Interesting take on Shakespearean language being less about semantic precision than emotional affect. Makes sense for theatre, not sure I agree even Joycean novels can be as fruitfully treated the same way when they are not typically written to need reading aloud as requirement for any magic, as you put it, or at least as regards novels as they've been predominantly written for the last few hundred years.
I also wonder: isn't Shakespeare's language in his plays less precise largely because they were collaborative? I don't have many sources on this atm but here's a general one:
I seem to recall hearing of specific evidence in grad school—and this follows logically too—that the plays were finalized as we know them today only after having had many actors/dramaturges change lines, undergone adaptations for different audiences, and withstood later edits by people like Pope.
Point being: how much can we attribute Shakespeare's indiscrete waves of linguistic music as intentionally a product of style and how much are they the result of collaboration (secret or otherwise), adaptation, edits, the expectations of theatre at the time, the audiences there, etc? Seems to me that the sonnets are much more consistently controlled and pointed in their meaning largely because of the nature of the form and because Shakespeare more definitely wrote them all.
Thanks, it's a good point! Hamlet, when discussing theater, says the groundlings are "capable only of dumb show," so presumably for them the company prioritized spectacle, while the words were for the more elite members for the audience and were moreover performance-centered, since plays, while they were sometimes published, were not necessarily written *for* publication. And, as you say, many hands were involved, and Shakespeare seems to have cared for his poems qua writing as he didn't about his plays, hence Jonson's quip that he should have blotted a thousand lines, meaning that he wrote drama carelessly. But this impression of Shakespeare as a wild improvising genius who did not obey classical rules, whether literally true or accidentally created by the theatrical conditions of the time (probably somewhere in the middle), did much to influence the concept of literary genius developed by Romantic writers who took Shakespeare as their model.
I'm definitely with you on that, but I also think, at this point, we've been bludgeoned by so many Shakespeare adaptations that invest currency in the myth of the isolated genius, it'd be nice if we did that slightly less. I love Bob Dylan, a veritable genius, but I think people more generally understand that the work of America's bard lifts melodies and lines so much that you could say his corpus as a whole is only great as it is because he collaborates deeply with the work of others. He admits as much himself in various interviews, and he plagiarized his Nobel speech off SparkNotes to prove it lol. Point being: genius relies on collaboration. I actually just saw a study that found anti-social people are far lower in IQ (save for verbally) than the myths of the cold, calculating serial killer depict, and that's kinda relevant here. Isolation doesn't produce intelligence as much as interaction does.
Maybe not the place for this question, John, but you seem likely to know: what if any connection may there be between Joyce’s self-description as “a scissors and paste man” (from a 1931 letter to George Antheil) and Arthur Griffith’s subversive 1914 newspaper of the same name, which evaded British censorship by reprinting quotations from other newspapers and books? I only just learned about this and the implications are startling—seems potentially to align the studiously apolitical Joyce with Burroughs and Gysin’s antiestablishment project.
I just learned about it from your comment! This short 1971 article from James Joyce Quarterly I found with a quick google speculates that Joyce took the method of "Aeolus" from Scissors and Paste, with its ironic juxtapositions, and alludes to it briefly in the same chapter.
"A certain amount of admiration for Griffith as a journalist seems to be implied. Arthur Griffith, in spite of much that has been said about him, was a courageous man, who faced censorship problems not entirely unlike those Joyce faced. His writings were continually suppressed. He was troubled most of his life by pressure from both Church and State. Prison, rather than exile, was his punishment; and with the kind of genius so appreciated by Joyce he decided in exasperation that the best way to deal with the hypocrisy of the establishment was to let them destroy themselves by their own words: he clipped out their idiocies, and printed them, without comment, for all to relish."
I think Joyce's version of being apolitical squares with a "higher" cosmopolitical nationalism, so this version of ironical anti-imperial subversiveness seems in his spirit. There's also the Citizen's line in "Cyclops" about how Bloom gave the idea of Sinn Fein to Griffith, which, while unreliable, seems symbolic of a kinship in Joyce's eyes. Griffith rejected violence and was loyal to Parnell, I think, and a re-scan of his wiki (I'm not a historian!) reminds me that Griffith began as an antisemite but changed his mind and particularly expressed sympathy toward Jewish victims of pogroms in Scissors and Paste.
I took the (KIndle) bait and hope to read Major Arcana over the next few weeks.
Thank you, I really hope you enjoy it!
