Notes and comments on René Girard and his work, A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare (1991; 2000)

DiskuteraThe Globe: Shakespeare, his Contemporaries, and Context

Bara medlemmar i LibraryThing kan skriva.

Notes and comments on René Girard and his work, A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare (1991; 2000)

1proximity1
Redigerat: jan 18, 2019, 6:19 am



(Photo : Hannah Assouline)

René Noël Théophile Girard (b. Avignon, FR. 25 December, 1923 - d. Stanford, Calif. 4 November, 2015) (French) Historian, Medievalist, literary critic, philosopher and anthropologist. Member of the Académie française, Chevalier du Légion d'honneur (), Commandeur de L’ordre des Arts et des Lettres (), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. photo by Hannah Assouline | (Photo credit: Hannah Assouline,); Causeur.fr : "René Girard et la nouvelle comédie des méprises" 4 January, 2016
_____________________________

Notes and comments on René Girard and his work, originally entitled, in French, Shakespeare: Les feux de l’envie / Éditions Grasset, Paris, 1990; published in English as A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare (Gracewing/Inigo, Leominster, England and New Malden, England, 2000)

for posting citations from and comments and discussion on René Girard's study of Shakespeare's work with, in particular, Girard's exposition of his insights into what he refers to as "mimetic desire" and its dramatic use by Vere, writing as William Shakespeare.
_____________________________



( All page citations are to the Gracewing/Inigo edition of 2000; emphasis is in the original text unless otherwise indicated)



“My goal in this study is to show that the more quintessentially ‘mimetic’ a critic becomes, the more faithful to Shakespeare he remains. To most people, no doubt, this reconciliation of practical and theoretical criticism seems impossible. This book is intended to demonstrate that they are wrong. All theories are not equal in regard to Shakespeare: his creation obeys the same mimetic principles I bring to bear upon his work, and it obeys them explicitly.”

… … …

Interpretation, as currently used, is not the appropriate word for what I am doing. My task is more elementary. I am reading for the first time the letter of a text that has never been read on many subjects essential to dramatic literature: desire, conflict, violence, sacrifice.

“The joy of writing this study stemmed from the repeated textual discoveries that the neomimetic approach permits. Shakespeare is more comical than we realize, in a bitterly satirical and even cynical mode, much closer to contemporary attitudes than we ever suspected. It is an error to believe that his intentions are irretrievable. Ever since the old New Critics, interpreters have dismissed the intentions of poets as inaccessible, even as inconsequential. As far as the theatre is concerned, this is disastrous. A comic writer has comic effects in mind, and unless we understand them we cannot stage the work effectively.

“The mimetic approach solves the ‘problems’ of many a so-called problem play. It generates new interpretations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, King Lear, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. It reveals the dramatic unity of Shakespeare’s theatre and its thematic continuity. It discloses great variations in his personal perspective, a history of his œuvre that points to his own personal history. Above all, the mimetic approach reveals an original thinker, centuries ahead of his time, more modern than any of our so-called master thinkers.”
______________________
(p. 5)

2proximity1
Redigerat: feb 4, 2019, 9:08 am

First posted and edited:
Monday, 21 January, 2019 (A)

Additions:
(B) Monday, 4 February, 2019

Object lesson—
_______________

In the following excerpt, you have an example of René Girard demonstrating his exceptional talents as a literary-drama critic. Though it may appear to some readers that this is easy, that appearance is deceptive. Generations of drama critics and specialists on Shakespeare have routinely missed what Girard explains to his readers:




... ...

“The tradition of external obstacles is the comic tradition par excellence. Today it is more powerful than ever; it is the ideology of psychoanalysis, of our ‘counterculture,’ of all sorts of ‘liberations,’ of the entire youth cult. It takes itself more seriously than ever. We must all pretend that ‘youth’ is somehow persecuted. Each generation proclaims this message as something brand-new that has never been formulated before. Ever since the Greeks, the theatre has been an important vehicle of this ideology, but Shakespeare is an outstanding exception. His attitude is so unusual that it is ignored rather than acknowledged. We do not realize how revolutionary A Midsummer Night’s Dream really is.

“The myth of external obstacles is so powerful in the general culture and theatre that even Shakespeare was not able to get rid of it at his first try. The Two Gentlemen of Verona is a transitional play, half conventional and half Shakespearean, a hybrid comedy in which non-mimetic conflict and non-mimetic differences, such as the hero/villain dichotomy, are already undermined but not yet abolished.

“In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, when Proteus learns about the planned elopement of Silvia with Valentine, he turns to the duke, who effectively intervenes; Valentine must flee Milan without Silvia. Since the mimetic rival constitutes an even greater obstacle than the father, we can see that the father is on the decline but still alive and kicking. But in A Midsummer Night’s Dream Helena does not even think of Egeus and Theseus when she learns that Lysander and Hermia are about to flee Athens; she goes straight to the mimetic rival, Demetrius. Fathers and dukes have become paper-tigers.

“The one and only source of conflict in all mature comedies is a crisscrossing of mimetic desires that keep converging on the same object because they imitate one another. In spite of the deceptive first scene, this is already true of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The only obstacles in the path of the lovers are the lovers themselves, the mimetic rivals. They are stronger, younger, and fiercer than any father can ever be. They are passionately eager to cause trouble, which is not the case, as a rule, with fathers.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream represents the first example of a uniquely Shakespearean type of comedy that makes fun of desire itself, denouncing its perpetual lie about being the victim of some kind of repression—repressive gods, repressive parents, a repressive student dean, or whatever. In all purely Shakespearean plays, the happiness of lovers is threatened from inside a group of peers, never from outside. The public’s prejudices are so entrenched, however, that all it takes to accredit the myth of a conventional A Midsummer Night’s Dream is to plant the old scarecrows at the entrance to the comedy. Four centuries later they still dominate the interpretation of a play that has strictly nothing to do with them.

“The first scene tantalizingly dangles in front of us all the cherished stereotypes: children against parents; youth against old age; handsome and sincere lovers unjustly deprived of their freedom of choice; hypocritical adults holding the reins of power. This narrative is pure make-believe. Parental authority is dead as a doornail; never again will it play a significant role anywhere in the theatre of Shakespeare.

“The conventional aspects of the first scene—it has other aspects as well that we will discuss later—may well have been conceived and written, at least in part, at a less mature stage than the rest of the play. It may be a last remnant from an earlier conception, closer to The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a fragment from a theatrical heritage that Shakespeare had not yet completely discarded. Shakespeare deliberately retained this archaic first scene, I believe, because it suited his strategy of semi-concealment in regard to mimetic rivalry. As noted before, he is always suggesting two different interpretations of what he is doing. The misleading first scene plays a role in this scheme; thanks to it, A Midsummer Night’s Dream can pass for a reassuring comedy in which the triumph of ‘true love’ is only temporarily postponed by a coalition of father-figures and supernatural beings.

“Shakespeare had good reason, it seems, to refrain from making the most flippant aspects of his play too conspicuous. It is probable that A Midsummer Night’s Dream was written for a princely wedding at the court of Elizabeth.2 Inconstancy does not mix well with a festive matrimonial mood: Shakespeare had to be careful. His comedy had to seem innocuous and conventional in the eyes of conservative courtiers. At the same time he knew that there would be some very clever people in his audience and did not want to disappoint them. They expected him to be delightfully daring, scandalous, and witty. He attempted to write for both groups at the same time, in such a way that each group would find in his play what suited its own taste and temperament; he probably succeeded with some of his more subtle contemporaries but sadly failed with posterity. The comic dimension of the play is inseparable from its mimetic substance and has never been recaptured.”
__________________________

(2. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in A New Variorum Edition, Horace Howard Furness, ed. (Philadelphia and London: J. B. Lippincott, 1953) 259-67)

(from pp. 37-39 : : Chapter 3: "The Course of True Love | The Four Lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream")

(B)





(from pp. 41-44 : Chapter 4: “ ‘O Teach Me How You Look’ | Helena and Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream ” )
______________

“The relationship (of Helena and Hermia) is the same as that of Valentine and Proteus (in The Two Gentlemen of Verona). The girls have been raised together, and their mutual imitation and its consequences are portrayed at much greater length than in the earlier play. One can see that Shakespeare has thought about this a great deal and, on this subject, he writes a beautiful poem that is also a powerful mediation on mimetic doubling :



(Helena:)
“Is all the counsel that we two have shared,
The sisters' vows, the hours that we have spent,
When we have chid the hasty-footed time
For parting us,--O, is it all forgot?
All school-days' friendship, childhood innocence?
We, Hermia, like two artificial gods,
Have with our needles created both one flower,
Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion,
Both warbling of one song, both in one key,
As if our hands, our sides, voices and minds,
Had been incorporate. So we grow together,
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet an union in partition;
Two lovely berries moulded on one stem;
So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart;
Two of the first, like coats in heraldry,
Due but to one and crowned with one crest.
And will you rent our ancient love asunder,
To join with men in scorning your poor friend?
It is not friendly, 'tis not maidenly:
Our sex, as well as I, may chide you for it,
Though I alone do feel the injury.

(Hermia)
I am amazed at your passionate words.
I scorn you not: it seems that you scorn me.
(III, ii, 198-221)


“The lines attributed to Helena are often the most interesting from the standpoint of mimetic theory; they represent a significant advance over the works already studied. At the beginning, Hermia is the embodiment of erotic success; the two boys are in love with her, and Helena is contagiously affected by their enthusiasm. It is no exaggeration to say that she treats her lifelong friend as if she were some kind of divinity.

“Being purely mimetic, the convergence of the boys’ desire upon Hermia has no objective justification. Hermia is not prettier than her friend, and Helena should be believed when she says a little later:


“Through Athenes I am thought as fair as she.”
(I, ii, 227)


This is similar to the statement by Proteus quoted in my chapter on The Two Gentlemen of Verona:


“She is fair; and so is Julia that I love…
(II, iv, 199)


“Here again, Shakespeare tells us that mimetic desire is indifferent to reality. A few years ago the director of a BBC Midsummer Night’s Dream decided that Hermia should be prettier than Helena. This was a mistake, for Helena’s unpopularity with the boys, at the beginning tells us nothing about her physical charm. When, later in the night, the whole mimetic scheme is reversed in her favor, must we assume that her looks have miraculously improved?

“Helena is just as pretty as Hermia and she knows it, but it is no comfort to her. Objective facts are one thing, mimetic facts are another. The two do not necessarily contradict each other, but neither do they necessarily coincide. In human relations, mimesis is the dominant factor. A mimetic defeat can destroy a girl’s self-esteem regardless of how pretty she ‘really is.’ Our psychologies and psychoanalyses invariably emphasize the role of the single subject and mask the formidable role of mimetic phenomena not only in our love affairs, but also in our professional lives, politics, literary and artistic fashions, and so on. At the beginning of the night, Helena seems more ‘neurotic’ than Hermia, but there is no sound reason to believe that she is.

“As our mediators prevent us from possessing the object that they designate to us, we prize the designated objects more and more, but this is true only in a first phase; when the rivalry further intensifies, the object recedes into the background and the mediator looms larger and larger. This evolution is remarkably expressed in Helena’s first speech, when she appears for the first time and defines the role of the mediator in her own existence, speaking to the divinity herself, Hermia, her best friend:


Hermia: “God speed, fair Helena: whither away?”

Helena: “Call you me fair? That ‘fair’ again unsay.
Demetrius loves your fair: O happy fair!
Your eyes are lode-stars, and your tongue’s sweet air
More tunable than lark to shepherd’s ear,
When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear.
Sickness is catching. O, were favour so,
Yours would I catch, fair Hermia, ere I go!
My ear should catch your voice, my eye your eye,
My tongue should catch your tongue’s sweet melody.
Were the world mine, Demetrius being bated,
The rest I’d give to be you translated.”
(I, i, 180-91)


“The reason for this language is obvious. If she could turn into Hermia, Helena could seduce not only Demetrius but all the other boys who are or might be in love with Hermia. We well understand why Helena wants to be Hermia. Demetrius is what Helena wants to have and Hermia is what she wants to be. Being is obviously more important than having.

“In Deceit, Desire and the Novel, an investigation of five great novelists led me to define the ultimate goal of desire in the following fashion:


“The object is only a means of reaching the mediator. The desire is aimed at the mediator’s being. Proust compares this terrible desire to be the Other with thirst: ‘Thirst—like that which burns a parched land—for a life which would be a more perfect drink for my soul to absorb in long gulps, all the more greedily because it has never tasted a single drop.’

…”Like Proust’s, Dostoevsky’s hero dreams of absorbing and assimilating the mediator’s being. … 1



“Words like ‘being’ and ‘ontological’ seem pompously philosophical in the context of flighty adolescents, yet they cannot be avoided. Being is what mimetic desire is really after, and Helena says so explicitly.

“Helena wants to be ‘translated’ into Hermia. The word is a key one in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; it links the ontological desire of the four lovers to the mythical metamorphoses of the midsummer night. Just as in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the desire for being goes hand in hand with a process of quasi-divinization; but in the first play this process is still directed toward the object, whereas now it is directed toward the mediator. We may call this evolution ‘irrational,’ ‘obsessive,’ even ‘pathological,’ but it is always logical in the sense of fulfilling the essential nature of desire.

“Helena is desperately in love with Demetrius, but he is hardly mentioned; gigantic in the absence of Hermia, his stature shrinks to almost nothing in her presence. Thus the real priorities of mimetic desire are revealed: however desirable the object may be, it pales in comparison with the model who gives it its value.

“A remarkable aspect of our text is its sensuousness. Helena wants to catch Hermia’s ‘favour’ as she would a disease, contagiously, through physical contact. She wants every part of her body to match Hermia’s corresponding part. She wants the whole body of Hermia. The homosexual connotations of this text are not ‘unconscious’ but deliberate, and it is difficult to see what kind of help psychoanalysis could provide. Shakespeare portrays the tendency of unsuccessful desire to to focus more and more on the cause of its failure and to turn the mediator into a second erotic object—necessarily homosexual, if the original desire is heterosexual; the erotic rival is an individual of the same sex as the subject. The homosexual connotations are inseparable from the growing emphasis on the mediator.

“Helena will show a little later that she has not forgotten Demetrius; her behavior with him is more ‘masochistically’ erotic during the night than that of any other character. Yet at this point her lover is eclipsed by her mediator, though not because of some ‘latent homosexuality’ à la Freud, an unconscious something that would suffuse the text in spite of the author’s conscious intention. It is Shakespeare’s intention to communicate this very significance to us.

“To Helena, Hermia is the model/obstacle/rival of mimetic desire; the mediated subject is hysterical because of her extreme frustration at the hands of her victorious mediator. Shakespeare deliberately illustrates this logic; to see him as a deluded puppet whose threads could be unraveled by our own superior power of demystification is a pretentious absurdity. He is writing less about Helena and her friends than about desire itself. He wrote this scene at a crucial point in his assimilation of the mimetic process. Having fully grasped for the first time the role of the mediator, he does his best to express his insight in dramatic form, his own form; he does what any writer must do when he discovers something really important: he turns it into literature.

