The Common Pursuit (23 page)

As we contemplate his string of instances we are moved to insist on certain distinctions the importance of which seems to

1 In Othello: An Historical and Comparative Study (Studies in Language and Literature, No. 2, University of Minnesota, 1915) and Art and Artifice in Shakespeare (1933). Professor StolTs position appears not to have changed between the two essays, but I find his less developed style the more intelligible.

have passed him by. When Shakespeare uses the 'same' convention as Beaumont and Fletcher, Dryden and Voltaire, his use is apt to be such that only by a feat of abstraction can the convention be said to be the same. Who will bother to argue whether jealousy in Beaumont and Fletcher or any of the others is psychologically defensible or not? The unique power by which Shakespeare compels 'faith in the emotions expressed' and beguiles Bradley and company into their absurdities is, of course, recognized by Professor Stoll, though he cannot recognize with any sureness its nature:

By the sheer potency of art Othello, lago, Desdejnona, and Emilia maintain, through all their incredible vicissitudes, their individual tone. And inconsistent, unpsychological though they be, their passions speak ever true. 1

To explain this potency, Professor Stoll, urging us to be content with 'mere art', talks vaguely of'tact', 'delicacy' and * poetry', makes play with analogies from music, and quotes Shaw's 'it is the score and not the libretto that keeps the work alive and fresh'. Elsewhere he can recognize that 'No one has more imaginative sympathy than Shakespeare; but', he goes on,

he employs it by fits and starts, often neglects motivation and analysis, takes a leap as he passes from one 'soul-state* to another, and not content with the inconsistencies of life, falls into the contradictions of convention and artifice. 2

This is better than talking about 'score' and 'libretto', though a critic who saw that and understood would make distinctions and discriminations that Professor Stoll ignores. The 'sheer potency' of Shakespeare's art, the 'magic' of his 'score' (and where is the 'libretto' ?) derives from his imaginative grasp of concrete human situations in their complexity and particularity; his power of realiring a vivid here-and-now of experience as part of an intricate and coherent context. The convincing life of the verse locally and the more inclusive realizing grasp belong together; the one is the index of the other. There are, no doubt, places in Shakespeare of which one may

1 Othello: An Historical and Comparative Study, p. 62.

2 Op. tfc, p. 69.

argue that local vividnesses here and there, convincingly living parts, are not related in an inwardly grasped whole, and that Shakespeare has fallen *into the contradictions of convention and artifice'. That would be an adverse criticism. But before we make it we must make sure what kind of whole Shakespeare is offering us. For instance, it is not intelligent criticism of Measure for Measure to say, as a dramatic critic did in The New Statesman and Nation : x

The author seems to have lost interest in it about half-way through, and turns a fine story to nonsense. (The Duke's character, if one could take it seriously, would be as curious and complicated as any in Shakespeare—a moralist who tortures people in order to study their behaviour on the rack.)

To 'take seriously* means, it is clear, to regard Shakespeare's Duke as a historical person and judge him by the standards one would apply in actual life. But, for anyone who can read, Shakespeare provides intimation enough that the Duke isn't to be taken in that way—that he moves on a different plane from the other characters. And because of the obviously serious purpose it subserves, and the impressiveness of the total effect it makes possible, we readily accept the convention involved in taking the Duke as we are meant to take him.

But with Othello it is different. By the time he becomes the jealous husband it has been made plain beyond any possibility of doubt or reversal that we are to take torn, in the dramatic critic's sense, seriously—at any rate, such a habit of expectation has been set up with regard to him (and he is well established as the main focus of attention) that no development will be acceptable unless the behaviour it imposes on him is reconcilable with our notions of ordinary psychological consistency. Other characters in the play can be convincing* on easier terms; we needn't inquire into the consistency of Emilia's behaviour—we accept her as a datum, and not even about lago are we—or need we be— so psychologically exacting. His combination of honest seeming with devilish actuality we accept as, at least partly, a matter of tacit convention; convention acceptable because of the convincingly handled tragic theme to which it is ancillary.

