Literary Theory Assignment and Othello

Formalist Criticism and the Teaching of Shakespeare Author(s): Kester Svendsen Source: College English, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Oct., 1965), pp. 23-27 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/373705 Accessed: 01-12-2018 17:29 UTC

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FORMALIST CRITICISM AND SHAKESPEARE

Formalist Criticism and the Teaching of Shakespeare KESTER SVENDSEN

HAVING NARROWED THE SUBJECT to Shakespeare, let us now narrow the ob- ject, or more precisely, the audience, the students for whom or on whom we can use modern critical theory. It is one thing to address Trinity College sopho- mores who prepped at Groton or in Northrop Frye's well-tempered curricu- lum, and quite another to work with un- dergraduates at a midwestern or north- western state university. Upper division, lower division, graduate, required course, elective course-these categories further modify our expectations and our ap- proach. I speak here of the uses of mod- ern critical theory in teaching Shake- speare to the ordinary undergraduate at a state university. Certainly much of what works with him will work with any stu- dent. But we must begin with him where he is: generally inexperienced in art, adolescent, a superannuated high school senior; and we must determine what we want him to have when we leave him. The present remarks derive from expe- rience with a sophomore-level three-term Shakespeare course populated mostly by a liberal arts enrollment and taught by a decayed Miltonist. They derive also from three main streams of modern criti- cal theory: psychological criticism, as represented chiefly by Ernest Jones and the contributors to Literature and Psy- chology; anthropologico-synoptic criti-

cism, pioneered by Maud Bodkin and lately anatomized by Northrop Frye; and a formalist criticism, whose Brooksian bankruptcy was somewhat prematurely announced from Chicago in the 1950's. I wish to argue the primacy of formalist literary theory in teaching Shakespeare to beginners.

I assume agreement that our purpose in this context is to help the aesthetically unskilled to understand and to enjoy reading and seeing Shakespeare's plays. Our end is not information but a habit of mind. This is modest enough, and practical. Ultimates like the self-aware- ness induced by the dramatic image of man are not for these beginners. In Frye's terms, we wish to evoke and to train powers, to enable a possession. This seems obvious until we realize how much recent criticism imbibed by our doctoral candidates has been devoted to formu- lating theories of literature and theories of literary criticism. Our eager young assistant professors too often use litera- ture to teach a theory of literature when they might better use a theory of litera- ture to teach ways of reading it. Nor is their excess unusual. XWe all remem- ber the bad old days following 1938 when the early New Critic revolutionaries re- duced all poems to images and irony. Now, having ignored history, we may be condemned to repeat it in what Warner Rice calls "the myth-understanding of literature." The great disadvantages of synoptic criticism is the likelihood of destroying the play by releasing it into

Mr. Svendsen, professor of English and Head of the Department at the University of Oregon, delivered this paper at the NCTE meetings last fall. He has published widely on seventeenth- century English literature.

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sion of their ideas and their dreams, the richer will be the opportunities for our creative workers. We must never forget that in the greatest ages of literature lit- erary scholarship and literary creation

have traveled hand-in-hand. That is some- thing that we would do well to keep in mind in order that we may encourage the creative artist, as well as the scholar, wherever we find him.

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24 COLLEGE ENGLISH

a tradition or a category, when for be- ginners it were better to encourage cul- tivated response to the immediate ob- ject-to show them what to look for in a play and what to do with it when found. Our object in teaching Shakes- peare to undergraduates is to make them not teachers but readers, not skimmers and paraphrasers but articulate partici- pants in a creative act by their expe- riencing the play as an imitation of an action. Clearly, this is not to disparage synoptic criticism nor to dissuade the student's later ascent to it. He should

indeed eventually be helped to perceive the wholeness of literature in its mythic and archetypal relations with human his- tory. But at first he must learn what goes on in particular plays, not abstrac- tions of plays.

For sophomores I eschew Frye's bril- liant theory because I find it dangerous to display to beginners. The danger lies partly in the necessarily fragmentary presentation they get and partly in their inability to distinguish woods from trees. A sophomore offered a system of cate- gories or analogues may well feel his re- sponsibility discharged when he can pigeon-hole this ritualistic hero or that archetypal image. He must be helped to comprehend the individuality of Julius Caesar, not its classification. In the light of our stated purpose, I would argue for his seeing the wholeness of a piece of literature, not the wholeness of literature.

Before suggesting some uses of forma- list theory, I should bow toward Leonard Manneheim and note that a low-voltage psychological approach has some benefit for the inexperienced and immature imagination; it can clarify the relation between human motive and human ac-

tion, the complexity of human desires, the struggle within a Macbeth or a Cleo- patra. The beginner in Shakespeare re- sponds to the display and definition of personality; for him plays are things made

up of people. It is a waste of breath to tell a sophomore that Hamlet is not a real person with a life outside or before the play. This is the only way he can begin to be interested in Hamlet. For him the protagonist of Abe Lincoln in Illinois is as real as the Abraham Lincoln

of history; and he insists on thinking of Hamlet in the same way. It used to be fashionable to smile at Bradley's treat- ing Shakespeare's characters as if they were recently deceased celebrities. But this is precisely the way the psychologi- cal critic must explore Othello and Bru- tus, as exemplifications of psychological laws. The play is an imitation of an action by people. For the beginner the only dramatic characters without a his- tory and a life of their own are those in Everyman: Good Deeds, Riches, Everyman himself.