“Desire makes its own mimetic truth more and more visible as its own internal history unfolds. This evolution has ‘always already’ begun; it is the destiny of mimetic desire, which fulfills itself whenever it has a chance to pursue its career to the end. As we said before and we will say again, the internal history of Shakespeare’s theatre is the history of desire itself.”
__________________________

(1) Deceit, Desire and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), p. 53

(A)




3proximity1
Redigerat: jan 22, 2019, 6:50 am

“Shakespeare is a marvelous example of what seems impossible in our barbarous times, a balanced and humorous view of questions now so loaded with ideological baggage that almost any mention of them makes us feel as if a ton of bricks had been unloaded upon us.” (p. 44)

(p. 46) “The more mimetic we are, the less we perceive the mimetic law that governs our behavior as well as our language. All these lovers keep teaching each other a lesson that not a one of them ever understands. All the pieces of the puzzle are in place and fit perfectly; as the two girls keep exchanging observations, the picture becomes more and more manifest, yet those who paint it remain blind to its meaning. What about the spectators? In order to enlighten them, Shakespeare has Hermia and Helena go through their little routine once again:


Herrmia: “I give him curses, yet he gives me love.”
Helena: “Oh, that my prayers would such affection move!”
(I, i, 196-97)


(p. 47) “For a second time Hermia suggests the only effective strategy, and for a second time Helena gets the message backward. All four lovers pursue the same ontological dream through the same absurdly self-defeating method. The more they persist, the more they get lost in the maze of the midsummer night; very soon the ridiculous misunderstanding will turn to nightmarish violence. They all share responsibility for what happens, but they never find out. Yet Shakespeare gives us one more chance to see what they never see:

Hermia: “The more I hate, the more he follows me.”
Helena: “The more I love, the more he hateth me.”
(198-99)

… …
“The psychiatrists and psychoanalysts tear apart the seamless robe of mimetic desire, trying to cut it up into separate ‘symptoms’ that do not really add up to well-differentiated psychic ailments; we must stay away from their language and the mental habits that go with them. They do not perceive the weird kind of inverted war that these lovers are waging against one another. The lovers’ desires need victorious opponents; if we invoke some reified notion of ‘masochism’ to account for Helena’s attachment to Demetrius, or some reified notion of ‘sadism’ to account for Hermia’s detachment from him, or for his own detachment from Helena, we lose sight of the single mimetic principle that governs all antithetical attitudes.
… …
(p. 48) “We should never believe that these characters truly are such as their behavior seems to imply; they can always respond to some mimetic signal, and all situations can reverse themselves at any moment.”
… …
“Psychiatric labels create an impression of permanent difference where none exists. Defeated from the start, Helena seems more intrinsically ‘masochistic’ than her three companions, but she is not. The other three will catch up with her during the night.

“Although less essentialist than the old ‘characterization,’ psychoanalysis is still too static for the constantly accelerating kaleidoscope of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Its (i.e. psychoanalysis’) false differentiations can only obscure the perfect transparence of what happens. The only way to grasp the mechanism of universal frustration is to face up to the implications of a multiplicity of desires, all radically imitative of each other, with no fixed and permanent model anywhere.

“The rules of the game explain why all participants undergo the same total sequence of experiences before the night is over. The order in which these experiences occur is indifferent; we must not be fooled by the mirage of some original difference that would be the ‘true’ difference. The four lovers keep desiring because, each time, they magnify purely positional differences into a false absolute. A revolving illusion of transcendence propels the entire system.

“The midsummer night is not a portrayal of this or that character’s more or less stable ‘neurosis’ or ‘complex,’ but a noche oscura that affects all characters in the same way and to the same degree—a collective ordeal and, ultimately, a kind of initiation ritual that they all successfully complete.

“These characters never listen to each other or even to themselves. They all speak the same truth but do not grasp it. They do not believe enough in what they actually say. The density of content in this supposedly insignificant play is extraordinary, but both the characters inside the play and the critics outside react to the language and to the events of the play in the same wrong manner; they all sincerely proclaim the incoherence of a marvelously coherent work. (emphasis added)

“The lovers use a perfectly stereotyped language, full of flamboyant figures of speech; they constantly borrow from two equally sinister domains of human activity: black magic on the one hand and vengeance and violence, war and destruction, on the other. In addition to being ‘rhetorical’ in the habitual sense, this language is used ‘rhetorically’ in the sense of being repeated unthinkingly and mechanically by mindless amateurs of time-honored clichés: the four lovers do not listen to what they say because they say it too often:

(p. 49)

“Where is Lysander and fair Hermia?
The one I’ll slay; and the other slayeth me.”
(II, I, 189-90)


“Our mimetic reading can exorcise once and for all the specter of ‘bad taste’ that has always haunted the critics of these passages. The predilection for oxymora is not a matter of stylistic choice; it reflects the ‘ambivalence’ of desire toward a mediator simultaneously idolized as a model and execrated as an insurmountable obstacle. Here is one more example of ‘rhetorical’ speech. Helena exclaims:


“You draw me, you hard-hearted adamant;
But yet you draw not iron, for my heart
Is true as steel. Leave your power to draw,
And I shall have no power to follow you.”
(II, i, 195-98)


4proximity1
Redigerat: feb 2, 2019, 10:48 am

(A) first posted Monday, 28 January, 2019
additions:
(B) posted Tuesday, 29 January, 2019
(C) posted Wednesday, 30 January, 2019
(D) posted Saturday, 2 February, 2019
_________________________________________



"The enormous force of Shakespeare comes from his ability to rid himself of two bad abstractions simultaneously: solipsistic desire and the bland, disembodied imitation (typical) of the aestheticians. The love of mimesis that sustains the aesthetic enterprise is one and the same with mimetic desire. This is the real message of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

"The Western philosophical and scientific tradition is based on the opposite principle. Mimesis (μίμησις) and Eros (ἔρως) are seen as separate. The myth of their mutual independence goes back to Plato, who never associates the two concepts, even though his frantic fear of mimetic contagion* and his distrust of art, more particularly of the theatre, points to the unity that his formal system repudiates. The disciplines of aesthetics and literary criticism , as well as psychology and the other social sciences, still reflect a divorce of mimesis and desire so entrenched in our formal thinking that Freud himself was unable to surmount it. This is the great failure of psychoanalysis, in my view.

"The divorce of imitation and desire has been cherished by traditional aestheticians and literary critics because it ensures the autonomy of their disciplines and isolates art from the impurity of worldly desires*; it proclaims the disinterestedness of aesthetic preoccupations. The philosophical mutilation of mimesis is really a spiritual narcissism for which a heavy price has been paid.

"Shakespeare's spectacular marriage of mimesis and desire is the unity of the three subplots and the unity of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The divorce of mimesis and desire is so powerful a tradition that the enigmatic news of their tempestuous union in the theatre of Shakespeare has not yet reached us; the message remains inaudible.

"At long last in our modern world, the general lassitude with traditional aesthetics has produced a justified rebellion against the notion of imitation as conceived by the Greeks, but this is no real break with the past; it is the circularity of false rebellion trying to deny the reality of that which it is unable to rethink. Instead of bringing imitation and desire together, the rebels are trying to expel mimesis from our cultural scene; their rebellion is a false one, a continuation of the old servitude. Even an impoverished mimesis is better than no mimesis at all. More understanding of A Midsummer Night's Dream could help us out of this impasse."
__________
( Girard, Chapter 6, pp. 64 - 65)


* " the principle of poetical imitation, or better, representation — μίμησις — is based on the confusion of the difference between appearance and being. Hence Socrates, or Plato, warns that it is necessary to use caution, lest from representing one contracts being. (1) "
— Juliane Prade-Weiss, "Translating Terror: On Exile and Mimesis in Ovid, Nabokov, and Benjamin"


(1) "μὴ ἐκ τῆς μιμήσεως τοῦ εἶναι ἀπολαύσωσιν. Shorey translates more conventionally: “lest from the imitation they imbibe the reality” (Plato, The Republic in two volumes, trans. Paul Shorey (London: Heinemann, 1963), 3.395 c-d). All translations by the author unless otherwise indicated."
(my emphasis added)

(Creative Commons License 2019, Et al.— Critical Theory Online | ISSN 2064-2962 )




"Oh, Hell! To choose love by another's eyes."
_________________________________________



LYSANDER: Ay me! for aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth;
But, either it was different in blood,—

HERMIA: O cross! too high to be enthrall'd to low.

LYSANDER: Or else misgraffed in respect of years,—

HERMIA: O spite! too old to be engaged to young.

LYSANDER: Or else it stood upon the choice of friends,—

HERMIA: O hell! To choose love by another's eyes. (I, i, 134-40)


"This poetic duet belongs to a well-known genre dediated to the various impediments of love: differences of age, social conditions, and last but not least, coercion by others. The list of these impediments never changes.

"If 'the course of true love never did run smooth,' lovers have primarily themselves—their slavish obedience to the mimetic law—to blame, but they do not know that. Unable to see the real obstacle against which they keep stumbling, the crisscrossing of their mimetic desires, they need fake obstacles as substitutes for the real one. Fortunately for their overworked imagination, they do not have to invent anything; they simply repeat what they read in the fashionable literature that they avidly consume.

“The first five lines mark a gradation leading to the last two, on which the emphasis lies: who are these ‘friends’ on whose choice love should not stand, who is this other whose choice may unduly influence our own choice of a lover? At this point, all the editors of the play warn their readers in a footnote that the word ‘friends’ refers to fathers and mothers rather than friends in our sense. In the Elizabethan period ‘friends’ could indeed refer to close relatives, even parents. But how can the editors be so sure? If ‘friend’ occasionally refers to parents, more often than not the word has its modern meaning. Its significance can be enlarged to include parents, but it can never be restricted in such a way as to exclude ordinary friends.

“In A Midsummer Night's Dream itself, we find friend and friendly used again and again in the modern sense. At the height of the midsummer night, Helena is quarreling with Hermia:


And will you rent our ancient love asunder,
To join with men in scorning your poor friend?
It is not friendly, ‘tis not maidenly. (III, iii, 215-17)


“Why do all editors exclude the most natural and obvious meaning of ‘friends’? The answer is inescapable: if they did not, if they read the two lines simply as they should be read, they would have to recognize in them two magnificent definitions of what this play is really about—mimetic desire.

“When Demetrius shifts from Hermia to Helena because of Lysander, he certainly chooses love by another’s eye. So does Hermia when she chooses Demetrius because of her friend Helena. The same was true in the works we examined earlier. Proteus’s love for Silvia stands upon the choice of his friend Valentine (The Two Gentlemen of Verona); since Tarquin has never has never seen Lucrece with his own eyes, he must necessarily ‘choose lover by another’s eyes.’

“This is what no one wants to face. The exclusion of mimetic desire is an unstated imperative, no doubt, but a very strict one. The vote is always unanimous. Given the context in which these two lines appear, the silent elimination of the literal reading, which is also the most appropriate to the context, is rejected out of hand, with not even one word of explanation. The whole operation goes without saying; it is entirely unconscious and automatic.”

“ … If Shakespeare had really intended to speak of those fathers who force their children to marry against their will, ‘friends’ would not be a very good choice and ‘love’ would be even worse. It would not be love, in this eventuality, but marriage that would stand upon the choice of ‘friends.’ The words ‘choice’ in the first line and ‘choose’ in the second also confirm the bankruptcy of the nonmimetic reading. In a case of outright coercion, the coerced party has no alternative; she does not choose anything. Those who desire mimetically abdicate their freedom of choice, no doubt, but they choose the model whose desire they imitate; only they can truly be said to ‘choose love by another’s eye.’

“The two lines are perfectly intelligible as they stand; they need no explanatory footnote, and that is the reason, of course, why the editors have one. How else could they protect their students from the dangerous contamination of the mimetic reading? The editors intervene for the sole purpose of rejecting the correct reading. They all act in very good faith, of course; they simply do not perceive anything pertaining to conflictual mimesis in this play. The idea that ‘mimetic desire’ could play a major role in Shakespeare seems too ridiculous to contemplate. (emphasis added)

“Thanks to these footnotes, we can spectacularly verify the very strong urge in many of us to suppress the whole idea of mimetic rivalry whenever it appears, in Shakespeare and elsewhere. This suppression must be condemned, of course, but it must be recognized that, in the present case, it is not entirely without excuses. …

“The first is that Lysander and Hermia are too deluded about themselves to imagine anything as clever as the mimetic interpretation of their own two lines. United in spirit with ten thousand mediocre poets, they will go on rehashing their sempiternal impediments until doomsday. These dismal clichés represent the sum total of their psychology. All we can expect after the first five lines is more of the same. The mimetic reading cannot be what they actually mean. They can only mean that which modern editors regard as the sole possible meaning of the two lines.

“In the litany of impediments, the tyrannical father is bound to show up at some point; from the ancient Greeks down to our great countercultural revolution, via Sigmund Freud, the father always remains the impediment par excellence, the number-one sacrificial beast, the main staple of our intellectual feast, the indispensable alibi of romantic failure. It is natural to think that the last two lines must be about him. They really are, in the sense that Lysander and Hermia can be thinking only of this forlorn personage. Even though their words do not quite fit the paternal reading, they come close enough to satisfy the eternal Freudian in all of us. Besides, these lines appear at the very beginning of the play, right after the scene with Egeus and Theseus, at a point when it is still legitimate to expect that the fatherly and ducal thunder will not be as radically ineffective as it turns out to be.

“Are these contextual arguments good enough to threaten the mimetic reading? Not for one second; compared to all this, the mimetic significance is as bright as the light of ten thousand suns.

“The wrong interpretation relies on evidence that is far from decisive, yet it cannot be disregarded because it comes from the author himself and the author knows what he is doing. Why did Shakespeare insert his two (literally) fabulous lines into the misleading context of the phony impediments? We already know that, beginning with A Midsummer Night's Dream, he wants to steer the bulk of his audience away from mimetic desire toward the romantic reading that he kindly places at our disposal. We have already seen some striking illustrations of the dual strategy that leads part of the public in one direction and another part in an entirely different direction. This is a particularly brilliant example of this twofold technique.

“A great dramatist knows that the context is more important than the text. Regardless of what is actually said in these two lines, most spectators cannot hear anything in them but the fulfillment of their stereotyped expectations. Far from trying to avoid the probable misreading of these lines, Shakespeare encourages it. But the contrast with the rest of the poem makes the last two lines comical to those who really understand them; those who do not, and who read them as mere continuation of the earlier platitudes, are not disturbed in the slightest; the footnote-prone editors are not disturbed either. All this corresponds exactly to what all these people expect from a comedy."
(A)

“Our two lines do not quite fit the nonmimetic reading, but they come close enough not to trigger in most minds the alarm system that becomes activated when a certain threshold of inappropriateness is reached. Below that threshold, our critical sense remains inert. These lines are a test; they compel us to make a choice between a comedy of external obstacles to which the first five lines of the duet belong, and the really Shakespearean comedy rooted in mimetic rivalry. If we do not see that we must choose, if we choose without being aware of choosing, we certainly will make the wrong choice.

“The poem functions like a superior pun. If we interpret it in terms of fathers, dukes, and fairies, we yearn for a nonmimetic interpretation and this is what we get; if we interpret the pun mimetically, we not only accede to the mimetic version but perceive the nonmimetic one as well, and the comic force of the play is revealed. In the midst of the traditional impediments, the real cause of romantic failure appears: the self-generated obstacle, the mutual interference of imitated desires clashing against one another.

“For a pun to be good, the more interesting meaning must be the less readily apparent, the rarer meaning, and it must owe this quality not to some cheap verbal trick, empty of significance, but to some essential reason, some deep-seated resistance of ours in face of something objectively evident. Our two lines magnificently fulfill these requirements; they are not objectively ambivalent, but seem so to our stubborn antimimetic prejudice. They operate exactly like the phenomenon that they most explicitly reveal and that remains concealed in the very transparency of its revelation.”
(B)

(pp. 72-75 / from Chapter 8: "Love By Another's Eye")

"For whom was Shakespeare writing his best lines? We can only restate once again our hypothesis of a circle of initiates, a few enlightened aficianados who, being familiar with the author's ideas, must have understood everything à demi-mot. ( my E.N.: that is, they understood without need of everything being made explicit in the text.) These people could not fail to spot such transparent formulae as to 'choose love by another's eyes.' "
(p. 76)

"Shakespeare does not share the infinite reverence that we have nowadays for desire, the reverence that always passes for extremely modern even though it was de rigueur in our Western culture long before the latest upheavals. We are always rushing to the defense of poor, oppressed desire, having engaged this myth for many centuries.

"Elizabethan trendiness already demanded what our own trendiness demands; it adopted a stylistically aristocratic version of the same thing. The dogma according to which desire can do no wrong was already fashionable in Greek comedy, and we take it for granted that Shakespeare should respect it. Yet this is the worst possible assumption for a real understanding of his genius. We unconsciously project our pious Rousseau-ism on a thinker radically alien to the great literary celebration of desire. Many who admire what they call Shakespearean 'psychology' from a safe distance would be appalled if they perceived its real implications.

