five chapters, on Lucrece, Othello, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Timon of Athens. Kuzner’s critical methodology is similar in each case: the Shakespeare text is placed beside a comparison text (the central ones are Cicero, Descartes, Paul, and Montaigne) in order to provide cross-pollination. The method can feel schematic, but this sense is leavened both by the wide array of other tangential materials brought to bear on the interpretations and by some fine close readings. Chapter 1 places Lucrece beside Cicero’s works in order to open up the question of “whether the self is unified or split, monistic or dualistic” (26). Evincing different positions across his writing career, Cicero provides Kuzner with a model of a “flexible, potentially pragmatic skepticism” in these matters (31)—one that can be therapeutic. In Lucrece, “Shakespeare declines any final decision about whether minds and bodies are divided or unified” (46), a suspension of judgment that “allows us to imagine alterations that would improve [the poem’s] world and ours” (158).

The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare's England: A Collaborative Debate (review)

complexity shows how disastrously disruptive quarrels would have been to business. Her third chapter focuses on playwrights and booksellers, especially the fashion in which the latter popularized the work of the former. As Knutson documents, these personal relationships facilitated commerce. At a future date, it would be interesting for Knutson to speculate as to why it was so important for many of her authoritative predecessors,“canonical Shakespeareans” all, to invent and perpetuate the War of the Theaters thesis. Such an exploration would have been beyond the scope of Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time, but an article outlining her theory of this paradigm would be valuable indeed. As I have intimated, the book’s excellence lies in its lucid writing and coherent organization, as well as in its appeal to multiple audiences. Although the last three chapters of this work seem to be aimed at specialists in the field, anyone could benefit from a reading of the Hamlet section (103–26). The uninitiated could learn about theater history, and students (especially) could profit from observing Knutson’s deft handling of data and translation of it into readable English prose. In many ways, the book’s scholarly method imitates its own thesis. Knutson’s frequent mention of other scholars in her field and her habit of situating her work in the context of theirs is, like the theatrical world she describes, collaborative rather than competitive, generous and collegial.

Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought@@@Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse

This is the first comprehensive study of the Renaissance commonplace-book. Commonplace-books were the information-organizers of Early Modern Europe, notebooks of quotations methodically arranged for easy retrieval. From their first introduction to the rudiments of Latin to the specialized studies of leisure reading of their later years, the pupils of humanist schools were trained to use commonplace-books, which formed an immensely important element of Renaissance education. The common-place book mapped and resourced Renaissance cultures moral thinking, its accepted strategies of argumentation, its rhetoric, and its deployment of knowledge. In this ground-breaking study Ann Moss investigates the commonplace-books medieval antecedents, its methodology and use as promulgated by its humanist advocates, its varieties as exemplified in its printed manifestations, and the reasons for its gradual decline in the seventeenth century. The book covers the Latin culture of Early Modern Europe and its vernacular counterparts and continuations, particularly in France. Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought is much more than an account of humanist classroom practice: it is a major work of cultural history.