And the tragic theme is centred in Othello. Dramatic sleight

1 Oct. i6th, 1937-

is not cheating so long as it subserves honesty there. We do not, even when we consider it critically, quarrel with the trick of ' double time', though it involves impossibilities by the criteria of actual life and yet is at the same time necessary to the plausible conduct of the intrigue; but equivalent tricks or illusions passing off on us mutually incompatible acceptances with regard to Othello's behaviour or make-up would be cheating—that is, matter for critical condemnation. To impose by convention sudden jealousy on Leontes in The Winter's Tale and Posthumus in Cymbeline is one thing: we admit the convention for the sake of an inclusive effect—a dramatic design that does not, we recognize (wherever in the scale of Shakespeare's work we may place these plays), anywhere ask us to endorse dramatic illusion with the feeling of everyday reality. But to impose jealousy by mere convention on Othello is another thing. What end would be served e What profit would accrue ?

According to Professor Stoll, the profit of 'putting jealousy upon the hero instead of breeding it in him' is an ' enormous emotional effect':

The end—the enormous emotional effect—justifies the means ... 1

This emotional effect, as Professor Stoll enjoys it, he represents as the product of our being enabled, by Shakespeare's art, to have it both ways: Othello succumbing to jealousy before our eyes acquires an intense dramatic value without incurring in our esteem the disadvantages attendant upon being jealous; there he is, patently jealous, yet he is at the same time still the man who couldn't possibly have become jealous like that.

The villain, by all this contriving of the poet's, bears in this instance, like the ancient Fate or intruding god, the burden of responsibility; and our sympathy with a hero made of no such baseness is almost wholly without alloy. 2

Professor Stoll, that is, in spite of the difference of his analysis, sees the play as the triumph of sentimentalization that it has appeared to so many admirers:

... no one in Shakespeare's tragedies more bitterly and wildly reproaches himself... Yet not of himself suspicious or sensual, he is now

1 Art and Artifice in Shakespeare, p. 41. 8 pp. dt. t p. 42.

not corrupted or degraded; and amid his misery and remorse he can still hold up his head and declare:

For nought I did in hate, but all in honour.

not easily jealous, but, being wrought, Perplex'd in the extreme.

He is a more effective tragic figure because he can say that—because, unlike many, he keeps our sympathy and admiration to the end. 1

The 'emotional effect' of the tragedy upon Professor Stoll is essentially that celebrated in his own way by Bradley, and Professor Stall's analysis, in fact, does explain in large measure why such a tragedy should be so widely found in Othello and found irresistible.

Fortunately we are not reduced to reversing the critical judgment and censuring Shakespeare, The dilemma that Professors Stoll and Bradley resolve in their different but equally heroic ways —the dilemma represented by a 'not easily jealous' Othello who succumbs at once to lago's suggestions—needn't be allowed to bother us. Both critics seem to think that, if Othello hasn't exhibited himself in the past as prone to sexual jealousy (and his reputation tells us he hasn't), that establishes him as 'not easily jealous', so that his plunge into jealousy would, if we had to justify it psychologically (Bradley, of course, prefers not to recognize it), pose us an insoluble problem. Yet surely, as Shakespeare presents him, it is not so very elusive a datum about Othello, or one that ordinary experience of life and men makes it difficult to accept, that his past history hasn't been such as to test his proneness to sexual jealousy—has, in fact, thereby been such as to increase his potentialities in just that respect.

However, he is likely to remain for many admirers the entirely noble hero, object of a sympathy poignant and complete as he succumbs to the machinations of diabolic intellect

1 Op. cfc, p. 43*

'MEASURE FOR MEASURE'

RE-READING, both of L. C. Knights's essay 1 and of Measure for Measure, has only heightened my first surprise that such an argument about what seems to me one of the very greatest of the plays, and most consummate and convincing of Shakespeare's achievements, should have come from the author of How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? For I cannot see that the'discomfort' he sets out to explain is other in kind than that which, in the bad prepotent tradition, has placed Measure for Measure both among the 'unpleasant' ('cynical') plays and among the unconscionable compromises of the artist with the botcher, the tragic poet with the slick provider of bespoke comedy. In fact, Knights explicitly appeals to the 'admitted unsatisfactoriness' of Measure for Measure. The 'admitted unsatisfactoriness', I find myself with some embarrassment driven to point out (he quotes Hazlitt and Coleridge, and might have followed up with Swinburne, the Arden editor, Sir Edmund Chambers, Mr Desmond MacCarthy, the editors of the New Cambridge Shakespeare, and innumerable others), has to be explained in terms of that incapacity for dealing with poetic drama, that innocence about the nature of convention and the conventional possibilities of Shakespearean dramatic method and form, which we associate classically with the name of Bradley.