"In the contemporary scale of values, the sanctity of desire—‘authentic’ desire, of course, the ‘true love’ of Hermia and Helena—has replaced all former virtues. To speak ill of desire is unconscionable blasphemy. By our current standards, Shakespeare is too genuinely subversive to be readily intelligible. We assume that all great writers, the ‘good guys’ in our book, are fighting for the good cause; they are on the side of poor, innocent desire oppressed by its countless persecutors. But Shakespeare is forever modern because he reveals the permanent taboos of our supposedly taboo-less culture. When we vaguely sense the distance between his conception of desire and ours, we warn each other darkly that he may well be ‘conservative.’ In the domain of desire, we always regard as ‘subversive’ and ‘novel’ the ideas we love; they really are the hoary clichés that Shakespeare was already deriding in his comedies.”
(p. 77)

"If we interpret Phebe (of "As You Like It") in terms of character, we will describe her as 'cold,' 'haughty,' 'authoritarian,' 'egotistical,' and so forth. We will add up these traits and call the sum total Phebe's 'character.' But her sudden passion for Rosalind contradicts this so-called character. In order to preserve our 'psychology,' our belief in characters, we will have to assume that Phebe acts out of character when she falls in love with Rosalind. The problem with this implicit theory is that those who adopt it without realizing that they adopt a theory at all—as a rule, they regard themselves as immune to all theory—really dismiss as inconsequential the major point of the Phebe episode, the truly Shakespearean point: the role of others in triggering this revolution in Phebe's attitude, the impermanence and ultimate unreality of what passes for our 'character.'

"The word narcissism is popularly used nowadays as a synonym for Elizabethan self-love. It sounds more 'scientific' than self-love but means exactly the same thing. The word does not designate a natural attribute, as 'character' does, but it is hardly less misleading, since it still implies a more or less permanent feature in our psychic makeup. This notion can only hinder our understanding of Shakespeare.

"Faith in the genuineness and intrinsic durability of narcissism is characteristic of subjugated desires; Silvius, for instance, is sincerely convinced that Phebe is as autonomous as Jupiter himself. If we read the essay that launched the modern career of the word 'narcissism,' Freud's Introduction to Narcissism, we will see that the mistake of the good Silvius is also the mistake of good old Sigmund Freud.

"Unlike Freud and other theoreticians of the self, the literary masters of mimetic desire see through the illusion of self-love and reveal the mimetic nature of its composition and decomposition. In an earlier essay I tried to show that Proust is more lucid than Freud with respect to the mimetic fragility of narcissism. (Note: René Girard, "Narcissism: The Freudian Myth Demythified by Proust," in Psychoanalysis, Creativity and Literature, ed. Alan Roland, (New York, Columbia University Press, 1978)

"I have been criticized for neglecting the later developments of narcissism in Freud, which take into account the acute lack of true self-sufficiency that may suddenly characterize the so-called narcissist. Freud was too good an observer, indeed, not to discover in the end that the most extreme narcissism, so-called, is often associated with the very opposite symptoms, extreme dependency on others. This much I will concede. If you read the relevant texts, however, you will quickly see that Freud never discovers the mimetic link between the two opposites; as a result, he never satisfactorily accounts for the 'paradox' of their juxtaposition in the same individual. He keeps thinking in terms of a strictly individual desire rooted entirely in family history and uninfluenced by other desires in the vicinity. He never unraveled the crucial mystery of two or more desires that violently disagree because they agree too much, because they imitate each other.

"To the critic of Shakespeare, the main problem is not whether such phenomena as intrinsic self-centeredness or permanent character really exist; up to a certain point, they certainly do, but their existence is irrelevant to a playwright interested in dramatic effects. He is not writing philosophical or psychological treatises, but comedies and tragedies of desire."
(pp. 103-104 / Chapter 11: 'Tis not her glass, but you that flatter her' Self-love in As You Like It)

(C)

“What a mimetic effect has erected, another mimetic effect can destroy. With great bluntness, Rosalind warns Phebe that she should not mistake her present luck for the permanent effect of some deterministic cause. She may not always find a meekly obedient Silvius in front of her:


But, mistress, know yourself, down on your knees,
And thank heaven, fasting, for a good man’s love;
For I must tell you friendly in your ear,
Sell when you can, you are not for all markets.
(III, v, 57-60)


“The financial metaphor in this last line corresponds neatly to what quite a few economists have theorized in recent years about the mimetic nature of financial speculation. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, André Orléan, and others have interpreted some of Keynes’s observations mimetically. In a free market, values fluctuate not according to the law of supply and demand but according to each speculator’s evaluation of what the overall evaluation will be in regard to this same law. This is a far cry from the objective law itself, which can never determine the situation directly, since it is always subject to interpretation and all interpretations are mimetic and self-referential. These interpretations are not interested in the objective facts but in the forces that actually shape the market, the forces of public opinion, which really means the dominant interpretation. 1

"Economists are dealing with a mimetic game that most of them overlook in their fetishistic belief in so-called ‘objective data.’ Mathematical calculations can apprehend objective data, but they cannot take interpretations into account; that is why no amount of objective information will ever make prediction fool-proof.

(pp. 101-102)
____________________________
(emphasis added)

(1) Jean-Pierre Dupuy, “Le Signe et l’envie,” in Paul Dumouchel and J.-P. Dupuy, L’Enfer des choses (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1979), 85-93. André Orléan, “Monnaie et speculation mimétique,” in Violence et vérité (Paris: Éditions Grasset et Fasquelle, 1985) 147-58.



(D)





5proximity1
feb 1, 2019, 10:28 am




“By the time of As You Like It, the knowledgeable few must have regarded mimetic interaction as highly characteristic of Shakespearean art. If we do not grasp the mimetic law, we cannot decipher the author’s allusions to it. They operate like a coded message, but the code is not arbitrary. “Do you love him because I do!” is Shakespeare’s personal signature written across a most un-Shakespearean relationship. Shakespeare signals that he has not forgotten what real conflicts are about.

“If we had found “Do you love him (or, rather, her) because I do!” in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Rape of Lucrece, A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Much Ado About Nothing, this formula would have helped our analysis of those works. Paradoxically, it cannot help with As You Like It. It makes little sense where it should make most, in the context of its own play. Its real context is a Shakespearean intertextuality that embraces the whole œuvre.

“What we know about the previous works makes it impossible to believe that “Do you love him because I do!” is an inconsequential turn of phrase, rhetorical in the trivial sense, a meaningless combination of words; it is too pertinent to mimetic friendship and rivalry not to reflect the author’s continued preoccupation with this subject, yet it is not pertinent to As You Like It. In order to see its overall indirect pertinence, a detour through the more explicitly mimetic plays is necessary. The critics who insist on dealing with each play as an autonomous work of art cannot discover what we are talking about. A whole dimension of Shakespearean wit escapes them.

“If we interpret each play in isolation from its neighbors, in deference to some principle of aesthetic formalism, we will never perceive the network of allusions crucial to a real intelligence not only of what binds the plays together but of each play considered separately. Aesthetic formalism has been a great extinguisher of Shakespearean satire. The enjoyment of satiric literature rests on a feeling of reader-author complicity incompatible with the notion of an “intentional fallacy”—one of the deadliest of our critical fallacies, in my opinion.

“The satiric nature of the play is suggested by its title, As You Like It. The author addresses the spectators and announces that for a change he is not writing his own kind of play, but theirs. Like all great satirists, Shakespeare must have been besieged with requests for a more uplifting view of mankind. Great mimetic writers are always asked to renounce the very essence of their art, mimetic conflict, in favor of an insipidly optimistic view of human relations, always presented as more gentle and humane, whereas in reality it reflects the cruelty of self-righteousness.

“In As You Like It Shakespeare feigns to oblige and, to a certain extent, really does. ‘Here is a play,’ he says, ‘that paints the world not as I see it, not as it really is, but as you, my public, like it, without ambivalent sentiments, without ambiguous conflicts, a play full of characters clearly designated as ‘heroes’ and ‘villains.’

“A drama that evacuates mimetic entanglements needs some substitute source of conflict or it will not be dramatic at all. It can only turn to what is sometimes called the ‘Manichean’ perspective. If it does not attribute conflict to the antagonists’ identical desires, it must postulate some intrinsic difference between them, the difference of good and evil. Instead of facing up to envy and jealousy such as they are, namely, two-sided, slippery phenomena, the pastoral genre (of which As You Like It is an example) systematically portrays some characters as intrinsically good, and other characters as intrinsically bad.

“The conflicts that we do not want to attribute to the process of mimetic rivalry must be given some cause external to the goodness of the hero or heroine, and it can only be the evil disposition of some clearly designated villain. This official troublemaker will have no other purpose in life than to make the lives of noble-minded heroes and heroines miserable. He will be the indispensable scapegoat, thanks to whom the noble-minded people are able to wash their hands of whatever unpleasantness the plot requires.

“Idealistic literature reflects what may be called the normal paranoid structure of human relations. It systematically transforms mimetic doubles into highly differentiated aggressors and ‘aggressees.’ This structure belongs to mimetic rivalry itself; it expresses the reluctance of this rivalry to acknowledge itself as such. We had a good example of it in the scene where Helena and Hermia each projects on the other the sole responsibility of a discord that is paradoxically based on too much concord. Shakespeare alludes to this paradox, I belive, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when after reading the announcement of Pyramus and Thisbe, a play no less deluded in principle than As You Like It is supposed to be, Theseus asks incredulously,


“How shall we find the concord of this discord?”
(V, i, 60)


“In As You Like It Shakespeare makes all the stereotyped oppositions that indirectly reflect mimetic rivalry as visibly false as he can. He makes the hatred of Oliver for Orlando completely gratuitous. In Lodge’s Rosalynde, the source of the play, there are the same two brothers as in the comedy, but the discontented one has objective reasons for discontent; he is the dispossessed brother, whereas in As You Like It it is the reverse. Systematically, Shakespeare does away with the realism in his play. Among all available possibilities, he always chooses the most farfetched, the one most contaminated with romantic illusion.

“The play loudly advertises its opposition to common sense, but never takes itself seriously; in the conclusion, the cardboard villains all undergo an instantaneous conversion to the pastoral good. This, too, is part of the pastoral tradition. Thus, as soon as Orlando’s bad brother, Oliver, and Duke Frederick have acquitted themselves of their villainous business, which does not amount to much anyway, they decide to settle in Arden and are immediately cleansed of all evil propensities.

… … “Ultimately, the only people left in the pastoral world are a few unmarriageable ex-villains who spend the rest of their lives expiating their sins in ecologically-healthy surroundings, while the heroes and heroines, having no sins to expiate, rush back to the bad old world swiftly to appropriate the estates and dignities conveniently vacated by the reformed villains.

“The pastoral genre gives free rein to our tendency to deny the possibility of acute conflict among close relatives and friends, which is the substance of tragedy according to Aristotle. The pastoral world can be regarded as the anti-tragic world par excellence, and an amused Shakespeare discreetly underscores the most outrageous features of its self-deception. All who suffer from mimetic desire would like to see it abolished by decree. They feel about it the way they feel about their rivals, associating the latter with such desire and regarding their dislike for both as incontrovertible proof that they have nothing to do with either. The problem always seems to be with ‘them,’ the others, never with ourselves.

“Only mimetic desire would dream of escaping from itself through physical means, by moving to some distant land still untouched by the plague of contagious rivalry, a more pristine and ‘natural’ world, perhaps—an old-fashioned, less urbanized country, an unspoiled nature with inhabitants more innocent and fresh than our distressingly competitive neighbors. If we moved there, we could enjoy the company of delightful others with no fear of ever getting embroiled in the mimetic entanglements of the bad old world.”
____________

(pp. 95-98) ( Chapter 10: "Do you love him because I do!" | The Pastoral Genre in As You Like It)

6proximity1
Redigerat: feb 3, 2019, 10:39 am



First posted and edited: Friday, 1 February, 2019

additions
(B), 3 February, 2019

________________________________________

(Chapter 14 A Woeful Cressid' 'Mongst the Merry Greeks | The Love Affair in Troilus and Cressida)

__________________

“The major idea of this study is that Shakespeare is not merely a dramatic illustrator of mimetic desire but its theoretician. If this thesis had to be defended on the basis of a single play, Troilus and Cressida would be my choice. No play is more clearly designed for the unraveling of a whole range of mimetic phenomena, and this time it does the job not solely through the interaction of a few protagonists, but in the larger context of two societies at war.

“Great as A Midsummer Night’s Dream is, from the standpoint of theory, the mechanics of desire and rivalry operate so smoothly in that comedy that they remain a relatively discreet presence, always subordinate to a coherent theatrical enterprise. This is no longer the case with Troilus and Cressida; instead of turning into a soothing ritual and a delightful myth, the play ends in a most negative and destructive fashion.

“When it no longer serves the purpose of a final reordering, mimetic disorder becomes an end in itself, at least from a dramatic standpoint; the various themes and subplots have no raison d'être in Troilus and Cressida but to reveal more and more facets of disintegration. The play can be defined as a treatise of mimetic decomposition. Mimetic manipulation has always played a role in Shakespeare, but in private relations primarily. In Troilus and Cressida it turns into a veritable technique of politics and government, and this may well be the most amazing achievement of this amazing play.”
(A)

“There is a politics of erotic desire in this play, but there is also a political problem in the strict sense, the problem of Agamemnon’s lack of authority, and it is handled by Ulysses through mimetic tricks similar to those of Pandarus in the erotic domain. The unity of the play lies in the demonstration of the parallel role played by mimetic strategy in all areas of human activity. The symbol of this unity is Pandarus, the erotic go-between whose importance not only for this play but for the whole theatre of Shakespeare cannot be exaggerated.

“It is impossible to look at Pandarus even for a second and not to recognize the whole problematic of desire made man. The only way to talk about Troilus and Cressida without mentioning mimetic desire is to avoid Pandarus entirely, which is what the critical tradition has always done. What this character stands for is never discussed; his symbolic value for the entire play remains unacknowledged.
… …
…“Pandarus wants his niece Cressida and the young Troilus to have an affair, and he tries to instill in each one separately a burning desire for the other. …

“Pandarus provides his two protégés with the most irresistible model of desire in Troy or anywhere else, the beautiful Helen. Nothing incites desire like desire itself. As a magnet for countless desires, Helen is matchless; the whole Trojan War is fought for her sake; who could be more effective than she? Whatever Helen happens to desire—especially in matters erotic, her special field of expertise—is likely to be avidly imitated by all women who want to be desirable. Countless Cressidas want to be Helen in the sense of metaphorical desire, in the sense of Helena’s translation to the more successful Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“Far from being a new trick born of television, sexiness by proxy is as ancient as humanity itself. It goes back to primitive religion and has never gone out of fashion. In our own world, of course, it is more important than ever. Modern technology accelerates mimetic effects; it repeats them ad nauseam and extends their scope to the entire world, but does not change their nature. It also turns them into a most respectable industry called advertising.

“When business tries to increase the sale of the product, it resorts to advertising. In order to inflame our desire, advertisers try to convince us that the beautiful people all over the world are already in love with their product.”

(B)

(pp. 121-123)



7proximity1
Redigerat: feb 7, 2019, 9:44 am

Posted Wednesday, 6 February, 2019
_________________

Notice some interesting parallels between René Girard's critical analyses in the excerpts above with some pointed out here, in the following excerpt from an article by Howard C. Cole, where Prof. Cole begins by noting observations of T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare's 'development' :



(Note: emphasis added in the following.)