Interesting take on Shakespearean language being less about semantic precision than emotional affect. Makes sense for theatre, not sure I agree even Joycean novels can be as fruitfully treated the same way when they are not typically written to need reading aloud as requirement for any magic, as you put it, or at least as regards novels as they've been predominantly written for the last few hundred years.
I also wonder: isn't Shakespeare's language in his plays less precise largely because they were collaborative? I don't have many sources on this atm but here's a general one:
https://blog.oup.com/2016/11/shakespeare-collaborators/
I seem to recall hearing of specific evidence in grad school—and this follows logically too—that the plays were finalized as we know them today only after having had many actors/dramaturges change lines, undergone adaptations for different audiences, and withstood later edits by people like Pope.
Point being: how much can we attribute Shakespeare's indiscrete waves of linguistic music as intentionally a product of style and how much are they the result of collaboration (secret or otherwise), adaptation, edits, the expectations of theatre at the time, the audiences there, etc? Seems to me that the sonnets are much more consistently controlled and pointed in their meaning largely because of the nature of the form and because Shakespeare more definitely wrote them all.
Thanks, it's a good point! Hamlet, when discussing theater, says the groundlings are "capable only of dumb show," so presumably for them the company prioritized spectacle, while the words were for the more elite members for the audience and were moreover performance-centered, since plays, while they were sometimes published, were not necessarily written *for* publication. And, as you say, many hands were involved, and Shakespeare seems to have cared for his poems qua writing as he didn't about his plays, hence Jonson's quip that he should have blotted a thousand lines, meaning that he wrote drama carelessly. But this impression of Shakespeare as a wild improvising genius who did not obey classical rules, whether literally true or accidentally created by the theatrical conditions of the time (probably somewhere in the middle), did much to influence the concept of literary genius developed by Romantic writers who took Shakespeare as their model.
I'm definitely with you on that, but I also think, at this point, we've been bludgeoned by so many Shakespeare adaptations that invest currency in the myth of the isolated genius, it'd be nice if we did that slightly less. I love Bob Dylan, a veritable genius, but I think people more generally understand that the work of America's bard lifts melodies and lines so much that you could say his corpus as a whole is only great as it is because he collaborates deeply with the work of others. He admits as much himself in various interviews, and he plagiarized his Nobel speech off SparkNotes to prove it lol. Point being: genius relies on collaboration. I actually just saw a study that found anti-social people are far lower in IQ (save for verbally) than the myths of the cold, calculating serial killer depict, and that's kinda relevant here. Isolation doesn't produce intelligence as much as interaction does.
Maybe not the place for this question, John, but you seem likely to know: what if any connection may there be between Joyce’s self-description as “a scissors and paste man” (from a 1931 letter to George Antheil) and Arthur Griffith’s subversive 1914 newspaper of the same name, which evaded British censorship by reprinting quotations from other newspapers and books? I only just learned about this and the implications are startling—seems potentially to align the studiously apolitical Joyce with Burroughs and Gysin’s antiestablishment project.
https://www.rte.ie/centuryireland/articles/british-military-suppress-nationalist-newspaper
I just learned about it from your comment! This short 1971 article from James Joyce Quarterly I found with a quick google speculates that Joyce took the method of "Aeolus" from Scissors and Paste, with its ironic juxtapositions, and alludes to it briefly in the same chapter.
"A certain amount of admiration for Griffith as a journalist seems to be implied. Arthur Griffith, in spite of much that has been said about him, was a courageous man, who faced censorship problems not entirely unlike those Joyce faced. His writings were continually suppressed. He was troubled most of his life by pressure from both Church and State. Prison, rather than exile, was his punishment; and with the kind of genius so appreciated by Joyce he decided in exasperation that the best way to deal with the hypocrisy of the establishment was to let them destroy themselves by their own words: he clipped out their idiocies, and printed them, without comment, for all to relish."
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25486959
I think Joyce's version of being apolitical squares with a "higher" cosmopolitical nationalism, so this version of ironical anti-imperial subversiveness seems in his spirit. There's also the Citizen's line in "Cyclops" about how Bloom gave the idea of Sinn Fein to Griffith, which, while unreliable, seems symbolic of a kinship in Joyce's eyes. Griffith rejected violence and was loyal to Parnell, I think, and a re-scan of his wiki (I'm not a historian!) reminds me that Griffith began as an antisemite but changed his mind and particularly expressed sympathy toward Jewish victims of pogroms in Scissors and Paste.
Thanks for this informative comment!
Bravo.
Thanks!