It is true that Knights doesn't make the usual attack on the character and proceedings of the Duke, and tell us how unadmir-able he is, how indefensible, as man and ruler. 2 Nor, in reading

1 In Scrutiny, X, 3.

2 'The Duke hardly seems to be a personage to delight in. It is not merely his didactic platitudes and his somewhat over-done pompousness that get upon one's nerves, but his inner character. We first meet him too timid or too irresolute to enforce his own laws and deputing his duty to another, while he himself plunges into a vortex of scheming and intrigue; concluding by falling in love with a votary. At ffl, i, 67 does he not transgress against the confessional ? Again, he must have known of Angelo's treatment of Mariana, at least we arc left to suppose he did [HI, i, 228], and was not his (the Duke's) a very shifty way of bringing him to justice, instead of a straight prosecution? Then the freedom with which he lies [IV, iii, 108-15] is not prepossessing, I imagine Shakespeare was not in love with his Duke.' A shy fellow was the Duke'/' —The Arden Introduction, p. xxii.

this critic, do we find cause for invoking the kind of inhibition that has certainly counted for a lot in establishing the 'accepted* attitude towards Measure for Measure —inhibition about sex: he doesn't himself actually call the play 'unpleasant' or 'cynical'. But that 'sense of uneasiness* which 'we are trying to track down' —what, when we have followed through his investigations, does it amount to ? It focuses, he says, upon Claudio, or, rather, upon Claudio's offence:

It is Claudio—who is scarcely a 'character' at all, and who stands between the two extremes—who seems to spring from feelings at war with themselves, and it is in considering the nature of his offence that one feels most perplexity.'

I am moved to ask by the way what can be Knights's critical intention in judging Claudio to be 'scarcely a " character" at all'. I think it worth asking because (among other things) of his judgment elsewhere that Angelo is a 'sketch rather than a developed character-study'. True, he says this parenthetically, while remarking that Angelo is the 'admitted success of the play'; but it is an odd parenthesis to have come from the author of How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? It seems to me to have no point, though an unintentional significance.

But to come back to Claudio, whom Knights judges to be 'not consistently created 1 : it is plain that the main critical intention would be rendered by shifting the italics to 'consistently'—he is not 'created' (i.e. 'scarcely a "character"') and, what's more significant, not consistent. This inconsistency, this 'uncertainty of handling', we are invited to find localized in the half-dozen lines of Claudio's first address to Lucio—here Knights makes his most serious offer at grounding his argument in the text:

From too much liberty, my Lucio, liberty: As surfeit is the father of much fast, So every scope by the immoderate use Turns to restraint. Our natures do pursue, Like rats that ravin down their proper bane, A thirsty evil, and when we drink we die.

What problem is presented by these lines ? The only problem I can see is why anyone should make heavy weather of them. Knights finds it disconcerting that Claudio should express vehe-

ment self-condemnation and self-disgust. But Claudio has committed a serious offence, not only in the eyes of the law, but in his own eyes. No doubt he doesn't feel that the offence deserves death; nor does anyone in the play, except Angelo (it is characteristic of Isabella that she should be not quite certain about it). On the other hand, is it difficult to grant his acquiescence in the moral conventions that, barring Lucio and the professionals, everyone about him accepts ? A Claudio who took an advanced twentieth-century line in these matters might have made a more interesting * character'; but such an emancipated Claudio was no part of Shakespeare's conception of his theme. Nor, I think Knights will grant, are there any grounds for supposing that Shakespeare himself tended to feel that the prescription of premarital chastity might well be dispensed with.