"Shakespeare' s Comedies And their Sources: Some Biographical And Artistic Inferences"*
_____________________________________



"ABOUT FIFTY YEARS AGO T. S. ELIOT, glancing at Shakespeare's "continuous development,?" noted that the playwright apparently put more and more of himself into his plays. Since "the choice both of theme and of dramatic and verse technique in each play seems to be determined increasingly by Shakespeare's state of feeling, by the particular stage of his emotional maturity at the time," what we call " 'the whole man' is not simply his greatest or maturest achievement, but the whole pattern formed by the sequence of plays," and what we should see as "the full meaning of any one of his plays is not in itself alone, but in that play in the order in which it was written, in its relation to all of Shakespeare's other plays, earlier and later." 1

To some extent Eliot's concerns reflect his own time's interests in Shake-speare vis-a-vis the works: the biographical speculations of E. K. Chambers in 1930 (e.g., "an attempt at Timon" may have occasioned "a nervous break-down") and of John Dover Wilson in 1932 ("Shakespeare came very near to madness in Lear") or C. J. Sisson's attempt in 1934 to supplant such "mythical sorrows" with an equally mythical cheer (he "maintained throughout his robust and transcendent faith in God and his creature Man").2 And, to a lesser extent, Eliot must have also been influenced by nineteenth-century conjectures, from the biographical inferences of Schlegel and Wordsworth to Edward Dowden's monumental "attempt . . . to connect the study of Shakespeare's works with an inquiry after the personality of the writer, and to observe . . . the growth of his intellect and character." 3

I.

(p. 406)

"What makes Eliot's approach at least potentially more fruitful than his predecessors', even Dowden's, is his emphasis upon author and work as a reciprocal relationship: the "whole man" is to be found in that "whole pattern" increasingly shaped by the man's "state of feeling," and therefore whatever one play seems to say about the playwright's art or intellect or character must be tested against the evidence furnished by its sequential neighbors. The sequence, of course, must be based on a generally accepted, if sometimes inconvenient, chronology (pace Wilson's insistence that unless Timon "be the stillborn twin of Lear . . .we may give up talking about Shakespearian moods altogether," p. 131).

Another aid in tracing what Wilson calls "moods" and Eliot "states of feeling" is to limit the sequence to plays of the same genre, thereby losing parts of the total "pattern" but gaining a much closer sense of one part by comparing only like things. Since Shakespeare wrote more comedies than histories or tragedies (a great deal more if we include those plays only recently designated as "romances"), since he wrote them over a longer period of time, and since they are far more varied (and therefore probably reveal more experimentation), let us measure the man by this dramatic kind. ...

_____________________

(1): T. S. Eliot, "John Ford," in Essays on Elizabethan Drama (London, 1932; rpt. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956), pp. 125-26

(2): E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), I, 86;

John Dover Wilson, The Essential Shakespeare: A Biographical Adventure (Cambridge, 1932; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1964), p. 120;

C. J. Sisson, "The Mythical Sorrows of Shakespeare," in Studies in Shakespeare, ed. Peter Alexander (London: Oxford Univ. Press, (1964)), p. 32.

(3): Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (London, 1872; rpt. New York: Capricorn, 1962), p. xiii.

______________________

HOWARD C. COLE, (now Emeritus) Professor of English at the University of Illinois, is the author of A Quest of Inquirie: Some Contexts of Tudor Literature and of The All's Well Story from Boccaccio to Shakespeare; his article here is a prospectus for a book on Shakespeare's development as a craftsman of comedy.

____________________________


* Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Winter, 1983), pp. 405-419


8proximity1
Redigerat: feb 16, 2019, 7:31 am

First posted and edited 13 February, 2019 8:50 a.m.
__________________________________

If you systematically lock out, forbid, exclude, all of the most robust and searching criticism—something which deeply marks our times, since so many people and institutions are only too happy to do this (read this site’s “Talk” commentaries!)—then at the same time you also ensure a safe place in which idiotic nonsense may take seed, grow and flourish freely. This is true not only of literary criticism but also of practically any field of human endeavor: political affairs, higher education, all the arts and sciences. It describes, in effect, the state of Shakespeare scholarship, long a sheltered preserve, fiercely resisting all the most insightful critiques because these lead into areas which are professionally taboo; they lead into what, if left unchecked, produces a complete demolition of the scholarly orthodoxy concerning the author and the work which go by the name of “William Shakespeare.”

The most insightful scholars are those very people most likely to fall afoul of this timid and defensive world of ‘Shakespeare-studies’ orthodoxy. René Girard, as one of the most insightful scholars of his or of any previous generation, lived and worked on the margins of professional Shakespeare scholarship, though he was so much more than a Shakespeare scholar alone. A reading of A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare (1991) reveals the profound ignorance of the near-totality of orthodox Shakespearean scholarship—then and now. Such experts, often holding important and influential places in teaching and in dramatic arts have little or no idea at all about the real significance in this author’s genius or its operation in his work. They are foolish hacks, spouting safe, conventional nonsense and are often well-paid for their part in this travesty.

Because the ignorance the real author and his work’s real import is so deep and so widespread, society misses all of the rich opportunities for better understanding of human relations. The author of “Shakespeare’s” works not only explains himself and his times to us through his poetry and plays, not only tells us who he was, he helps explain our times to us, helping us to understand who we are and what we are doing and why. None of this is available to those who are ignorant of or closed to the insights of Girard. Shakespeare’s observation, “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players:” is read, even by experts, as a glib observation, there simply for amusement, a clever turn of phrase. On the contrary, there is nothing at all glib about these lines or about their import. They are intended in the utmost seriousness and are full of far-ranging social, moral and psychological implications in the ‘real world’— apart from their immediate dramatic implications within the play ; Oxford's purpose, (Edward, Earl of Oxford, the real genius behind the pen-name "William Shakespeare") was first to explain and expose his deepest thoughts and insights about himself and the workings of world of human affairs; entertainment was secondary to all that.

Thus, our own present-day political drama concerning the rise of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States is experienced by many as a bewildering crisis. Nothing of the rich resources in Oxford’s poetry and plays has been seen, taken and applied practically by us to understand our predicament. Rather, we participate directly and indirectly in this crisis as wholly ignorant, unsuspecting agents who exhibit all the foolish and self-defeating characteristics of Shakespearean characters in a tragedy, comedy or tragi-comedy. There are those whose acts and thoughts resemble Cassius or Casca, from Julius Caesar; who resemble Orsino, Olivia or Viola in Twelfth Night; who resemble Pandarus, Troilus or Cressida in Troilus and Cressida.

Here, for example, is just part of René Girard’s masterful analysis of Julius Caesar presented with my own digressions on how, in the U.S., Americans are living through a political crisis with so many aspects which are reflected in and dramatized by the play.



NEW YORK (AP) — Delta Air Lines on Sunday said it is pulling its sponsorship from a Manhattan-based theater company for portraying Julius Caesar as a Donald Trump look-alike in a business suit who gets knifed to death on stage.

On the same night that the theater community was celebrating Broadway's finest at the Tony Awards, the Atlanta-based airline released a statement saying it notified The Public Theater of its decision "effective immediately."

"No matter what your political stance may be, the graphic staging of Julius Caesar at this summer's Free Shakespeare in the Park does not reflect Delta Air Lines' values," the statement said. "Their artistic and creative direction crossed the line on the standards of good taste."
__________________

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/life/theater/2017/06/11/delta-ends-theater-company...



The decision of Delta Airlines executives to withdraw sponsorship of a New York theatre company for that company's portrayal of the title-role character in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar as one unabashedly modeled after President Donald Trump is virtually certain not to have sprung from any particularly fine appreciation for the dramatic operations employed in this play by the play's author. Still, the airline's executives' impulse was quite correct and well-founded.

Drawing on René Girard's work on the drama of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, I want to try to show how this production amounts to a remarkable 'living-laboratory' case in which we can apply and see the efficacy of Girard's dramatic insights at work.

As an example of psychic motives behind the years-long massive and manic effort to vilify Donald Trump, there can hardly be a more revealing one than this production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Alas, the insight into this play's dramatic mechanics is generally so abysmally poor—even among scholars and theatre professionals!—that it shall take some time and effort and the unrivaled work of René Girard to show how and why this is so.


(NOTE: The following excerpts do not necessarily appear in the order they're found in Girard's text, A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare (1991/2000) pp. 204-209; I have selected the relevant parts and composed them slightly in order to highlight Girard's argument to best effect for clarity. Emphasis is as in the original text except as noted otherwise.)



"The process of collective violence (...) is always a version of what we call scapegoating. (...) According to dictionaries, the victim is substituted for the real culprit, but in many instances the very notion of a culprit is absurd. Who is responsible for Casca's thunderstorm? Who is responsible for the Theban plague? The myth answers that Oedipus must be; the myth reasons like (or as) Casca (does); the myth is a pure scapegoat representation by which our modern classicists are still fooled, but Shakespeare is not.

(...) The word 'scapegoat' does not appear in Shakespeare but the process certainly does. Cinna (the innocent man in the crowd, unconnected to the murderers' conspiracy) is a caricatural example. Is Caesar a scapegoat as well? Is he not truly responsible for the decay of republican institutions; is he not a tyrant, therefore a real culprit?

"We must not attribute our own ideas to Shakespeare. If we want to know how Shakespeare himself views the murder, we only have to point to the features in Caesar that make him a typical scapegoat, unconsciously selected for this typicality rather than for what is really singular in him as a statesman and an individual.

"We think of scapegoating as a collective phenomenon, and Caesar's murder satisfies this requirement. We think of scapegoating as something that can happen at any time, but is most likely to happen in times of crisis; Caesar's murder satisfies this second requirement. (emphasis added)

"The word 'scapegoat' brings to mind ideas of physical defects, unsightly infirmities, and spectacular abnormalities. In the Middle Ages, the sick (mentally or otherwise physically) and the physically handicapped were more likely than healthier people to be persecuted as witches, sorcerers, bringers of the plague. Caesar has his share of infirmities: he has a bad ear, and suffers from a disease, epilepsy, that resembles a positive trance—which is no doubt why ancient and primitive societies have always viewed this falling sickness (I, ii, 254, 256) as a sign of personal affinity with the sacred in all its forms, the bad as well as the good.

(Within the play) "Everything Caesar does everything we learn about him as a public or private individual, including the sterility of his wife—which the popular mind readily attributes to a husband's evil eye—makes him look like a man earmarked for victimization. At one point he (Caesar) offers his throat to the crowd in a gesture reminiscent of some sacred king volunteering for the role of sacrificial victim. It is also significant that Caesar would be associated with both the Lupercalia and the Ides of March, two Roman festivals rooted, as all such festivals are, in so-called scapegoat rituals.

“It may be objected that much of this is already in (the author’s sources, e.g.) Plutarch; Shakespeare is simply repeating his source. He is closer to Plutarch, no doubt, than many critics are willing to admit, for fear, perhaps, of minimizing his originality. This fear is unfounded. Shakespeare’s genius manifests itself first and foremost in his mimetic reading of Plutarch.

“Plutarch’s Caesar has all the telltale signs except for the bad ear. Even if this infirmity is not Shakespeare’s own invention, even if this feature too comes from an ancient source, this additional scapegoat sign is significant. A lesser writer might have discarded all such signs as demeaning, unworthy of a great hero, uselessly superstitious. In ‘classical’ France the bad ear and the falling sickness would have been condemned in the name of ‘good taste.’ For showing Attila dying of a nosebleed, the old Corneille was endlessly ridiculed. Being under no such pressure, Shakespeare carefully reproduced everything he found in Plutarch, and added a little more on his own.

When they talk about Caesar, Cassius and Casca constantly resort to such words as ‘monster’ and ‘monstrous’ in such an ambiguous way that all distinction between the physical and the moral is abolished. This practice encourages the victimization of physically abnormal people. When the world seems monstrous such men as Casca seek some human embodiment of this monstrousness. They spurn rational explanations in favor of such magical formulas as ‘the man most like this dreadful night.’ (I, ii, 68) Had he lived during the great medieval plagues, Casca would have persecuted Jews, lepers, and physically-handicapped people. There were still witch-hunters in Shakespeare’s world, and Casca and even Cassius are patterned after them. What else is a witch-hunter except one who finds others who embody “an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul”? (Emphasis added)

“In spite of his repudiation of astrology, Cassius is not really immune to the irrational influence of typical scapegoat features; his story of swimming across the Tiber reveals an obsessive concern with Caesar’s physical infirmities. To Casca and even to Cassius, then, Caesar is certainly a scapegoat; is he one to Brutus as well? If one conspirator can be regarded as rational, Brutus must be the one. His fascination with Caesar has nothing to do with epilepsy or the bad weather. Brutus may be excessively ambitious but his attachment to the Republic is sincere. He is obsessively jealous but his jealousy is really his own—authentic mimetic desire, so to speak, rather than a copy of a copy, as in the case of Casca.

“Traditional criticism has always dealt with Julius Caesar as if Shakespeare happened to be a nineteenth-century historian writing from the standpoint of post-Enlightenment rationalism. The murderous political game of the play is treated as a perfectly rational activity. In order to challenge this reading, one must show that not even for Brutus is Caesar a rational target of assassination. If the scapegoat reading of the murder is applicable only to marginal characters such as Casca , its relevance is marginal as well, and there is a rational core to this play that my mimetic interpretation cannot touch.

“The objection is already countered by the role played by mimesis in Brutus’s decision to join the conspiracy, but the question is so crucial that the point must be further emphasized. As far as Brutus is concerned, it is true that Caesar is no borrowed rival, but he is borrowed as a target of assassination. This is what the scenes with Cassius make clear, and the point is confirmed by Brutus’s soliloquy; he (Brutus) lost his sleep only after Cassius ‘first did whet (him) against Caesar.’ (III, I, 61) Thoughts of murder did not enter his honest and virtuous soul spontaneously.

“Even in Brutus’s case, Caesar is a scapegoat. To clinch the fundamental point, Shakespeare makes Brutus’s political indictment of Caesar extremely weak and unconvincing. Brutus honestly acknowledges that Caesar has not yet abused his power; he does not deserve to die (II, i).

“What matters here is not the historical accuracy of this interpretation (the play makes no allusion to Caesar’s illegal crossing of the Rubicon), but its implications for the type of victim that Shakespeare wants Caesar to be. He wants his murder to be unjustifiable, even from an extreme republican standpoint. His reason for denying the essential rationality of the murder is not his personal preference for Caesar or for the monarchical principle, but his overall mimetic view of human relations, the whole basis for his conception of tragedy.

“How could Caesar fail to be a scapegoat anyway, since his murderers want him to be responsible for a whole crisis of Degree*? Such a crisis can only be regarded (by Shakespeare or other aware critics) as the responsibility of all citizens, or of none at all, since its roots go far back into the past—to the very beginning, as a matter of fact. In no case can this crisis be the responsibility of a single individual, however powerful he happens to be. Brutus’s reasoning is less a fantastic version of ‘the man most like this dreadful night,’ a political rather than a magico-cosmological version. Ultimately, all murderers are equally irrational and undifferentiated.

“In my view, there is not a trace in Shakespeare of contemporary (i.e. 16th-century) superstition in the style of James I. The depth of his (Shakespeare’s) satire is incompatible with personal involvement (i.e. in a naïve and unsuspecting manner such as his characters exhibit). Only an imperfect reading of him can let one believe otherwise. Shakespeare seems irrational to those who underestimate the extent to which mimetic and scapegoat aspects enter into (the play’s author’s) dramatic decisions and ideas that they themselves are incapable of criticizing.

“Let us take as an example the physical signs of scapegoating. Why does Shakespeare insist upon them? Is it not because he believes in them? Is he not superstitious himself? Shakespeare frequently illustrates the human tendency to endow the accidental and the insignificant with a completely unfounded negative significance for the purpose of stigmatizing and scapegoating. In many instances he does this in a way that cannot leave any doubt regarding his intelligence of the mechanism involved.

“He’s no dupe of Cleopatra blaming the bad tidings on the messenger who brings them. …

If the scapegoating has nothing better at its disposal, it will seize even upon physical differences that are neither unusual nor unpleasant. The text makes clear that Shakespeare is no dupe of this process. He can see that, during a mimetic crisis, the appetite for victims increases concurrently with the process that deprives people of the differences on which they count. Against a background of increasing uniformity, only the grossest differences stand out, and in particular physical ones. When all significance is disintegrating, they alone remain visible; they would-be scape-goaters focus on them in a desperate attempt to retrieve significance. (Emphasis added)

“Our thinking is stil determined by models of rationality not powerful enough for Shakespeare. In spite of its loudly-professed respect for ‘all cultural differences,’ contemporary rationalism still dismisses primitive religion as totally meaningless, ‘pure’ superstition, unintelligible mumbo-jumbo. That is why it cannot understand Julius Caesar; it cannot understand the tragic writer’s understanding of scapegoat phenomena and of their role in ancient religion.