From this preliminary engagement with persons and actions, the teacher of Shakespeare can draw upon formalist literary theory to stimulate his students' discovery of what is going on in the discourse that is the play. Its great ad- vantage is that it does not denature the play, as a Freudian or Marxian or syn- optic criticism tends to do, making the play an example of something rather than a thing in itself. I use the term formalist to include Reuben Brower as well as Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom as well as Eliseo Vivas, Harry Levin in his essay on the Player King's speech, even mirabile dictu, that arch-priest of the his- torical scholars, Don Cameron Allen, whose Harmonious Vision invests the

New Critical technique with a learning like that of Rosemond Tuve, than which there can be no higher compliment. What all of these have in common is actually formalist criticism. For the purpose of this argument, formalist criticism is con- cerned with sensitivity to structures, with that interaction of elements which is

form and which generates force. It is close reading, explication de texte, study

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FORMALIST CRITICISM AND SHAKESPEARE 25

of symbols and images as they interact, the New Criticism, as we used to call it. Better, I think, than any other method, formalist criticism deals with the play as language, with as it is read a verbal imitation of an action. If one may para- phrase Langer, formalist criticism is pre- sentational where other kinds of criti- cism are discursive. Formalist criticism

encourages awareness of language as a living act. The student working with symbols, images, syntactic patterns, and figurative language is at once experienc- ing them and learning what happens to him and to the discourse before him when he does. He sees, as in no other dispensation, the work of art as a made thing. Nothing so sharply defines the play as awareness of design in a play: the larger designs of narrative conflict, the smaller designs of dominant images and recurrent figures. The beginner can- not respond to all, any more than the playgoer can. But he can respond to some. It is upon these some that we build.

I repeat, we must begin where these undergraduates are, which is to say be- gin with what they can do. From their first papers we learn that commonly all they can do is a shallow sketch of the characters, a superficial emotional state- ment of the moral problem, or a constipated paraphrase of the action. Commonly, I say, but not exclusively. Advanced Placement courses, John Hay Institutes, and Project English programs have accelerated diffusion of contempo- rary critical techniques among high school teachers; and if the freshman com- position course includes literature, the graduate assistant who taught our sopho- more would have introduced him to ex- plication. Each year a few more students have the rudiments of critical reading. But most of them must be taught how to look for what and why. They must be led into the practice, not the theory, of formalist criticism, not a formula. As

I noted a moment ago, inexperienced readers are like playgoers in this: no playgoer can respond consciously to every parallel or contrast in the many scenes of Antony & Cleopatra any more than he can to each recurrence of the

blood image in Macbeth. Furthermore, in this exercise practice can make im- perfect; and there is every chance of splintering the play. The sophomore set to hunting images of disease in Troilus and Cressida may, when he finds promis- ing passages, reduce the drama to a group of lyric fragments not really unified by what he is taught to call streams or pat- terns of imagery. Thus we must modify Heilman's analysis of Lear or of Othello in presenting it as a model. We would teach art, not contrivance. We must be prepared to answer the inevitable echo of Amy Lowell without the expletive and say indeed what patterns are for. Like any method used in isolation or, if it is not too unkind to say so, in a vacuum, formalist criticism can become a travesty of literary experience. We want the students to become possessed of a power, not obsessed by a trick. Yet it is in working with language, in seeing the connotations of word, image, meta- phor, and symbol that the sophomore ac- quires knowledge about literature even as it excites his imagination, even as he participates in it. When Octavius says that the drunken tongue "splits what it would speak," the student perceives the statement as a piece of virtuosity char- acterizing the sober and calculating Cae- sar even as it bodies forth the forms of things unknown. Antony could never have managed the line.

From this particular, then, I would move to three examples of the way form- alist criticism can be adapted to the undergraduate teaching of Shakespeare and to a brief illustration of what may be done with one play, Henry IV, Part 1. The three examples are Cleanth Brooks's essay on the naked babe in Macbeth,

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26 COLLEGE ENGLISH

Reuben Brower's ordering of The Tem- pest, and Robert Heilman's monumental (not to say monolithic) reading of Lear. It will be observed that one avoids in

these the nit-picking of Roy Walker and the visionary absolutes of G. Wil- son Knight. Brooks's essay resolves a crux, but more significantly to our purpose it exemplifies a method of exploring tone as well as idea. Repeated images of defense- lessness and the cloak of manliness refine

the crucial image and enable the stu- dent to see the art of language in drama as well as to grasp a central theme. Brooks's method is repeatable; and there lies its strength as formalist theory. The best criticism of this kind elicits emula- tion, not mere admiration. The Alexan- drine elaborations of some early explica- tors were self-defeating as pedagogy; students were impressed, all right, and overwhelmed. Literary analysis was something they read or heard, but would hardly presume to attempt. Working from the same theory as his undisciplined imitators, Brooks provides a method as persuasive as its results.

