We’ve all just survived one of the toughest political
years in living history, and one of the few things we might
all agree upon is that toward the end there, it was becoming
very tiresome being told what to think. From that professional
vulgarian Michael Moore’s ham-handed propaganda to the
resurgence of the Swift Boat Veterans (headed up by the same
man chosen by Richard Nixon 34 years ago to be sicced on a
young John Kerry,) the media pros and pols had a palpable
design upon us.
 Perhaps
you recognize that last phrase. John Keats wrote those words
to his friend Reynolds after reading Wordsworth’s “Hymn
to Pan” and after coming away from the experience with
some doubts about the poet’s greatness, especially when
compared to Shakespeare. “For the sake of a few fine
imaginative or domestic passages,” wrote Keats (and
perhaps he meant “dramatic” there instead of domestic
– his letters were wonderful but very hurried), “are
we to be bullied into a certain Philosophy engendered in the
whims of an Egotist – We hate poetry that has a palpable
design upon us – and if we do not agree, seems to put
its hand in its breeches pocket.”
There’s a lot of that going around today – that
peddling of poetry, or more commonly of film, fiction, non-fiction,
and personal opinion, that has a palpable design upon us and
which puts its hand in its breeches pocket in a sulk if we
don’t instantly agree with its all-too-obvious prejudices.
(Mark Twain used to say that the rarest of things was a lawyer
who kept his hand in his own pockets, but I digress and we
aren’t here to gang up on lawyers. Not yet.)
It’s possible that Keats’s sensibilities here
had been influenced by a lecture he’d heard just days
before by William Hazlitt criticizing what he later called
“the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime,” but
we also know that Keats had been trying for some time to work
out an explanation for the peculiar genius of Shakespeare
– what he was later to call “Negative Capability.”
Six weeks before this note to his friend Reynolds, young Keats
had been walking to town with his neighbor Dilke to see a
Christmas pantomime and Dilke – who was an opinionated
so-and-so – had held forth on various topics during
the entire walk to town.
“Several things dovetailed in my mind,” Keats
wrote to his brothers, “& at once it struck me,
what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially
in Literature & which Shakespeare posessed so enormously
– I mean Negative Capability, that is when
man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts,
without an irritable reaching after fact & reason.”
A lesser poet like Coleridge, Keats goes on to explain, “would
let go by a fine isolated versimilitude caught from the Penetralium
of mystery,” because a lesser poet (or novelist, or
filmmaker, or visual artist) insists on – well, actually
has no other choice -- impressing his own limited interpretation
on reality. Keats recognized Shakespeare’s almost unique
ability to suspend judgment in viewing all things human and
natural – Keats called it Shakespeare’s “capacity
of submission” – and realized that, in artistic
terms, it went beyond mere submission into the unheard-of
ability to “annul self.”
This sounds a little esoteric, vaguely Buddhist, but it’s
not – it was a literary strategy and the very real and
compelling secret to why Shakespeare stands alone not just
in the pantheon of English playwrights but among all men (pardon
me, persons) of letters. Keats explained to his brothers
that the tiresome neighbor Dilke was “a man who cannot
feel he has a personal identity unless he has made up his
Mind about every thing.”
Sound familiar? Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers, the
Car Guys on NPR, point out that we men have to answer every
question put to us – whether about cars, sports, directions,
politics, or the origins of the universe, regardless of whether
we have any knowledge on the subject at all – because
we suffer from MAS* (*Male Answer Syndrome.) More and more,
it seems, novelists and filmmakers – and not just the
men – suffer from Male Answer Syndrome, shoving their
puny little opinions ahead of them like hostages in a botched
getaway.
Hazlitt once said of Shakespeare – “He was nothing
in himself, but he was all that others were, or that they
could become.” Keats developed this idea of artistic
self-annulling into his theory of Negative Capability, a poetic-creative
attempt to empathize and understand others – other human
beings, the sparrow pecking at gravel outside his window,
a nightingale, Nature, the living and the dead – through
the cool lens of what Keats and other Shakespeare-admirers
of his era called disinterestedness, (which means,
of course, a passionate interest in the behavior and character
of these others, but analysis without judgment, observation
without opinion, and perception without preaching.)
In the last couple of years I’ve begun to read Shakespeare
in earnest – really read him – and I’ll
be damned if I can find the man’s opinions on such issues
as religion, marriage, royalty, revolution, politics, money,
sexual orientation, love, hate, women, war, fate, happiness
– little things like that. I look forward to making
my next decade, if I’m allowed a next decade, into the
Simmons-Delves-Deeper-Into-Shakespeare Decade, but I have
little doubt that I’ll emerge not much the wiser about
the Bard’s personal opinions.
On the other hand, in an enjoyable discussion with my daughter
Jane last night over dinner and a good cabernet, she made
a strong argument that the reputedly invisible William Shakespeare
left plenty of footprints in his 37 plays, and that his opinion
on certain things -- including his enchantment with the green
wood, his skepticism about marriage, his celebration of powerful
female personalities such as Beatrice and Rosalind, his aversion
to tyranny (even of that of the mob) but preference for authority,
and his attraction to real estate – all come through
clearly enough.
Perhaps so, but in this age of the bestselling Left Behind
Series peddling its predigested pablum to fellow believers
and of “serious fiction” like Franzen’s
Corrections being hailed as the Great American Novel
for beating us about the head and shoulders with obvious opinions
and posturings, not to mention the most recent obscurant proselytizing
from whichever unknown Marxist that’s just been awarded
the last Nobel Prize for Literature, a little breeze of disinterestedness
would be a welcome relief.
I’ve just finished a fascinating book by Stephen Greenblatt
called Will In the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.