“If we read Shakespeare from the standpoint of this insufficient reason, we do not understand what role the scapegoating signs play in his work. Nonmimetic critics mistakenly assume that the only possible reason for which Shakespeare could want to incorporate the mimetic elements that we have discussed in his tragedy is that he himself was tempted to believe in them. We should not let our own ignorance victimize the tremendous intelligence of Shakespeare.

“If these critics were right, Shakespeare could not depict mimetic phenomena as powerfully as he does. When we read Shakespeare from the standpoint of a rationality inferior to his own, there are only two possibilities. First, we may piously pretend not to see whatever does not fit our narrow rationality and celebrate our mutilated version of his genius; we reduce the scapegoat aspects of Caesar to a picturesque décor with no decisive impact on the overall significance of the play. Or alternatively, we face up to these irrational aspects and cannot understand why they should figure in the narrowly ‘historical’ play that we want Julius Caesar to be; we must accuse Shakespeare himself of unreason. We suspect that he was a kind of super Casca, a man with a great poetical gift, no doubt, but primitive as a thinker, a believer in irrational signs.

“The whole modern dogma of the absolute separation between great poetry and intelligence is one of the consequences of our blindness to the role of mimetic desire and victimage in great literature. The ultimate implications of Julius Caesar seem almost too dangerous to pursue. Our own rationality cannot reach the founding role of mimetic victimage because it remains tainted with it. Narrow rationality and victimage lose their effectiveness together.


“Shakespeare possesses the sharpest possible eye for the human tendency to arbitrary scapegoating and the manner in which the dissolving of significance in mimetic violence destroys everything in its wake. Shakespeare must have been tempted by nihilism and threatened with madness but, unlike Nietzsche, he survived the great personal crisis to which his tragic period in my opinion must correspond. His work is a deconstruction of our narrow metaphysical reason that goes beyond the Nietzschean-Heideggerian limits, which are still our own. With his awareness of the victimage mechanism and its religious consequences, he reached an anthropological vision that has remained undeciphered to this day but is finally becoming intelligible, thanks to the same mimetic theory that enabled us to unravel the significance of the comedies.”

_______________________

* ‘Crisis of Degree’ is a short-hand reference to what concerns any society’s (ancient or modern) general loss of, breakdown in, the traditional ranked hierarchies by which social class and status were marked and distinguished, one from the other. It is a ‘crisis’ in which these distinctions lose their features and in which social standings become ‘undifferentiated’ by a general collapse of outwardly-observable behaviors which previously had separated the elite’s typical public conduct from that of the masses.

____________________________

No sane person, much less a sane POTUS, would:

(“Just askin’ ”) “Is It Time to Call Trump Mentally Ill?”

Resolved: Trump's personality disorder makes him unfit to be president.

“The president rages at leaks, setbacks and accusations”

”Trump's Madness Invites Mutiny”

a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar
like that bad boyfriend who everyone warned you not to date, and now that he has proven to be exactly what everyone said

the Trump reality. A man with a deformed personality and a defective intellect runs a dysfunctional administration

Suggests Trump Is Suffering from Alzheimer's

the boor: weird handshakes, no handshake, holding hands, threatening tweets, insults to various groups, lewdness, discourtesies to wife, odious toadying, betrayal of base

inspiration for "Nazis," "racists," & bigots.

margd: Trump mentally unbalanced

__________________________________

For reference and further reading or listening:

(.pdf) "COLLECTIVE VIOLENCE AND SACRIFICE IN SHAKESPEARE'S JULIUS CAESAR" by
RENÉ GIRARD
(1989)
(This is an earlier essay which contains much of what appeared three years later in A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare concerning Girard's exposition of Julius Caesar, the dramatic and religious features and functions of sacrifice, envy, and the "scapegoat" as a social phenomenon. It offers a good introduction to the ideas in the excerpted citations, above.)

Colloquium on Violence and Religion (International Association of Scholars of Mimetic Theory)

VIDEO: Mass Imitation of Crazy Primates - excerpt of a classroom lecture by Prof. Jordan Peterson

Violence and the Sacred, Re-issue, London, 2013, Bloomsbury Publishing, PLC. ; first published in French, 1972, La Violence et le sacré by Éditions Bernard Grasset, Paris, FR.; first published in English, (Patrick Gregory, Transl.) 1977 by Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD.

CBC Radio Audio file | CBC News · March 3, 2016 : The Scapegoat: The Ideas of René Girard, Part 1 (full episode: 53 mins. :58 secs.) ; Part 2 ; Part 3 ; Part 4 ; Part 5.


from the University of Kentucky's College of Arts & Sciences | Modern & Classical Languages, Literatures & Cultures (Article) : "René Girard and the Scapegoat" (Essay) by René Girard

(Journal article) Imitative behavior — A theoretical view by WANDA WYRWICKA, PH.D. | (The Pavlovian Journal of Biological Science | July 1988, Volume 23, Issue 3, pp 125–131)

(Journal article) The evolution of culture: From primate social learning to human culture by
Laureano Castro and Miguel A. Toro | PNAS July 6, 2004 101 (27) 10235-10240;
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0400156101


(Journal article) Chimpanzee and Human Cultures by Christophe Boesch and Michael Tomasello | Current Anthropology 39.5 (Dec, 1998): 591-.
(COPYRIGHT 1998 Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research)

9proximity1
Redigerat: feb 16, 2019, 7:40 am



“All over the world, when sacrificers are asked why they perform sacrifices, their justification is the same as that of Brutus: they must do again what their ancestors did when the community was founded; they must repeat some foundational violence with substitute victims. Just like Brutus, they invoke some ancient narrative that explicitly or implicitly culminates in a collective expulsion or murder. We call these myths, and most anthropologists regard them as fictional, but the sacrificers do not. They view them as real historical beginnings that must be piously re-enacted. ... (p. 210) René Girard, A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare

-----

(Parenthetical comments in the following (except where these are in italics) are my own—either to clarify Girard’s text or to bring to light some of our own common misconceptions as they apply to Girard’s insights.)

“Post-sacrificial institutions are not religious in the narrow sense of requiring some form of immolation, but they can remain ritualistic in respect to the representational closure rooted in the original scapegoat effect, the principle of all discrimination. The reluctance to think through this scapegoat origin still accounts for not only the modern critics’ efforts to dissociate theatrical catharsis from Greek religion, but also for their universal shying away from mimetic desire (as a dramatic motive force) and all mimetic effects in the theatre of Shakespeare.” … (p. 223)

-----

“Without (one’s possessing a) mimetic awareness (and most of us have practically none), the ability of human beings to live together in relative harmony is taken for granted (and never more so than today, twenty-eight years since this work’s first publication). The origin of society becomes a real problem only to those who conceive of the possibility of cultural differentiation dissolving into mimetic rivalry and its confounding contraries, (something which the naïve modern “progressive liberal” is simply incapable of conceiving), which should not be confused with a peaceful coincidentia oppositorum. If mimetic crises are possible, disorder (in society) becomes less problematic than order. All human order must eventually return to chaos, from which it must have emerged in the first place (a view which is sheer anathema to contemporary progressive social and political dogma, which sees all disorder as the consequence of inadequate understanding of enlightened ‘progressive’ political ‘principles’ at the foundation of which lie pan-human fellowship and brotherhood—a faith to which the progressive liberals cling, child-like, out of a fear and insecurity born of doubts which they cannot admit to themselves, much less to others; but these are not children, they are desperate adults).

“In mythology already, cultural differentiation appears as a mysterious conquest over undifferentiated chaos. Does this mean that mimetic thinkers such as Shakespeare are mythical? (i.e. mythically-minded) Non-mimetic thinkers almost automatically assume that they are. As a result, Shakespeare is often regarded as a great creator of myths, even sometimes as personally superstitious, and this is where Shakespearean criticism has gone wrong, imprisoned in the narrowness of its own rationalism.

“Mimetic thinkers, tragic thinkers, are generally distrusted for being unduly pessimistic and depressive, even psychologically unbalanced. The supreme artists often are apocalyptic thinkers, always inclined to exaggerate the urgency of the crisis in which, they feel, their societies as well as (they) themselves are plunged. There is more than a grain of truth in this distrust, but it becomes a justification for massive untruth when it leads to a blanket dismissal of the fundamental insight these thinkers provide.

“This insight is the apprehension of violent reciprocity and mimetic doubling as the main source of human conflict. It is more powerful than any other view, but this power is like a spirit imprisoned in a rock, a purely artistic truth ignored even by those literary critics who proclaim the superiority of literary texts in the abstract, but always take their cue from some philosophical or anti-philosophical fad, the two being equivalent.

“It takes only a smattering of mimetic awareness to understand how a crisis of Degree gets started; it takes much more to understand how it ends—so much, as a matter of fact, that even the most mimetic (in our sense) of systematic thinkers have never been able to solve this enigma. If the violent escalation of the sacrificial crisis is pursued far enough, total annihilation threatens and, sooner or later, the mimetic thinkers themselves are so frightened that they take refuge in some kind of (concept of a) social contract. Even Hobbes ends up with one, even the Freud of Totem and Taboo.

The idea of the social contract is the great humanistic whitewash (and, thus, a veritable modern-day myth, indistinguishable in its force, character or effect from any of the most ancient and primitive of myths) of mimetic rivalry, the standard escape hatch for those who cannot pursue the mimetic logic far enough; the specific form that this beautiful (social contract) document assumes matters not at all, at least from our perspective. The absurdity of the idea increases in proportion to the force of the mimetic insight that propels the thinker. The social contract must show up at the most violent climax of the mimetic crisis (otherwise, it holds no reconciling value, the crisis having passed, it would no longer be urgently needed or acceptable to its putative ‘parties’ in the absence of the crisis), amid the monsters of the midsummer night and of Degrees aflame, in the very circumstances that make a rational solution even more unthinkable than at any other time. The idea that, at the instant of greatest hatred, the hysterical doubles sit down quietly together for some nice legal chit-chat is so far-fetched that its proponents always present it as a purely theoretical device. (emphasis added)

“In Julius Caesar Shakespeare pursues the mimetic logic to the bitter end, and what he finds when he gets there is no social contract, to be sure, but the unanimous violence of the foundational murder.”
(pp. 227-228)

10proximity1
Redigerat: mar 4, 2019, 6:48 am



(Athens. The palace of THESEUS.)

THESEUS:
...
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;

________________________________

A Midsummer Night's Dream (V, i, 1844-1850)


_____________________



“Irony is not demonstrable, I repeat, and it should not be, otherwise it would disturb the catharsis of those who enjoy the play at the cathartic level only. Irony is anti-cathartic. Irony is experienced in a flash of complicity with the writer at his most subtle, against the larger part of the audience that remains blind to these subtleties. Irony is the writer’s vicarious revenge against the revenge that he must vicariously perform. If irony were too obvious, if it were intelligible to all, it would defeat its own purpose, because there would be no more object for irony to undermine.” (p. 253)

"The sonnets contain some amazing mimetic material and certainly deserve a place in this book. ... Some are so spectacular that, for a while, I toyed with the idea of beginning this entire essay with them. ... In the end I decided against this, for fear of adding fuel to the eternal fire of the 'biographical fallacy.' ... The number-one question with regard to the sonnets is always the same: 'Are they or are they not autobiographical?' ... The three protagonists of the sonnets are the poet himself, a young man whom he loves, and the celebrated 'dark lady,' a sensuous and unreliable mistress. ... Here is a first example, ...



Sonnet LXII
____________

That thou hast her, it is not all my grief,
And yet it may be said I loved her dearly;
That she hath thee, is of my wailing chief,
A loss in love that touches me more nearly.
Loving offenders, thus I will excuse ye:
Thou dost love her, because thou know'st I love her;
And for my sake even so doth she abuse me,
Suffering my friend for my sake to approve her.
If I lose thee, my loss is my love's gain,
And losing her, my friend hath found that loss;
Both find each other, and I lose both twain,
And both for my sake lay on me this cross:
--- But here's the joy; my friend and I are one;
--- Sweet flattery! then she loves but me alone.



"The autobiographical question is unanswerable and of no real interest anyway.* But the 'existential' question is something else entirely. The desire portrayed in this sonnet and in all sonnets is the same as in the theatre. To assume that a writer such as Shakespeare spent his entire life writing about a subject of no relevance to himself is simply ludicrous. ...

"Without mimetic theory, we cannot even summarize this poem completely. That fact alone is astounding. Almost any critic will tell you that mimetic desire is irrelevant to poetry, even intrinsically anti-poetical. It may be of some use with satiric literature, esprit in the French manner, but it has nothing to say about poetry, and poetry, as we all know, is the inner sanctum of literature.

"This sonnet and others like it should never have been written, especially by such a poet as Shakespeare. Should we doubt their authenticity? (!) This is impossible; they are as quintessentially Shakespearean** as Twelfth Night and Troilus and Cressida. They recall those diseases with which seventeenth-century physicians did not have to bother: their existence was not acknowledged by la faculté.

"Could my personal prejudice exaggerate the embarrassment that these sonnets should cause to the literary bien-pensants?


(p. 298-298) ("Thou dost love her because thou know'st I love her" | Rhetorical Figures in the Sonnets)


In what meaningful sense is there an "autobiographical question" concerning the author which is distinct from some "existential" question concerning him? When it comes to a a person who, above all, is a writer, then the features of this person's, this author's, "autobiography" are the same in character as whatever "existential" matters concern him. Where does the author's autobiography 'stop' and his "existence" 'take up'?

Everything which Girard then goes on to treat in the paragraphs which follow about this "existential" question in Shakespeare deal directly with the author's life, his 'autobiography', that is, his personality— and never more so than in the example that concludes this up-dated post, below these intervening examples starting just below :



"Let us examine a 'dual' sonnet*** addressed to the dark lady. ...



O, from what power hast thou this powerful might
With insufficiency my heart to sway?
To make me give the lie to my true sight,
And swear that brightness doth not grace the day?
Whence hast thou this becoming of things ill,
That in the very refuse of thy deeds
There is such strength and warrantize of skill
That, in my mind, thy worst all best exceeds?
Who taught thee how to make me love thee more
The more I hear and see just cause of hate?
O, though I love what others do abhor,
With others thou shouldst not abhor my state:
If thy unworthiness raised love in me,
More worthy I to be beloved of thee.



"Instead of an erotic triangle, what we find in this sonnet is many striking figures of speech. This is what modern explicators love to find in a poem. They have been taught to emphasize language. In contemporary criticism, language is everything—this is the great discovery of our age, The real point of poetry is not what it says but how it says it. ... If the poet insists on this type ( i.e., here, the serial use of oxymorons, as in "thy worst all best exceeds") nonsensical conjunction, he must have some purpose other than the normal communicative function of language.

"What is this purpose? All current answers to that question are still rooted, it seems to me, in the littérarité of Roland Barthes. Whatever distinguishes a poem stylistically focuses the reader's attention on the poem as poem, on its identity. Through his figures of speech and also through the poetic form as such—here the form of the sonnet—the poem says: 'I am literature.' In poetry especially, but also in prose, the single-mindedness of denotation gives way to many connotations. The principal (sic) of these is the distinctiveness of literature as literature, its 'literarity.'

... ...

"The lady's mimetic trickery consists in constantly playing with the affections of more than one man. This is the source of her power over the poet. Fidelity would not make her half as attractive as infidelity does. That is why the poet's sentiments toward her are 'contradictory.' He finds her desirable and repulsive, delightful and abominable. We are reminded pf an enraged but impotent Troilus watching Cressida int he arms of Diomedes.

"It is therefore literally true, as far as this woman is concerned, that 'her worst all best exceeds.' It is literally true that the poet is furiously in love as well as furiously in hate with her. His enslavement is paradoxically reinforced by that which, from the standpoint of non-mimetic logic, should put an end to it. It is literally true that the lady owes her power to her insufficiency—in other words, to the flaw that makes her receptive to the advances of other men. It is literally true that 'in the very refuse of her deeds' there is enough 'strength and warrantise of skill' to keep the poet permanently in chains.

