Brooke Nelson
Eng. 378 Strickland
Final Paper
8-4-04
Shakespeare and the Myth
Hundreds of attempts at defining the “real” Shakespeare have proven only that there will be hundreds more. As these attempts add phenomenon and attention to the Canonical King through the power of conspiracy, the authenticity of the Shakespeare spectacle becomes, rather than a detriment to the legacy, a driving force for a larger and ever-adaptive readership.
I was introduced to Shakespeare in high school, and my experience with him then was as traumatic and vile as it is today. I hate Shakespeare with an undying passion that eternally burns in every fiber of my being. This began, I can assume, due to my complete inability to come to terms with his language. I found myself spending hours trying to connect infinite footnotes with the “actual” text, struggling to come to any understanding at all. A basic plot summary was, at best, my grand finale. Of course, I was able to watch film adaptations of the plays (which I always did), but this was also only understood at a plot level, and mostly through actions rather than words. And the big deal with Shakespeare, I was told, was with his language and techniques. So with my inability to grasp the words, I thought I was ignorant, incapable of ever understanding the genius behind the texts.
So I did what any good student does. I got Cliff’s Notes and asked everyone else what they thought. Magically, everyone thought the same things. And those things were what the teacher thought. And we discussed Shakespeare in class with smiles on our faces, and we praised him for his glorious linguistic mastery, and we all chanted his name in our heads as the king of all kings. The owner of the canon and the owner of our linguistic and literary hearts. This, strangely enough, also occurred with my own high-school students when I taught Julius Caesar, King Lear, and Hamlet. I taught them what I thought society wanted them to know, and what standardized tests required me to teach. And that’s what they learned.
Thus is the strength of collective agreement, collective ignorance. This is the case with most perceptions of Shakespeare; people love him because they are supposed to. People who hate him because they don’t “get” him are often considered ignorant or non-appreciative of “true literature.” But these people who hate him because they don’t get him are, possibly, more in touch with the “reality” of any text than their Shakespeare-adoring counterparts. These people, myself included, face the problematic nature of the unreality behind the “author.”
Texts are readable because they hold some value in the societal or cultural readership. In the case of an ancient text (which is what I call Shakespeare), it is readable because teachers, professors and the media tell us it’s readable, and therein exists its cultural value. We (secondary-educated Westerners) all know Romeo and Juliet because we all read it and we can talk about it because we were forced to as high-schoolers (and possibly collegians). We appreciate it because we recognize the themes within because we are taught to appreciate those themes. However, much of the language is lost in our “translations” of today. The extensive need for footnotes demonstrates this.
In this loss of language, we lose much of the supposed glory of Shakespeare; much, if not all, of the spirit of Shakespeare lies not within the language and techniques, but in the pedestal upon which this society places his name. In this case, Shakespeare is not readable for the text, but for the legacy, the conspiracy, the questionable authorship.
Shakespeare’s role in literature is comparable to an actor playing a role already been played before. The actor is so far detached from the script that to say he is the character is a metaphor. Everyone knows who the Godfather is, and we as a society connect on the level of knowing him and his role in the film industry. But Marlon Brando is only the Godfather because we, as a society, value his role as a structure, a scaffold for other actors and other productions. No other actor playing the part of the Godfather would be acceptable to the movie-going society. Brando’s role is legendary only because we have encouraged and supported its legend. Such is comparable with Shakespeare. He is applicable to today’s society thematically; his structure is set in the cement of social values and historical traditions, steeped in cultural support.
In this quest for authorship, logically, people search for the author of the texts assigned to Shakespeare. However, in this quest, people are mistakenly searching not for the author, the scriptor, but the origin of the text. In finding the origin of a text, readers feel connected to that text, and consequently, to each other: “The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us” (Barthes 186). We feel connected to standardized American society in our mutual “understanding” of Shakespeare, thus leading us collectively down the path, albeit a false path of formulated literary relationships. These illusive relationships we have with the Shakespeare legacy allow his glory to persist.