From learning how to read images from so confined a passage, the student can be introduced to dramatic design in Brower's rehearsal of opposed figures in the language of The Tempest. The outer form, the act and scene division, the stages of narrative development, the ris- ing and falling action-these are apparent enough to our paraphrasers. What Brow- er exemplifies is a means of getting at the inner form, the design effected by the contrasts between figures of sleep and figures of wakefulness, figures of sound and silence, figures of sovereignty and slavehood. The images are seen as functional beyond characterization and thematic resonance; they inform the play. Brower, Brooks, Traversi, and Clemen are complementary, not contra- dictory. Beginners move by easy stages from the structure or form of a passage to the structure or form of the whole

play-and always with a sense of their own past as readers.

The third example is the full length formalist treatment of a single play. For years, we recall, the New Critics suffered under the sneer that their method served

only for brief reflective lyrics, chiefly from seventeenth-century England. With the appearance of Warren's book on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Brooks's Well Wrought Urn and his shared edi- tion of Milton's minor poems, and Heil- man's This Great Stage, the New Critics, that small infantry warred on by cranes, demonstrated once and for all that their

theories could be applied to longer works. I say this well aware of the mixed re-

ception met by these books, well aware of their faults, and well aware of the opposed fields magnetizing Chicago and New Haven. But I say it also well aware that these books extended the revitaliza-

tion of literary study in the academics of the late thirties and forties. This va-

riety of formalist criticism works with students now for the same reasons that it worked then. And it works not as an

exclusive or excluding method. The stu- dent who moves from Brooks through Brower to Heilman will discover its limi-

tations as well as its advantages. This technique can do little, for example, with the literary or cultural context of the play. The relation of Lear to its pred- ecessors and archetypes, to the Mirrour for Magistrates, to the Machiavellian view of nature, to Jacobean melodrama -he will get none of these because they lie outside the theory and the method. Except as inert fact, they also lie out- side the competence of the beginning student of Shakespeare; he cannot in- volve them in any extension of his pow- ers; he can memorize them but he can- not possess them. At his age and stage he is capable of only partial possession of a work of art. He can learn a way of looking and thinking that will enable him really to comprehend "I stumbled

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GRAMMAR, HISTORY, AND CRITICISM

Grammar, History, and Criticism KENNETH S. ROTHWELL

PREFERABLY THIS PAPER should begin with some tidy statement such as "history re- constructs the environment out of which

a work of art grew, while criticism handles the context in which a work of

art lives." Like so many of my best thoughts, however (to steal a bon mot from someone), everything about this aphorism may be true except the facts. The fact is that the relationship between history and criticism is highly contextual, rarely being reducible to an "either-or" proposition but normally dwelling in an atmosphere of "both-and." A second temptation might be to say that some kind of Law-of-Inverse-Ratio-to-the- Dwindling-Past operates, so that works of recent vintage-like John Kerouac's On

Mr. Rothwell, an associate professor at the University of Kansas, got the idea for this article while working last year on a study of the longer poem in America, a project supported partially by the American Philosophical Society. He has published previously in College English and else- where, both on criticism and on Elizabethan literature.

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'when I saw" or "Reason in madness." Comprehending these themes means see- ing them as focal points of a structure that states by being a structure of state- ments. Only after he has learned to do this can he aspire to a larger vision, a more extended possession of Shakes- peare's plays.

Let me conclude with some remarks

on Henry IV Part 1 as its design has been or might be viewed, by formalists. I limit these to those features which

have proved most successful in immedi- ately involving beginning students of Shakespeare as participants in the ex- perience of reading the play. As they advance from discovering the characters, they can be led to some perception of narrative stylization. They identify three groups of characters: the king's party, Hotspur's and Falstaff's. These are local- ized and specified in the first two scenes. They can see the whole narrative as made up of three partial and conflicting narratives. The play moves through three council scenes, three quarrels, and three reconciliations, as Hotspur makes peace with Glendower, Hal with his father, and Falstaff with Mrs. Quickly. These nar- ratives advance within themselves, each

with its special excitement of the imagi- nation, as they intersect and give the main action its form. This orchestration of narrative, still dependent upon char- acter and motive, can then be made apparent in the conflict of ideas or themes. The political irresponsibility of Hotspur, like the social and moral ir- responsibility in Falstaff, threatens to assimilate Prince Hal and the future of England into disaster. Hal's rejection of both extremes at Shrewbury, as he stands between the dead Hotspur and the sham- ming Falstaff, is a piece of thematic stag- ing-but it is also the logical resolution of a design initiated by the earliest scenes.

In this briefly stated example may be seen a capital contribution of formalist criticism-in defining the relation of form and idea, it makes the integrity of the play accessible and significant. That in- tegrity is of course not mere consistency of parts and singleness. It is a dynamic interaction of parts which creates in the beginning reader a sense of focus, of developing power to comprehend, a sense of the wholeness of the play, a sense of the design of Henry IV Part 1 under which the themes converge and clarify.

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