... ...

"The mimetic paradox fits the oxymoron like a glove. The opposites neither destroy nor compliment each other, and their cumulative effect is monstrous in the sense of the midsummer night. The figures of speech treat conventional language roughly in order to express the poet's predicament as economically as possible. There is no reason to panic and proclaim that our sonnet is 'pure rhetoric,' even less, of course, to assert that language itself cannot cope, that language as such has broken down.

"The triangular sonnets and the dual sonnets of the dark lady have a common mimetic content. Traditional critics never explicitly refer to this content, of course, but they silently rely on it when they assume that there is only one lady for all the sonnets. They do not envisage the possibility that the lady might be different from one sonnet to the next. They are doing the right thing, no doubt, but on which ground? It cannot be the color of her hair, since it is not always mentioned. The one feature that is never missing is her mimetic strategy, the purposeful treachery that is explained in the triangular sonnets.

"In the London of Elizabeth, mimetic skill was certainly not the monopoly of one woman only. In theory at least, the possibility that the dark lady is not the only woman in the sonnets cannot be discounted. Concretely, however, this hypothesis is irrelevant. The woman is always the same in the sense that her relationship with the poet is always the same, and that its effect is always the same. It makes no real difference if the lady is denounced in general terms, through the means of the figures of speech, or if her chief weapon is discussed, the affair that she may be having with the poet's best friend.

... ...

"Shakespeare can play the literary game of littérarité just as competently as his mediocre rivals. The difference is that he breathes real life back into this game, by turning it into one more expression of the great poet that, paradoxically, mimetic theory reveals.

"Too much emphasis on littérarité signals a narcissistic impoverishment of literature. Only a snob writes works of art for the purpose of being labelled 'literary.' Mediocre poets are mediocre because they use the conventions of poetry conventionally, that is, for the sake of convention as such.

"Far from being anti-poetical, mimetic theory alone reaches the essence of Western love rhetoric, which is never as empty as it seems. It is the closest thing we have to a linguistic vehicle for mimetic interaction. If this language were as meaningless as critics always claim, it would not have endured for so long. Even today, when a writer becomes able to apprehend the convolutions of mimetic strategy, he is labelled 'rhetorical' by those who do not want to bother with the real meaning of what he says. The current praise of rhetoric is as irrelevant as the former blame, because it still implies the old indifference to content. The writers themselves are never indifferent to the content of their own works and, if they are good, they try to express that content as simply and economically as possible."

(pp. 299, 300, 301, 302)






"It must not be a mere coincidence, if the suppression of the villain (in The Winter's Tale) occurs in the very same play that radicalizes the evil of mimetic self-poisoning and for the first time makes one of the two childhood friends innocent. This conjunction suggests that Shakespeare is coming to terms with something in his past that wanted to emerge into the light but did not quite succeed. As I have already suggested in my Joyce chapter, the drama of the two childhood friends may well be his own, but we do not need a precise biographical correlative in order to sense the dynamics of truthfulness at work in the later plays, beginning with Hamlet, continuing with the first two romances, and culminating in The Winter's Tale.

"We can strengthen this hypothesis, I believe, if instead of comparing only three plays, as we have so far, we add a fourth, Cymbeline, one more drama of unjustified jealousy. Let us recall the plot: Posthumous has been forced to leave Scotland after marrying Cymbeline's daughter, Imogen, against the wishes of her royal father. His exile takes him to Rome, and there, in front of some local playboys, foolishly bragging about the superiority of Scottish women in general and of Imogen in particular, he plants an "emulous" desire for his beautiful wife in a young man named Jachimo."


(p. 318)
__________________________

and then, an even more direct resort to the author's life-circumstances in this later excerpt:

"To read The Winter's Tale as some kind of confession seems a plausible hypothesis to me. Shakespeare seems to regret his past behavior toward some women very close to him, in conjunction with some other friend intensely loved and intensely hated. This is interesting not from a biographical viewpoint but because it fits the difference of perspective between the earlier plays and the romances, especially The Winter's Tale.

"A comparison of The Winter's Tale with The Two Gentlemen of Verona is especially interesting. In the light of our hypothesis, it is the same story. In the early play there is already a hint, we found, that Valentine is at least partly responsible for the abominable behavior of Proteus. But this behavior is truly abominable, whereas in The Winter's Tale it is so only in Leontes' imagination. The Proteus of this play, Polixenes, has not betrayed his friend at all; he has not fallen in love with Silvia.

"It makes sense to believe that Shakespeare accuses himself of an excès de soupçon reflected in his former implacable application of the mimetic law, in his inability to portray innocent characters, especially childhood friends or brothers. This hypothesis does not mean that Shakespeare in The Winter's Tale necessarily accuses himself of the same crimes as Leontes; it is sufficient to think in terms of symbolically equivalent misdeeds. ...

...
(p. 326)
___________________________





___________________________

* "The autobiographical question is..." That view is, as I see it, Girard's most remarkable failing in this otherwise brilliant essay. He belies this assertion himself in scores of cases throughout his work in which he is again and again gripped with an attention to what is none other than a fascination for the author's person and identity. He contradicts himself in the very next paragraph and objects to other critics' dismissing mimetic theory as "irrelevant to poetry" having just told us that the author's own identity as it concerns his biographical facts is——of no real interest anyway. How, after all, does one dismiss as "of no real interest" an author's own biography and then immediately use the phrase, "by such a poet as Shakespeare"? He has apparently already forgotten that this poet, as a person, a distinct individual identity, is of no real interest anyway; all we are interested in considering is what this poet does, how he does it and why, with what aims and purposes. But, for these. his autobiographical facts are of no real interest to us. Yet, again, immediately, he is concerned to ask, rhetorically, whether we may doubt sonnet XLII's "authenticity", a matter which is precisely one centered on "the by and the of" of a particular author for any given text!

In another striking fault, he misuses "quintessentially" in a telling error: using it in a comparative sense— "as quintessentially Shakespearean as ..." Something is either quintessential —of the essence of a thing or person, his innate and inseparable qualities and characteristics, inextricably bound up with that thing or person, or it is not quintessential; both are "quintessential Shakespeare" and, thus, 'equally quintessential.' There are no "degrees" of quintessence and a critic as astute as Girard should have certainly been aware of this. So in this error he reveals being careless when otherwise he is supremely careful in all things.

I am tempted to suspect that, in all this, Girard is writing just as he has described Shakespeare as having written: to two very distinct audiences, one —an inner favored set of aficianados —the ears of whom are finely-attuned to the inner messages, and another audience, gross and interested in and capable of only grasping and enjoying the text on its superficial level.

____________________

** Emphasis added.

*** i.e. the Poet(Author)-"Dark Lady", versus a sonnet which mentions the triad of Poet(Author)-"Dark Lady" - "Fair Youth"

11proximity1
Redigerat: feb 24, 2019, 8:30 am


first Posted 23 February, 2019 08:26 a.m.
_______________________________

René Girard expounds on the scapegoat motif in "Shakespeare" 's The Merchant of Venice

_____________________________________________________________________________



“When I say that a character in a play is a scapegoat, my statement can mean two different things. It can mean that this character is unjustly condemned from the perspective of the writer. The conviction of the crowd is presented as irrational by the writer himself. In this case, we say that in that play there is a theme or motif of the scapegoat.
“There is a second meaning to the idea of that a character is a scapegoat. It can mean that, from the perspective of the writer, this character is justly condemned, but in the eyes of the critic who makes the statement, the condemnation is unjust. The crowd that condemns the victim (i.e. scapegoat) is presented as rational by the writer, who really belongs to that crowd; only in the eyes of the critic are the crowd and the writer irrational and unjust.

“The scapegoat, this time, is not a theme or motif at all; it is not made explicit by the writer, but if the critic is right in his allegations, there must be a scapegoat effect at the origin of the play, a collective effect probably, in which the writer participates. The critic may think, for instance, that a writer who creates a character like Shylock, patterned after the stereotype of the Jewish moneylender, must do so because he personally shares in the anti-Semitism of the society in which this stereotype is present. …

“Everyone agrees that Shylock is a scapegoat, but is the scapegoat of his society only or of Shakespeare as well?

“What the critical revisionists maintain is that the scapegoating of Shylock is not a structuring force but a satirical theme. What the traditionalists maintain is that the scapegoating in The Merchant of Venice, is a structuring force rather than a theme. Whether we like it or not, they say, the play shares the cultural anti-Semitism of the society. We should not allow our literary piety to blind us to the fact.

“My own idea is that the scapegoat is both structure and theme in The Merchant of Venice, and that the play , in this essential respect at least, is anything the reader wants it to be, not because Shakespeare is as confused as we are when we use the word ‘scapegoat’ without specifying, but for the opposite reason: he is so aware and so conscious of the various demands placed upon him by the culture diversity of his audience; he is so knowledgeable in regard to the paradoxes of mimetic reactions and group behaviour that he can stage a scapegoating of Shylock entirely convincing to those who want to be convinced, and simultaneously undermine that process with ironic touches that will reach only those who can be reached. Thus he was able to satisfy the most vulgar as well as the most refined audiences. To those who do not want to challenge the anti-Semitic myth, or Shakespeare’s own espousal of that myth, The Merchant of Venice will always sound like a confirmation of that myth. To those who do challenge these same beliefs, Shakespeare’s own challenge will become perceptible. The play is like a perpetually revolving object that, through some mysterious means, would always present itself to each viewer under aspects best suited to his own perspective.

“Why are we reluctant to consider this possibility? Both intellectually and critically, we assume that scapegoating cannot and should not be a theme of satire and a structuring force at the same time. Either the author participates in the collective victimage and cannot see it as unjust, or he can see it as unjust and should not connive in it, even ironically. Most works of art do fall squarely on one side or the other of that particular fence. Rewritten by Arthur Miller, Jean-Paul Sartre or Bertolt Brecht, The Merchant of Venice would be different indeed. But so would a The Merchant of Venice that would merely reflect the anti-Semitism of its society, as a comparison with Marlowe’s Jew of Malta immediately reveals. “

(p. 249 )
_________________________________

12proximity1
Redigerat: feb 25, 2019, 11:18 am



first posted and edited Sunday, 24 February, 2019 | 10:54am

__________________________

In James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses, the character, Stephen Dedalus, an alter-ego of the novel’s author, presents a lecture on Shakespeare. Girard devotes a chapter, Chapter 29 (pp. 256-270): “Do You Believe Your Own Theory?” : ‘French Triangles’ in the Shakespeare of James Joyce to Joyce’s apparent recognition of mimetic dynamics in Shakespeare’s work. The following excerpts are from this chapter.
_________________________



“There is one remarkable exception to the great silence of posterity regarding the role of mimetic desire in Shakespeare—James Joyce in Ulysses. (The character,) Stephen Dedalus’s lecture in the National Library of Dublin masquerades as a ‘Life of William Shakespeare’ but is really a mimetic interpretation of the theatre.” … (Girard, p. 256)

"Stephen's listeners want to evade the lecturer's mimetic insight, so they fight back with a barrage of critical nonsense. They have read everything and quote everybody, from "the brilliant Frank Harris in The Saturday Review to Alexandre Dumas fils (or is it Dumas père) who said that, 'after God, Shakespeare has created most,' (Ulysses, p. 210) Not one platitude is missing. ...

"The read ideas of the lecture shine through only intermittently, tiny jewels almost invisible in the trampled mud of a pig pen. ...

"Stephen cannot provide respectable-sounding arguments for his thesis; he has no common language with his listeners. They seem as futile and platitudinous to him as he seems megalomanaical to them."

(The character, Eglinton, objecting): ..."stops everything: 'You (Dedalus) are a delusion.... You have brought us all this way to show us a 'French triangle' " ((Ulysses, p. 211)

"Up to that point, Stephen had felt gloriously invulnerable," but now ... His self-confidence is shattered; (Eglinton) sensing his advantage, ..."

(continues,):


... 'Do you believe your own theory?
' —No, Stephen said promptly.' " ((Ulysses, p. 211)


"As far as I know, all critics of this text regard this no as final. How could they be blamed for refusing to take Stephen's lecture seriously? Stephen himself repudiates his own child. The mimetic Shakespeare is now dead and buried; Stephen was trying to be playful and his joke misfired.

"This is a gigantic mistake. The no is the last word that Stephen utters aloud, but it is not the real conclusion of the whole affair. If the critics of Joyce were as curious as they are supposed to be, they would read the twelve lines that follow and come upon a brief interior monologue in which Stephen recants his first recantation." ... (Girard, p. 262)

... "Ulysses is misunderstood, but its author must share the responsibility for the critical breakdown. He did his best, obviously, to mislead those who regard themselves as 'serious critics.' (Girard, p. 267)

... "Joyce inserted many ambiguous signals in his text. Unless we perceive the mimetic dimension of everything, they suggest the opposite of what they truly mean. Stephen is more serious than he seems, but his seriousness is of a kind that the other kind of seriousness will never recognize.

"Stephen is childishly provocative, but his claims (i.e. concerning "Shakespeare" and mimetic desire in his plays) are less presumptuous than they seem. His (this) insight does not depend on scholarship in the usual sense. One person will grasp it after reading a single play, and others never will who have memorized the entire theatre. It is not the quantity of information that counts, but what we do with it."

"Why this sacrificial manipulation (by Joyce in his Ulysses? In the case of Shakespeare, we speculated that the ambivalence enables the playwright to satisfy the prejudices and capabilities of two entirely different publics (i.e. audiences). The multiplicity of interpretations is not an intrinsic property of writing, but something that the author engineered for a purpose. But this purpose cannot be present in Joyce, or at least not in the same sense. An 'avant-garde' writer does not write for large numbers of unsophisticated readers. What can be his motives?"
(Girard, p. 269) (emphasis added)

13proximity1
Redigerat: feb 28, 2019, 9:55 am

“To have (or to ‘use’) a scape-goat, by definition, is not to know that we have (or ‘use’) him.”

—René Girard, “The Scapegoat: The Ideas of René Girard,” Part 2

______________________________________



...
"With our most fashionable critics today we have reached the point when history makes no sense, art makes no sense, language and sense itself make no sense." ...

(p. 288)
_________

"We ourselves forged that situation with no help from anyone. We cannot blame it on some vengeful god. We have no more god upon whom to reject the responsibility we so profoundly assumed when it did not appear menacing. Although the situation in which we now find ourselves was eminently predictable, most philosophers and scientists were unable to predict it; the few who did never got a serious hearing.

"As modern culture turned to science and philosophy, as the Greek side of our inheritance became dominant, to the point when mythology proper, with disciplines like psychoanalysis, made a kind of intellectual reappearance, the Judeo-Christian text was rejected to the outer fringes of our intellectual life; it is now entirely excluded.

"As a result, absolutely no sense can be made of our current historical predicament. We are beginning to suspect something something fundamental is missing from our intellectual landscape, but we do not seriously dare ask what. The prospect is too terrifying. We pretend not to see the disintegration of our cultural life, the desperate futility of the puppet shows that occupy the empty stage during this strange intermission of the human spirit. A silence has descended upon the earth, as if an angel were about to open the seventh and last seal of an apocalypse."

_______________________

(p. 289) Chapter 30: Hamlet's Dull Revenge: Vengeance in Hamlet

14proximity1
Redigerat: mar 5, 2019, 11:36 am

René Girard himself remarks that “An ‘avant-garde’ writer does not write for large numbers of unsophisticated readers.”

But he mistakes the work and its author when he repeatedly suggests that “Shakespeare” could or did do this, that he deliberately crafted his work on different “levels”, expecting of his audience-members’ tastes and discernment different things in their sophistication and “offering” them different levels of “quality” according to their abilities.

In our author’s case, Edward Oxford did not write for any number, large or small, of such less-sophisticated or unsophisticated people. The idea that Oxford deliberately addressed audiences by tailoring his writing, "up" or "down," depending on the kind of aesthetic awareness some imagined subset of readers or viewers he had in mind, in such a way that it had a particular meaning or import which was intended for the less sophisticated reader or play-audience-member is bizarre.