In this issue of canonicity and social value, Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh discuss the impact of literary traditions as
…A self-conscious preoccupation with the reformulation of literary, like any cultural tradition, [which] seems always to surface when ‘tradition,’ no longer tacit or self-evident, has thereby been opened up to critical debate. […] Although a range of meaning might be attributed to such works in different ages, their essential transhistorical aesthetic value remains stable. (397)
This stable value is the product of subscription to Shakespeare as a canonical figure. The value of knowing him and the tradition of reading him far outweighs the struggle to read and apply his texts to contemporary life. In this way, Shakespeare as a major canonical figure represents “…a function of ideology which operates to construct a value system which legitimates as good those artifacts which mediate or represent those with cultural power” (398). And so we continue the tradition because that cultural power leads us to, and to avoid doing so challenges the strength of not only our intellectual capabilities, but also the very basis of tradition and societal structure itself.
Because every side of this issue is inherently loaded and opinionated, the important question must become not “who is the real Shakespeare?” but “what is the value/function of the legend of Shakespeare in terms of authorship and tradition?”
This myth of an “author” stems from the ideology that nothing can truly be authored because to author something then denies a true reader. Roland Barthes, “author” of “The Literature of Exhaustion,” says, “…it is language that speaks, not the author; to write, is, through a prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realist novelist), to reach that point, where only language acts, ‘performs’ and not ‘me’” (186). The language taking over the text, however, brings up negotiations of identity and reality (or the inability to see reality) as illusive, due to the manner in which text is used to create more text to create meaning and more meaning. This is the chicken-before-the-egg syndrome, where text is at stake, and cannot be trusted as “truth.”
Because text is based on signs that represent moments/things/actions, it is removed from the things themselves, and therefore only a social agreement. This social agreement is contractual per moment, per our desire for relationships within the structure, and often the cultural structures these systems are hidden, decontextualized and therefore seemingly closed. Jacques Lacan says, “meaning emerges as the result of the play of differences within a closed system,” (191) suggesting that the closed system both nourishes and depletes itself according to the changing needs of the culture. This is why the author is always considered in the past of his/her book, an actor taking the stage for the show, and then scurrying to his/her den when completed. Perhaps this is why Shakespeare and the controversy over authorship still thrive; authorship is not only at stake on a literary level, but also on a literal level.
We see his texts as having a potential author rather than a scriptor, as Barthes puts it, meaning we see the text as changing with the times rather than stagnating it in accordance with maintaining the tradition. Barthes says “to give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (188). Taken literally (if I can do that), this suggests that because we have yet to name an author for sure, because there is reasonable doubt, this text is open and will continue to be open until it can be defined (which will probably never occur).
Although this debate can be held with any “author” of any text to which many groups of people subscribe and believe in, Shakespeare is important because “he” is a symbol for literature and learning and academia. Shakespeare is the canonical king because he ritualizes the study and structure of literature and symbolizes more than plays and sonnets, but a strong basis for the contemporary study of literature. This is evident in the amount of people who know who he is (or think they know), have read his literature, have taught or been taught his texts, and have seen the various productions/adaptations of his plays. The Western world holds the legend of Shakespeare not only as a means to convey meaning and transcendent human conditions (arguably), but also as an ideology for the progress of a moral society (morality meaning the social laws that govern a society).
Because the author, Shakespeare, very well could be the product of another author, or many authors combined, and because authorship is inherently a myth anyway, ridding students of Shakespeare as part of the canon might only detriment the study of literature/language/rhetoric. According to David Kudler, Publishing Director of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, “[Shakespeare’s] plays are a direct example of how mere words can transform a society and the mind as well…. Shakespeare drew…well, OK, stole most of his plots from the folk tradition and popular literature of his day,” (1) which again demonstrates the idea of authorship versus originality, both of which being unattainable.