(If you have any doubts as to whether Shakespeare is the Writer
Among Writers and will remain so for millennia more, read
this book along with Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare:
The Invention of the Human and perhaps Park Honan’s
Shakespeare: A Life and – for the sheer fun,
energy, and speculation of it – Anthony Burgess’s
amusing and sensual novel about Shakespeare, Nothing Like
the Sun.)
Greenblatt – also the editor of the great annotated
Norton collection of Shakespeare that has, with its 20-pound
heft, put a permanent crease in my abdomen – has been
criticized for speculating too much, but with a personality
as elusive (historically and opinion-wise) as William Shakespeare’s,
some informed speculation is called for and Greenblatt’s
is wonderfully informed.
Greenblatt suggests that the playwright’s “annulment
of self” came about not just because of artistic reasons,
but out of shrewd calculation as to the best way to keep his
head and body connected. We know that the young Shakespeare
had left Stratford-on-Avon at the height of the persecution
of closet Catholics and commando-Jesuits sneaking into newly
(and fanatically) Protestant England – Shakespeare’s
own father left a secret testament after his death asking
for Masses to be said for him. The first sight to greet young
Will as he crossed the amazing London Bridge into the city
would have been the heads of at least 37 men on pikes on that
bridge – and not just any men, no common thieves or
pickpockets or murderers, but the rotting, mummifying heads
of men of importance, including nobility. Traitors. Heretics.
Men who had SPOKEN OUT.
Christopher Marlowe – a man exactly Shakespeare’s
age and the playwright we know had the most impact on the
budding author, even if much of that impact was negative –
met his end with a knife through the eye, and while many thought
it was just over a “reckoning” of a bill in a
bar, we know now that Marlowe was a spy and died in a house
filled with spies and informants. It may have been an execution.
Kit Marlowe was a man of strong opinions. He was a man who
SPOKE OUT.
But perhaps the most interesting element of Greenblatt’s
book is a look at another aspect of Shakespeare’s persistent
Negative Capability, a different sort of lacunae. It’s
the analysis of the leap of genius in the Bard’s work
when – in Hamlet and never abandoned after
that – Shakespeare learned what to leave out of
his narrative. Which logic not only to abandon but to
defy. Which backstory (in ugly Hollywood parlance) not to
tell. Which motive not to make visible.
In Greenblatt’s words –
Shakespeare
found that he could immeasurably deepen the effect of his
plays, that he could provoke in the audience and in himself
a peculiarly passionate intensity of response, if he took
out a key explanatory element, thereby occluding the rationale,
motivation, or ethical principle that accounted for the action
that was to unfold. The principle was not the making of a
riddle to be solved, but the creation of a strategic opacity.
This opacity, Shakespeare found, released an enormous energy
that had been at least partially blocked or contained by familiar,
reassuring explanations.
In real terms, Shakespeare was trusting the audience to exert
the same Negative Capability – the same talent at allowing
diametrically opposed tensions to remain unresolved –
that he himself used in his writing. In this sense, no writer
before or since has ever demanded so much from an audience
or had an audience receive so much in return. We are all gifted
collaborators when we enter deeply into one of Shakespeare’s
creations from Hamlet on.
But what are these “strategic opacities” that
Shakespeare dares to place between the audience or reader
and the play? In Hamlet they are legion – Why
does the young prince feign madness when it only draws attention
to himself at a time when he should be invisible to the king
and court so as to plot his revenge? Why does he not take
his revenge – why does he become sidetracked into his
own expansion of consciousness, obsessed with his own overhearing
of himself? How can a basic revenge plot – the Hamlet
plays were a theatrical cliché even before Shakespeare
wrote his version – evolve and grow into the ultimate
experience of consciousness?
In Othello, the “strategic opacity”
is precisely the lack of a motive for Iago’s scheming
and hatred. Iago never does reveal his motive – in fact,
he revels in having no motive – and vows to remain silent
until his death as they drag him off to torture. In King
Lear, the plot would make sense if told as previous versions
of the play had been written – with the old king demanding
his “test of love” from his daughters before
he divided up his kingdom. But Shakespeare starts his version
of the play with the map already drawn, the three segments
of equal size. The test of love that ends up killing Cordelia
and driving Lear himself into nihilistic madness and death
makes no sense whatsoever.
I’m currently working on a screenplay version combining
my novels SUMMER OF NIGHT and A WINTER HAUNTING, and every
time I get to one of these necessary flashbacks or bits of
dialogue which exist to shore up internal logic and show motivation,
I rebel. (Some screenwriters call these “rubber ducky
scenes.” As in the movie Pretty Woman where
Richard Gere and Julia Roberts are in the bathtub and Gere
explains – in essence – that he’s become
a cold-hearted corporate raider because his unloving father
used to come into the bathroom when he was a little boy and
sink his rubber ducks. The gorge becomes buoyant writing these
scenes . . . strike them out!)
But I am no Shakespeare – I’m not even a Shakespeare
wannabe. Such genius of lacunae and Negative Capability is
almost beyond my ken, much less beyond my talents. I am, at
best, one of the Coleridge types who “would let go by
a fine isolated versimilitude caught from the Penetralium
of mystery.”
But consider how breathtaking it is to have had a writer
among us who not only could apply such disinterestedness to
his observations and writings but who could bring characters
alive who – unlike most of us who live and breathe –
became “free agents of themselves.”
What courage it took not only to develop this Negative Capability
into the heart of one’s art, but to trust living audiences
and generations not yet born to enter into such daring collaborations
with him – to exalt such willing suspension of disbelief
into the most subtle and powerful of psychological insights.
In a real sense, the energy released from Shakespeare’s
placement of “strategic opacity” which demands
the full use of Negative Capability – in the audience
as well as the tale -- was the literary equivalent of triggering
the device at Trinity Site.
Nothing has ever been the same since.
Merry Christmas.
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