An analogy may help. Consider a master chef, one of those who comprise the group of the world’s foremost experts in the arts of cooking. In this rarefied world of the culinary arts, a chef may be one whose tables are so limited in availability that the clientele resemble members of a small private club: his diners are so regular and their palates so refined that the chef and his dining guests know each other well and are familiar with each other’s tastes and preferences. Here, I do not mean simply that when it comes to preparing a plate which has a morsel of grilled beef the chef knows which diners prefer their beef rare or medium or well-done—though he may; I mean, rather, that the diners and the chef know how well suited are the palates to the chef’s ever evolving menus.

There are other world-class chefs who don’t want to cook for the same closed-circle of elite diners all the time. What they want is to bring their cooking art to a varied and changing clientele. Thus, they don’t know who is coming through the door to take a seat at their tables. This doesn’t matter. The chef in such a kitchen never sends a dish out to a table which is less than an example of his finest work. Everything must be done as perfectly as it is possible to make it. No less is acceptable. Whether the diners at the table are capable of fully appreciating the exquisite quality of the dishes they are served is something the chef does not bother to concern himself about. His objective is always the same: to work at the top of his art at all times, with no regard for the sophistication of those who are on the receiving end. The idea would strike him as outrageous that he might prepare certain dishes for certain tables’ diners which are tailored to reflect a lower quality or level of culinary sophistication, something beneath his usual highest standards of work, simply because it is thought that this is what best suits certain less-sophisticated guests in the dining room.

The chef’s objective is to keep his art at the highest possible level; it’s not that he could not prepare dishes which were meant for those supposed to be unable to appreciate his best. It’s that doing so would not interest him. He wants instead that every guest, no matter the degree of sophistication of his palate, to be introduced to the best work he is capable of producing. This doesn’t mean that he supposes even for a moment that all of his dining-guests are equal in their abilities to appreciate his cooking. It is assumed that they aren’t and can hardly ever be so; this is never an important consideration in what to prepare or how to prepare it.

For a playwright, it’s not even a question of selecting and preparing different levels of quality in the variable dishes served: every member of the audience, by necessity, is “served” the same dialogue and action in any given work. Whether they “see” and “hear” the same things from the playwright’s and the actors’ artwork is something else. Oxford, I am confident, never concerned himself with how well, if at all, his plays and poetry were understood and appreciated by an audience. He was always writing for an audience which was in every way supposed to be up to the quality of his own efforts as a master of his craft. Again, to condescend to, to “write ‘down’ to” a supposed less-sophisticated subset of the audience or readership would be an outrageous proposition. The playwright’s objective is to write ‘up to’ the highest degree of his ability and that of his audience to understand and appreciate. Whether or not they are aware of this invitation, the author invites those of the audience who arrive at the theatre or of readers who arrive at the plays’ pages with less than this in taste and comprehension to be challenged and improved in their literary taste and sophistication by being exposed to the best—and only the best—that the poet-playwright can produce on the page and the actors can produce on the stage.

Again, the fact that many in the audience or in the readership are nothing like the sort of sophisticated readers or listeners that the most aware of the audience are; this always goes without saying. The writer, the playwright, the poet, should never waste a moment wondering or worrying about it.

Imagine a composer or musician, a playwright, novelist or architect saying to his audience, “This next work, or piece in the performance is intended for those in the audience who are quite as sophisticated as my most astute listeners—so I’m going to drop my game down to their level for this piece.” Try to imagine Beethoven, Mozart, Handel, “Shakespeare,” (Edward Oxford), or any other master of his craft doing that—Carlos Santana, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, Leonardo da Vinci, Salvador Dali, etc. It’s simply ridiculous.

The audience member comes to the artwork with as much or as little in sophistication as he happens to have. The artists meets all such comers as they are and welcomes them to the very best of which he is capable. In the presence of a masterwork, the listener, the reader, the viewer, leaves with something more or, at the very least, with no less than that sophistication in and appreciation for art with which he arrived. The audience member may fail himself but a master artist can never allow that to be an excuse for his failing to give his best to the audience member.

A five-star chef is, of course, quite capable of preparing a simple dish of scrambled-eggs. But, served them under the proper circumstances, a guest is going to enjoy a dish which is nothing less than one among the best of its kind that he has ever enjoyed. Less than that would be a disgrace to the chef.

15proximity1
mar 5, 2019, 11:33 am


In the following excerpt, Girard presents a novel theory of aesthetics and its implications for an historical retrospective on artistic development's major shifts in reigning paradigms from the Greeks' search for the imitation of nature's perfection to the modern abandonment of nature as model and inspiration for imitative creative work.



(from Chapter 36: To Your Shadow Will I Make True Love | The Winter's Tale (Act 5, Scenes 1 & 2) pp. 330, 331, 332, 333.)

_______________________

“In Twelfth Night, when Olivia wants to arouse the desire of Viola, she ceremoniously unveils her face as she would a painting. This pseudo-narcissistic heroine knows ‘by instinct’ the superior power of images in her world and turns herself into a false work of art, a mirror for Viola , a mere semblance of the woman she is.

“This negative attitude does not mean that Shakespeare ‘did not like art,’ of course. He liked it so much that he regarded it as he did other passions, as a form of enslavement. To most of us art is little more than one of ‘the worthy causes,’ vehemently but tepidly embraced, a little like ecology and social justice. Art and artistic values have many enemies in our world, and we valiantly take up arms against them, automatically assuming that the same must have been true, a fortiori, of the great artists we admire. Shakespeare would be grateful, we believe, if he could see the mighty battle that we are waging in defense of what he undoubtedly stood for, the ‘higher values’—in other words, our own.

“This modern use of the financial word ‘values’ is alien to Shakespeare, and so is the philosophy behind it. Four centuries ago artists needed defending but not art. Art was still closely associated with the spirit of discovery characteristic of the Renaissance and early modern period. The split between the aesthetic spirit and the spirit of scientific and technical development had not yet occurred.

“The advance of realism in painting seemed like one example among others of what the forces of free human creativity could achieve when unleashed. It was not quite our notion of ‘progress,’ but it was beginning to look like it. A strikingly realistic detail in painting could arouse the same kind of excitement as the invention of some clever mechanical device. Among aristocratic patrons the love of art often had that starry-eyed what-will-they-think-of-next? quality that is reserved nowadays for state-of-the-art computers or superconductivity.
… …
“Leontes is a typical Renaissance connoisseur, a man curious about everything new and remarkable. That would certainly include a statue so mimetically realistic that it cannot be distinguished from its human model. …

“To us the cult of the true-to-life is worse than outdated; it is a proof of aesthetic illiteracy. After great excesses of realism, we shifted to the other extreme and our flag is still planted there. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, for a century or more, art has been glorified in direct proportion to its divergence from what we disdainfully call ‘photographic realism.’ The ancient obsession with verisimilitude has become an embarrassment that we try to dismiss as an innocuous quirk, a minor flaw in the aesthetic mentality of our predecessors. In reality it was the major principle of art; it expressed the dynamic unity we have lost, the harmonious conjunction of aesthetic, scientific, and technical aspirations.

“The mimetic definition of art reigned unchallenged from the Greeks to the end of the nineteenth century, and then it was overturned in a few years. The revolution was such that we find it difficult to see any continuity between the late and the early modern periods. Shakespeare is going to suggest one. From our perspective, the cult of the true-to-life seems too subservient to appearances, too respectful of things as they are. Shakespeare views it negatively as well, but for reasons almost diametrically opposed to ours. He sees it as an enthronement of artifice, a first departure from Being that could authorize many others.
… … …
“Before the Renaissance, painting had tried to stick to reality out of genuine respect for it. The absolute superiority of divine over human creation was taken for granted. With the Renaissance, things began to change: the emphasis shifted away from the reproduction itself. Artists still imitated nature, but in a spirit of competition that made them bolder and bolder. Soon they began to hope that human creation would overtake and even surpass its model.

“If we extrapolate the Shakespearean view of mimesis to the later periods, it will account for the aesthetic upheavals of the last two centuries less differentially than art historians so far have, but more coherently and effectively. After competing for something they called the truth of nature, artists declared this object irrelevant and competed directly among themselves. At that same moment they decided that, far from being indispensable, imitation was after all abhorrent; the fear of repeating what others had already done or were about to do replaced the old fear of not imitating faithfully enough. And yet, far from putting an end to aesthetic fads and fashions, the universal search for originality accelerated and multiplied them; it generated modes of mimetic submissiveness more tyrannical than those produced by explicit imitation.

“The rejection of mimesis as a theoretical principle does not really mean the end of it in practice; it displaces imitation and drives it underground. The modern movement as a whole—with a few partial and glorious exceptions—reflects the general drift of modern society from external to internal mediation.

“When mimesis shifts from the positive to the negative, when it tries to elude duplication, it produces more and more of it through unintended reciprocity. The logic of competition destroys the rituals of the past, forcing art at first into hysterical distortion, then into formlessness and chaos, finally into absolute nothingness, self-destruction pure and simple.” …

16proximity1
Redigerat: mar 8, 2019, 11:30 am

First posted Thursday, 7 March, 2019; edited 11:41am.
Additions: (A) Friday, 8 March 2019
_________________

What I hope an attentive reader shall gain, above all, from the foregoing citations of René Girard’s work in A Theatre of Envy is a vivid idea of the mentality, the intellect of the author of the work attributed to “Shakespeare.”

Girard avoids taking a direct position openly on the “Authorship Question.” But virtually everything he shows us in his work about Shakespeare reveals that author to have been nothing like the real-life individual from Stratford-Upon-Avon as far as history’s documentation presents him to us.

Girard's portrayal of the author's intellect, not only his factual knowledge of history, geography, aspects of the world far from England’s shores, and, hardly least, but also his striking familiarity with the most intimate details of the habits of the court-life of monarchs and other members of nobility, his awareness of everything about this world so closed to those who are not members by birth or by royal preferment, their tastes, sometimes refined, sometimes gross, their strengths, weaknesses, and the ways in which they are subject to suffer and fail as others, who are commoners, do—in all this we are given a vivid picture of the author's mind and personality.

Thus, in this way, Girard’s work points up as quite stark the contrast between what is, on the one hand, the very best we could possibly imagine from the life of this cartoon-figure:



and, on the other hand, the life and world of, the intellect and artistic talents and genius of a man who had the advantages of noble birth, the best education his time could offer one, the rich experience of close personal knowledge of those in the highest positions of society and government, of art and literary pursuits, the flesh-and-blood person who is pictured here:



Girard's penetrating vision of the mental life of this author belies his repeated assertions that the author's biographical facts are of little interest or import to us—after which Girard often immediately resumes a focus on just that, the assumed or conjectured aspects of the author’s thoughts, his life-circumstances and personal history as dramatic and poetic artist.

Then, as now, geniuses come in for a great deal of criticism because others find their characteristics, their personalities, their genius, so hard to take. It's more than just a little noticed. It grates on many around them who are, frankly, their intellectual inferiors. Couple, then, a person of such an intellect with something else, a similarly-rare aesthetic sense, one who is not 'only', not 'merely' a person of rare literary genius but also a highly-refined aesthete.

Aesthetes, too, while not necessarily geniuses, are also people who are so often the easy and ready targets of derision by others who don't share their tastes and sensitivities to beauty, to art.

Girard presents the author brilliantly and, at the same time, he describes him and demonstrates him to be, in just this brilliance, for all our own supposed appreciation of his genius, an artist who is, in fact, still very little understood and appreciated for it and for certain aspects of that poetic art. Girard shows us that, amazingly enough, this author remains to this day largely misunderstood and very much underestimated and under-appreciated—as much by professional scholars and critics as by others.

A skeptical reader might object that, if Girard's study proves anything, it's that, indeed, one may have an extremely good insight into an author's mind and his work while at the same time being either unaware of or mistaken about the correct identity of that author.

Girard's insights, however, as brilliant as they were, did not penetrate to areas that he might have better understood if he'd taken the Oxfordian thesis seriously and applied its assumptions about the author's identity to his other theories.

The extremely strained relationship with William Cecil, Oxford's guardian after the death of his father, the sixteenth earl of Oxford, and the bases for this strained relationship leap out to us, as Oxfordians, from Girard's analyses. The same is true whenever Girard touches on the author's work as it reveals his attitudes about men and women as displayed in characters on stage who seek their future marriage partners, and, similarly, about characters' relations as wives and husbands.

When Girard writes,



"Fathers are always less important than children and psychoanalysts claim. I have tried to show that this was already the true message of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and this time it is so explicit that we cannot doubt its Shakespearean pertinence. When Rosalind coyly tries to explain her love for Orlando by her obedience to her father, and to Orlando's father, Celia humorously challenges her hypocritical excuse.

"One of the two fathers is dead and the other is absent; Rosalind's passion has nothing to do with either one. Quite explicitly this time, Shakespeare mocks the favorite myth of youthful desire, fatherly omnipotence. When he was writing, this myth was not quite as ludicrously deceptive as it is today, but it was ludicrously deceptive enough, it seems, to justify the Shakespearean satire. The paternalistic system, if it ever really existed in the Christian West, had already disintegrated."
____________
(pp. 93-94)


it's without keeping in mind that, from the age of twelve, Edward Oxford had lost his own father; or that his mother quickly re-married; or that Oxford grew up as a ward in the household of one of the country's most politically-ambitious, most politically-powerful, emotionally one of the most domineering and most egotistical of men, William Cecil, closest counselor and adviser to Queen Elizabeth through nearly her entire reign. Cecil, later, Lord Burghley, by virtue of his daughter, Anne's, marriage to Oxford, was also one of the very wealthiest men in the entire realm.

Such was the adult male— born a commoner, but one with the most burning desire to acquire noble rank, noble prestige, and as much wealth and power as he could join to it—which Oxford faced as sudden-surrogate father of sorts. Such was William Cecil, consummate political operator.

Though Oxford, who was born to high noble rank and, so, could and did take it for granted, in his stride, having no need to be or to feel dazzled by the idea of belonging to the society's most elite circles, was raised in the household of this extremely wealthy and powerful man, Edward already had, as he himself well understood, filial-identity aplenty; there is, thus, no reason to suppose that, for this young boy, orphaned of his esteemed noble father, he could or should find that missing-father easily replaceable by a man such as Cecil.

For Cecil, on the other hand, Edward represented, was, indeed, the embodiment of, much that Cecil coveted and did not then yet have for himself. Here we have the makings of an extremely potent and volatile rivalry in power and prestige, in rank and in privilege—with the rank and the privilege overwhelmingly on Edward's side by birth and the power overwhelmingly on the side of Cecil, first counselor to the Queen.

Cecil, already twice married and with children of his own, would not have necessarily felt much if any fatherly love toward this ward of twelve, the young 17th Earl of Oxford, one amongst numerous noble children in his ward-ship.

All of these power-relational dynamics can help us to understand the dynamics at work in Edward's mind, the mind of a genius, though still only a boy, and the mind of the future playwright and poet, a boy for whose aesthetic and literary genius Cecil was no match, rivaling Edward (during his youth) only in the political genius that is at work in power-politics.

And where, indeed, would Edward Oxford, from a young age, find a ring-side seat at the heart of national political power? In the very household of his guardian, William Cecil; and in the very inner-sanctum of that guardian's world of daily-work, the court circle of the Queen herself.

________________________

It's interesting and illuminating to follow a reading of Girard's A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare by reading Edward Dowden's Shakespeare : a Critical Study of his Mind and Art (3rd Ed. revised, London, 1875, Kegan and Paul).

Where Girard presents a masterful explanation of the meaning and intentions behind Troilus and Cressida, Dowden is mystified by this play, asking,



"With what intention, and in what spirit, did Shakspere write this strange comedy? All the Greek heroes who fought against Troy are pitilessly exposed to ridicule; Helen and Cressida are light, sensual, and heartless, for whose sake it seems infatuated folly to strike a blow; Troilus is an enthusiastic young fool; and even Hector, though valiant and generous, spends his life spends his life in a cause which he knows to be unprofitable, if not evil. All of this is seen and said by Thersites, whose mind is made up of the scum of the foulness of human life. But can Shakspere's view of things have been the same as that of Thersites?