These appropriations of stories, and adherence not to the “original” creator(s) of the text, but rather Shakespeare (this mythological character to whom society subscribes), shows not that authorship is important, but that societal traditions, cultural symbols are inherent in the function of a society. According to Michel Foucault,
[I]n our culture, the name of an author is a variable that accompanies only certain texts to the exclusion of others: a private letter may have a signatory, but it does not have an author; a contract can have an underwriter, but it does not have an author; and similarly, an anonymous poster attached to a wall may have a writer, but he cannot be an author . . . [T]he function of an author is to characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within a society. (124 )
This function is evident in the PBS Frontline video, “The Shakespeare Mystery,” particularly when both sides of the authorship issues are deeply invested in their idea of the true creator of the texts. Neither side is willing to bend, even going so far as to weep openly concerning the issue. This emotional release is great evidence of the true influence not only the myth of Shakespeare has on society, but also the power of authorship. According to Brock University professor John Lye,
The author of a text is ‘in’ the text only insofar as we try to read her ‘out’ of it. This is not to say that a knowledge of an author’s life cannot illumine a text, but at the very same time that illumination forecloses a text, cuts off possible meanings that lie inherent in (or, implicit in) the structure of language, images, ideas in the text…. (1)
In this ideology, one can observe how “…any piece of writing is in fact a complex web of cultural meanings, a texture of them, a text. […] Any text is necessarily intertextual, it does not have boundaries but has filiations, connections, instead. An ‘author’ exists as a cultural process…” (Lye 4). This process is ongoing in the case of Shakespeare because of his influence in the canon and his progression through the canon as a symbol.
In accordance with this ideology, Joseph Campbell, the famous Jungian student, suggests that
…not only has it always been the way of multitudes to interpret their own symbols literally, but such literally read forms have always been—and still are, in fact—the supports of their civilizations, the supports of their moral orders, their cohesion, vitality, and creative powers. With the loss of them there follows uncertainty, and with uncertainty, disequilibrium…and where these have been dispelled, there is nothing secure to hold on to, no moral law, nothing firm. (10)
Because these symbols mean so much to the “morality” of a civilization, and because Shakespeare represents a great deal of the scaffold of mainstream Western literary texts, his strength is represented as not only a means to keep the tradition and therefore social peace alive, but also a thriving being, feeding the masses to keep them alive. According to Campbell, the environment shapes the story (Power 106), and since Shakespeare is adaptable to the environment in which is it introduced because of the various approaches that are often taken to understanding it, the story continues. And this, possibly, is his greatest worth, his power to transcend his own myth and his own text through the strength of his symbol.
Perhaps this notion of authorship then progresses these texts because they were revolutionary at one time, or maybe not even revolutionary, but simply new and innovative, or maybe just something the whole town could enjoy; this controversy creates the need for progression of the texts because we cannot let them go until we can define and categorize them. And we need to categorize in order to consume, because, in a capitalist society, this is what we do.
In the rhetoric of capitalism, contextualization is erased because the seller needs the buyer for the cyclic nature of the economy. Likewise, in much conventional writing the author needs the reader to succumb (even if the reader does not agree with the author’s argument, there is still the agreement of language) to her message in order for the structure to work. The structure then consists of “relations between the literary text and the social world [which recognize] that literature is a process and that the social world involves contexts and production and…reception” (Rice 103).
Between the reader and the author exists the context of many circumstances, including the social relevance of the text, the social construction of the author’s/reader’s language, the historical implications/influences on the text and on the author/reader, among others. Not to recognize this gap and the significance it has on representations of ideologies among societies is to ignore the very influence (“meaning”) of the text. This decontextualization then shields the reader, the textual consumer, from the cultural impact of language, and allows for further textual consumption of all texts, which are imbedded with cultural standards and power structures. This decontextualized consumer then consumes the historical implications of that language, further progressing those same ideologies—those same power structures.
Shakespeare is a huge support of this structure because we, our culture, buy into him. We demonstrate this in the manner in which we purchase his publications, read his works, value his texts. Despite the fact that the “author” has no influence on how we read his texts, especially concerning the time gap between its written time and contemporary Western society, we place importance and meaning on them in order to try and understand our own value in the scheme of tradition. In “Literature as an Ideological Form,” Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey claim “[t]he literary text is a privileged operator in the concrete relations between the individual and ideology in bourgeois society and ensures its reproduction” (140). The ability to control society then, through language and literature, creates the “effect of domination: the subjection of individuals to the dominant ideology, the dominance of the ideology of the ruling class” (140). This domination is essential to tradition and society in relation to text because in order for a text to “perform a particular social purpose effectively it must not only postulate but actually reach and influence its appropriate audience” (Balibar 140), thus producing and reproducing the apparatus.
The apparatus embodies the manner in which society behaves, and we base this highly on the traditions and myths that create us. However, this is tricky because of the manner in which we translate literature or text from the “author” to the page to ourselves as reader, and then to our lives. In this way,