"The central theme, the young love and faith of Troilus, given to one who was false and fickle,and his discovery of his error, lends its color to the whole play. It is the comedy of disillusion. And as Troilus passed through the illusion of his first love for woman, so by middle life the world itself often appears like one that has not kept her promises, and who is a poor deceiver. We come to see the seamy side of life; and from this mood of disillusion it is a deliverance to pass on even to a dark and tragic view of life, to which beauty and virtue reappear, even though human weakness or human vice may do them bitter wrong. Now such a mood of contemptuous depreciation of life may have come over Shakspere, and spoiled him, at that time, for writer of comedy." ...
___________

(p. vii, Preface to the Third Edition)



Again and again in the first of these two paragraphs, it is remarkable how much Dowden sees largely correctly in at least the first part of the his analysis; as he goes on, however, he falls into and afoul of several of the views of the play and its author's intentions which were conventionally held by many average critics. But he's correct: we do see "the seamy side of life" here and, though it is of course going to be a strange war which does not present a great deal in "the seamy side of life," what is on view here as seamy is not so much the war's terrible aspects as the personal characters of, the morals of, supposedly elite and noble people, often the sort people who are held up as models for others' admiration.

Yes, indeed, our author (Oxford) is more than suggesting that there can be much left to be desired in such people—as his life-experience taught him—and his characters show us this. Dowden is not mistaken in recognizing that. Still, it puzzles him where it did not puzzle Girard.

It is not so easy to square such a dark view of things with the most apparently reasonable view of the life-experiences of this William Shaksper fellow from Stratford-Upon-Avon. He, unlike a young Earl, orphaned of his noble father at the age of twelve and placed in the 'tender care' of a man like William Cecil, First Lord Burghley, has little to lead us to expect such a bitter and dark view. Shaksper supposedly left a place and a life of material modesty and social obscurity and, without much in prospects, to hear Stratfordians tell it, he struck out for London and, through a combination of luck and pluck, made his way in the world, eventually, stupendously so, becoming the English-language's most enduring and towering of literary geniuses. Where, in all that, is the sorrow and the pity? Thus, we search in vain for striking examples of deep and painful loss and disillusionment in this man's life. He began in relative poverty and obscurity and rather completely reversed his fortunes.

__________________________________________
__________________________________________




“How did Shakespeare shift from the brilliant but desperate cynicism of a Troilus and Cressida to the attitude suggested by the second half of The Winter’s Tale? His conversion does not look like an aesthetic caprice to me.”

… … …

“What a genuine writer truly desires to represent is his own state of mind.”

(p. 338)

_________________________________________


“The statue scene (in Troilus and Cressida) is a unique reversal of a relationship between truth and illusion, being and non-being, that had always prevailed in Shakespeare before The Winter’s Tale. In all comedies and tragedies, we always found the main thrust to be away from immediacy and toward more and more mimesis, more metaphysical illusion. Things that first passed for genuine were shown to be fictional; representations supposedly true turned out to be false; those false from the start vanished entirely. Sharp distinctions got blurred; clarity gave way to confusion. Harmonious shapes contaminated each other and became monstrous. Famous men disappeared, then reappeared as phantoms. Form disintegrated; differences collapsed; hard objects liquefied, making ‘a sop of all this solid globe.’ Symbols unraveled; nothingness triumphed.

“One could object that, in many plays, the ending already suggested a return to reality. This is true but, in all the conclusions we examined, the alleged reversal turned out to be a fiction of the superficial play, based on some sacrificial trickery, discreetly but effectively undermined by the deeper play. Degree itself stands exposed as the fruit of collective violence and is discredited.

“The ending of The Winter’s Tale is something else entirely. This time the triumph of being is genuine, no longer rooted in sacrificial death. What could be the cause of this revolution? Earlier we found that many obsessive Shakespearean themes reappear in this play but always with a difference. Leontes’ mimetic psychology is as subtle and profound as Shakespeare’s own and yet, when put to the test, it fails miserably. Is the paranoid insight that is stigmatized in this play the author’s condemnation of his own implacable psychology? Are the women persecuted in all the romances mere figments of his imagination or are they real women? For the first time, his meditation on the mimetic doubles leads the author to the notion of original sin. Does all this reflect a demystification of the demystifying stance, a self-critical, even a penitential mood?*

“The conversion/resurrection of Leontes greatly bolsters this hypothesis. In light of our previous chapters, it can hardly be a gratuitous fabrication; it must be rooted in the many aspects of this and previous plays that seem to call for it.

“How did Shakespeare shift from the brilliant but desperate cynicism of a Troilus and Cressida to the attitude suggested by the second half of The Winter’s Tale? His conversion does not look like an aesthetic caprice to me. It takes hold gradually and its first expression, Posthumous, sounds curiously awkward for such a powerful and experienced writer as Shakespeare. Posthumous, nevertheless, clearly prefigures the masterful handling of Leontes’ repentance.

“If we assume that the creator put a great deal of himself into these heroes, the specific difference of all themes in The Winter’s Tale makes perfect sense, including Acts 3 and 4, which we did not examine at all. As Shakespeare became more severe with himself, his tolerance of others increased and his portrayal of innocence acquired the power that it lacks in the first two romances.

I see
The Winter’s Tale and its conclusion as the indirect account of a creative experience based on the author’s deepening awareness that his past ferocity with sufferers of mimetic desire was still fueled by the virulence of the disease in himself.*

“I view The Winter’s Tale as the successful accomplishment of a purpose that long remained unfulfilled and that can be traced back not only to the first two romances, but to the Cordelia of King Lear, more obscurely to the horror of Othello, to the sacrificial nausea of Hamlet, even to the plays most colored by nihilism, as for instance the fierce Troilus and Cressida, where it can be read only in the frenzy of its own negation, in the systematic eradication of anything even remotely conceivable as redemptive.

“The self-involvement of a writer in his work is often regarded as something beyond the reach of the critic; now the idea is less popular than ever, colliding with the fashionable conception of literature as ‘verbal play.’ Even mimesis can be enlisted in this battle—by the very same people who, in principle, deny all relevance to it. Writers are such mimes, we are told, that they can feign a thousand states of mind that they never experience themselves. This is true, no doubt, but it is not the whole truth, and partial truths are misleading. What a genuine writer truly desires to represent is his own state of mind.

“These arguments against the writer’s involvement in his work have never impressed me very much; in the case of The Winter’s Tale, they impress me less than ever. They remind me too much of Leontes in front of his statue. We do not want to be taken in by representation. Fearing to appear naïve, contemporary critics stick to the illusion of an illusion; their false idea of art blinds them to the real Hermione behind the false statue.

“The spiritual experience I read behind The Winter’s Tale is deduced from the texts. It is not an ‘autobiographical’ hypothesis, it is not an ‘opinion’ or a ‘belief’ that I would gratuitously attribute to a man named William Shakespeare.

“A writer’s greatness as a mimetic revealer inevitably entails, at some point in his career, a concrete coming to terms with the truth of the doubles, and this experience can occur only at his own expense, at a severe cost to his mimetic ego. To accede to the mimetic awareness that structures his works, he must discover his identity with the targets of his own satire; he must accept the collapse of whatever mythical difference mattered most in his personal system of self-justification. Not theoretically but in his own flesh, he must verify the literal truth of Paul’s words to the Romans (2:1): ‘Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest does the same things.’ "

(Girard, p. 338-339)
(* Emphasis added)





(p. 207) “This was by no means the end of the Earl of Oxford’s career as an errant and erring husband and son-in-law. Soo after the interview in Bristol, the earl was given formal licence to go abroad, which he did for over a year. While he was gone his wife gave birth to a girl, who was named Elizabeth. When he finally returned he would have nothing to do with his wife and sent her back to her parents. Burghley was mystified, shocked, hurt; he had to fight rumour and innuendo and feel the shame of a failed marriage. He also had to face the blunt fact that he could not control people as he controlled policy.” (1)

_______________

(p. 219) “The earl wrote to Burghley two days later. It was a sharp, cold, dismissive letter, very much in Oxford’s style. He had found faults in his wife, though he would not say what they were. ‘I must let your Lordship understand this much, that is, until I can better satisfy or advertise myself of some mislikes I am not determined, as touching my wife, to accompany her. What they are, because some are not to be spoken of or written upon as imperfections, I will not deal withal.’ He was no longer prepared, he said, to weary his life with ‘such troubles and molestations’ as he had already endured; ‘nor will I,’ he wrote icily, ‘to please your Lordship only, discontent myself.’ Anne, wrote Oxford, could stay with her parents. Burghley had already offered to take his daughter back into his own house. Burghley and Lady Mildred could take care of her and Oxford would be ‘rid of the cumber thereby.'25"

“And this is precisely what happened, for by May Lady Anne was living at Theobalds and travelling with her mother, as she had done for many months. Burghley, like Oxford, was at the court at Greenwich.

“But Oxford’s letter was by no means the end of the business. The rumours were that little Elizabeth de Vere was not the earl’s child, rumours that were both shaming for Lady Anne and damaging at court for Anne’s father. In the months following, Oxford’s friends even whispered about Burghley’s mismanagement of the earl’s money." (2)

_______________

(p. 304) "Anne's marriage to the seventeenth Earl of Oxford was a private catastrophe for her, a troublesome inconvenience for her husband, and a cause for grief to her father. A union that had promised to be a great dynastic coup, an alliance between the Cecils and one of the most distinguished noble families in the kingdom, instead turned out to be the occasion of open hostility between the young earl and his father-in-law. For years there had been all kinds of ructions at court: the Oxford marriage was a blot on the reputations of Burghley and his daughter.

"Anne professed to love a husband who for years had refused even to talk to her and could barely stand to have her in his presence. He had nourished a resentment against his wife which he could not bring himself to state plainly and which she was unable to comprehend. There had, it was true, been something like a reconciliation after 1582, and the couple had had even had two more children after Elizabeth, both daughters, Bridget and Susan. But little had really changed for Anne and her husband. As late as May 1587 Burghley had complained to Sir Francis Walsingham that Oxford, who was as suspicious and dismissive of his father-in-law as ever, was failing to support his wife and children properly and that he, Burghley, was having to bear the burden of her household.(14)" (3)
________________________
(14) Payne, "Cecil Women ()", pp. 267-8

(1) (Cited in Alford, Stephen (2011); Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I; New Haven, CT. Yale University Press, p. 207)
(2) Alford, Ibid. p. 219
(3) Alford, Ibid, p. 304

(Note: the excerpts from Alford's biography of William Cecil, First Lord Burghley, are not to be taken at face-value as a true and fair account of the controversial relationship which Burghley had with his son-in-law, Edward, Earl of Oxford. There are many issues, many questions, many key points which Alford,conveniently for his view of things, leaves out of consideration. I intend to raise and consider these in other future posts.)






To the illustrious Lady Anne de Vere, Countess of Oxford, while her noble husband, Edward Vere, Earl of Oxford, was occupied in foreign travel

Veram Vera docen:t sun falsa dorsala Vero
Solaque Vera manent caetera vana volant.
Vera ergo Veri, cum sis coniunxque parensque
Verae, speque bona sis paritura Verum.
Mens tua fac Veri semper deflagret amore
Veri semper amans, sint tua verba Vera
Quod magis ut praestes, a very Authore requiras
Litera te doceat spiritus intus alat
Chari ut Longa viri sic desideria Levans
Gloria vera viri Vera vocere tui.


Truths teach the True woman:
falsehoods are incompatible with the Truth.

And only True things last - other things fly away futile.
Therefore, since thou, a True woman,
art both the spouse of a True man and the parent of a True daughter,
and art in good hope of being about to prepare for a True son,
make thy mind to be always cooled off by the love of the Truth.

Ever a lover of the truth, may these words by the True motto,
To fulfill which the more, ask of the Author of Truth
That his message may teach thee,
that His spirit may nourish thee inwardly:
So that thus easing the vast yearnings of a dear man
Thou mayest be called True -- the True glory of thy man.
__________________
(Translated by William P. Fowler, Shakespeare Revealed in Oxford's Letters, pp. 118 ff. Portsmouth, N.H. Peter E. Randall, Publisher.)


_______________________
Hatfield MSS (Cal.II.114)
Ward, Bernard Mordaut; The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, pp. 108-109. London: John Murray.
See also: https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/twenty-poems-key/



(A)

17proximity1
Redigerat: mar 12, 2019, 8:04 am

38: “THEY’LL TAKE SUGGESTION AS A CAT LAPS MILK” |Self-satire in The Tempest
____________________________________________________


The Tempest is a spider-web at the center of which Prospero/Shakespeare watches the progress of his own creation. The entire play is within the play. In the omnipotent magician breaking his own staff at the conclusion, we recognize the playwright himself announcing his decision to give up the theatre.

“According to current wisdom, the interpretation just outlined exceeds what a critic can reasonably ascertain regarding a literary work. It goes ‘too far,’ we are told. But in my view it does not go far enough. Not Prospero alone but everything and everyone in The Tempest alludes to Shakespeare’s creative process, beginning with Caliban, the main stumbling-block to a real understanding of this play. Our Shakespearean piety rebels against the demonstrable truth that, when he created this last monster, Shakespeare was thinking primarily about himself and his own theatre.

“Prospero’s harshness toward Caliban during the play contrasts with his earlier kindness. There was a period of mutual collaboration between these two characters. What could the ignorant Caliban do for such a learned man as Prospero? He initiated his master into the beauties of the island,



And show'd thee all the qualities o' th' isle,
The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile.
(I, ii, 337-38)




There is another possible view of Oxford's motivations in writing The Tempest and it may be included as an additional set of concerns with Girard's analysis here. For Girard, the author is "thinking primarily about himself and his own theatre", that is, his place and his part in the theatre of his time, a place and part which were nothing short of immense.

I believe this play was also reflecting Oxford's experience over the course of his life and by which experience he had become—as he was virtually bound to become—critical of some among his peers whom he knew, critical of their presumptions about their authority at a time when a merchant-class was challenging aspects of the nobility's key social and political role in the life of the nation. As various historians (Lawrence Stone (1935), R. H. Tawney (1941), J. H. Hexter (1961), Conrad Russell (1971)) have argued on one side or another, from one or another set of aspects, the stability in the authority of the nobility's rule before and during Oxford's time was shaken and threatened. He'd have well understood how and why this came to happen and he'd have felt a certain sympathy for some of the popular sentiments by which the noble class were being seen as deserving of criticism.

___________________________

18Podras.
mar 10, 2019, 12:24 pm

I just checked to see if anything was going here and discovered that a huge amount of someone else's work has been posted by prolixity again. It may be worth asking if copyright violations are being perpetrated. Maybe it is being done to hone typing skills. Poor prolixity. All of that effort and nobody is reading it.

19proximity1
Redigerat: apr 5, 2019, 7:00 am


With some fair to good understanding of the common mammalian trait of mimesis—that is, various mimetic patterns of behavior found in groups of social mammals—one can find interesting and helpful parallels in various forms of social behavior which is sometimes otherwise strange and mysterious;

Here, for example, some examples of our "species" 's mimetic behaviors:

As with these rock'n-roll-music fans ("Beatlemania")




and these market traders or banking and investment customers,







and this panicked crowd,



and these crowds of worshipers,







all have certain psychological aspects in common. In each case, there is mimetic behavior, here exhibited variously as joy, ecstasy, adulation, or the panic of fear or greed or a combination of these and other emotions which, depending on the circumstances might be envy or jealousy or a competitive ambition, etc.

In all these photos, masses of people are experiencing the same powerful emotions at the same time and for similar or identical reasons. In many cases, such crowds are exhibiting what amounts to a form of a mania, a panic or hysteria--all of them emotionally similar.

20proximity1
maj 9, 2021, 10:01 am



For continued discussion on this thread's topics, please refer to the Edward de Vere and the Shakespeare Authorship Mystery group