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The politics of ethical presentism: appropriation, spirituality and the case of Antony and Cleopatra

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 22; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502360802263709

1470-1308

Adrian Streete,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes I am grateful to Mark Burnett, John Drakakis and Paul Innes for comments and suggestions on this article. A shorter version was presented at a Shakespeare Association of America seminar on ‘Shakespeare, Appropriation and the Ethical’, April 2007, San Diego, and I am grateful to the comments of fellow seminarians, especially Robert Sawyer, and to Ton Hoenselaars and Alexander Huang who led the seminar. In dialogue with the work of Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur, philosophers and critics such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Richard Rorty, Martha Nussbaum and Zygmunt Bauman have been at the forefront of this ‘ethical turn’. For good overviews of the field, see Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), The Ethics of Postmodernity: Current Trends in Continental Thought, eds Gary Madison and Marty Fairbairn (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999) and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Shadows of Ethic: Criticism and the Just Society (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999). John Joughin, ‘Philosophical Shakespeares: An Introduction’, in Philosophical Shakespeares, ed. John Joughin (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 10. See the recent volume Presentist Shakespeares, eds Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes (London and New York: Routledge, 2007). Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 3. Ewan Fernie, ‘Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism’, Shakespeare Survey, 58, (2005), pp. 171–2. Ibid., p. 179. Ibid., p. 178. Ibid., pp. 176, 183. Ibid., p. 184. Ibid. Alan Sinfield, Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality: Unfinished Business in Cultural Materialism (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 5, my emphasis. Fernie, ‘Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism’, p. 184. Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 228. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume Three, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 235. Ibid. Alan Sinfield, Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality, p. 30. In using the term ‘“original” textual production’, I am aware of the fact that there can be no one single unfettered Shakespearean textual origin that all subsequent appropriations can be traced back to. See Leah Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London and New York: Routledge, 1996) and Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). I use the term rather to point towards the fact that appropriation is commonly thought of as a post-Shakespearean phenomenon. I should also note here that, although I examine some implicit philosophical problems in the trajectory of appropriation studies, I have also gleaned much from the work of many scholars working in the field, including Mark Burnett, Richard Burt, Christie Desmet, Samuel Crowl, Courtney Lehmann, Julie Sanders and Gary Taylor. Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present, p. 4. The implication that literature can have ethical value relies upon certain assumptions about the aesthetic status of literature as genre. To this end, the ‘ethical turn’ in recent criticism has been inspired by an important post-Enlightenment critique of Kant by figures such as Derrida, Lyotard and Lacoue-Labarthe. As John Joughin and Simon Malpas argue, ‘it is Kant's failure to reconcile epistemology, ethics and aesthetics in the third critique [of the Critique of Judgement] that opens a space for aethetics within modernity which point towards the possibility to its having a transformative potential’. John Joughin and Simon Malpas, ‘The New Aestheticism: An Introduction’, in The New Aestheticism, eds John Joughin and Simon Malpas (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 11. Mark Burnett and Ramona Wray, ‘Introduction’, Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), p. 8. Ibid. Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1997), p. 37 As Williams also notes on this page: ‘if ideology were merely some abstract, imposed set of notions, if our social and political and cultural ideas and assumptions and habits were merely the result of specific manipulation, of a kind of overt training which might be simply ended or withdrawn, then the society would be very much easier to move and to change in practice than it has ever been or is’. Burnett and Wray, ‘Introduction’, Screening Shakespeare, p. 8. Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture, pp. 38–39. Fernie, ‘Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism’, p. 179. Mark Robson, ‘Shakespeare's Words of the Future: Promising Richard III’, Textual Practice, 19.1, (2005), p. 28. Catherine Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 12. See Alan Sinfield, Literature in Protestant England 1560–1660 (London and Canberra: Croom Helm, 1983) and Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, 2nd edn (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989); Robert Weimann, Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse, ed. David Hillman (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Graham Ward, Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 117. Spiritual Shakespeares, ed. Ewan Fernie (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). Ibid., p. 7 Fernie's project is avowedly ‘presentist’ in focus, as he notes on p. 2. Such easy formulations ignore the still pertinent warning made by David Aers in 1992, enjoining early modern critics not to ‘facilitate the belief that “everything suddenly changed” during the period of one's own specialisation’ by caricaturing the social and theological structures of the medieval period. David Aers, ‘A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the “History of the Subject”’, in Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, ed. David Aers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), p. 196. Spiritual Shakespeares, ed. Fernie, pp. 11–13. See Alister McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Girolamo Zanchi, An Excellent And Learned Treatise […] (Cambridge [?]: John Legate, 1592), p. 122. For an important if problematic reading of the relationship between transcendence and immanence, see Regina Schwartz's ‘Introduction’ to Transcendence: Philosophy, Literature, and Theology Approach the Beyond, ed. Regina Schwartz (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), pp. vii–xi. See R.T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1997) and Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). Alan Sinfield, ‘Turning on the Spiritual’, Textual Practice, 20.1, (2006), p. 167. Spiritual Shakespeares, ed. Fernie, p. 3. Ibid. Ibid., p. 9. Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture, p. 121. See Alan Sinfield's still pertinent chapter ‘Protestantism: Questions of Subjectivity and Control’ in Sinfield, Faultlines, pp. 143–80. Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture, p. 121, my emphasis. Ibid. Spiritual Shakespeares, ed. Fernie, p. 8. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London and New York: Verso, 1996), p. 144. Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture, p. 122, my emphasis. See ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ in Althusser, For Marx, pp. 89–128. Spiritual Shakespeares, ed. Fernie, p. 9. The formulation here, consciously or not, invokes the cadences of the ‘Lord's Prayer’: ‘thy kingdom come, thy word be done, on earth as it is in heaven’. Derrida's Specters of Marx is the obvious intertext here. Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 296. Ibid. Ibid. Marxism is not beyond the charge of utopianism as many critics have pointed out, but my point is that a future based on a rigorous materialist analysis of the relationship between past and present ideological functions is a more politically responsible mode than the ethics of ‘possibility’ advanced by ethical Presentism. Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture, p. 122. See The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature: Patterns, Antecedents and Repercussions, eds C.A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984) as well as Margret de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). See Christopher Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth Century England (London: Oxford University Press, 1971) and Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Bernard Capp, ‘The Political Dimension of Apocalyptic Thought’ in The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature, eds Patrides and Wittreich, pp. 93–4. Ibid. p. 101. The exceptions are Ethel Seaton, ‘Antony and Cleopatra and the Book of Revelation’, RES, 22, 87, (1946), pp. 219–224; Andrew Fisher, ‘Antony and Cleopatra’: The Time of Universal Peace’, Shakespeare Survey, 33, (1980), pp. 99–111; and Clifford Davidson, ‘Antony and Cleopatra: Circe, Venus, and the Whore of Babylon’ in History, Religion and Violence: Cultural Contexts for Medieval and Renaissance English Drama (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 64–94. See also Patrick Ryan's ‘Shakespeare's Joan and the Great Whore of Babylon’, Renaissance and Reformation, 28.4, (2004) pp. 55–82. Naseeb Shaheen's Biblical References in Shakespeare's Plays (Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 1999) is the standard reference work in this area and all of the biblical allusions that I draw attention to are referenced in this text. John Drakakis has argued that such moments are examples of ‘Elizabethan “presentism”: a means of inscribing within a text from the past a contemporary relevance’. John Drakakis, ‘Present Text: Editing The Merchant of Venice’, in Presentist Shakespeares, ed. Grady and Hawkes, p. 19. I am grateful to Professor Drakakis for letting me see an earlier copy of this essay. Quotations from Antony and Cleopatra are from the Arden Edition by John Wilder (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). Terence Hawkes, ‘King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra: The Language of Love’, in Antony and Cleopatra: New Casebooks ed. John Drakakis (London: Macmillan, 1994), p. 112. See the references to Rome and the Tiber in Stephen Batman's The Doome Warning all Men to the Judgement […] (London: Ralphe Nubery, 1581), pp. 33–5. This book also contains long sections on Roman history as read through the lens of apocalypticism as well as woodcuts of various prodigies. I am grateful to Mark Burnett for lending me his copy of this text. All references are to The Geneva Bible (London: Christopher Barker, 1599). Francis Junius, The Revelation Of Saint Iohn The Apostle and Euangelist with the Annotations of Francis Junius, (London: Christopher Barker, 1599), p. 115. Junius’ notes to Revelation appeared in the 1598 and 1601 editions of the Geneva Bible as well as some of the 1599 and 1600 copies. For more on this, see Richard Baukham, Tudor Apocalypse (Oxford: The Sutton Courtenay Press, 1978), pp. 137–38 as well as Crawford Gribben's The Puritan Millennium: Literature and Theology 1550–1682 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), pp. 70–9. To this end, it is instructive that, as Antony's world crumbles, the failed coloniser should say: ‘The land bids me tread no more upon't, /…I am so lated in the world that I/Have lost my way forever’. (3.11.1–4) The flip side of early modern colonial imperialism, it would seem, is spatial and affective dislocation. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. J.T. McNeil, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols. (London: The Library of Christian Classics, 1961), I. 84. Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, in Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (London and New York: Arnold, 1992), p. 237. Heinrich Bullinger, A Hvndred Sermons Vppon the Apocalypse of Iesu Christ (London: John Daye, 1573) STC 4062, 170b. H. Neville Davies, ‘Jacobean Antony and Cleopatra’, in Antony and Cleopatra: ed. Drakakis, p. 137. Ibid., p. 129. It is also worth noting here that the imperial name adopted by Julius Caesar, pontifex maximus, also became in time the preferred title of the Pope. I am indebted to Paul Innes for this point. Margot Heinemann, ‘“Let Rome in Tiber Melt:” Order and Disorder in Antony and Cleopatra, in Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Drakakis, p. 174. Ibid., pp. 174–5. See Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 220-29. Davidson, Antony and Cleopatra, p. 75. Spencer's The Fairie Queene is the obvious source for literary representations of apocalyptic whoredom, but the whore of Babylon is implicitly and explicitly present in a range of early modern drama, most noticeably Dekker's The Whore of Babylon (1603). Junius, The Revelation of Saint Iohn, p. 119. Ibid. Arthur Dent, The Rvine of Rome or An Exposition vpon the whole Reuelation, (London: Simon Waterson and Cutbert [sic] Burby, 1603) STC 6640, p. 208. Junius’ notes for this passage in The Geneva Bible state the following: ‘For those powers of wickednesse are thrust downe into hell, and bound with chaines of darknesse: and are there kept vnto damnation’, Junius, The Revelation of Saint Iohn, p. 114. Dent, The Rvine of Rome, p. 6. It is also worth noting here that the Greek location of the site where Revelation was supposedly written has an indirect analogue in the history that the play deals with – strictly speaking Cleopatra was not Egyptian but in fact Greek. I own this point to Paul Innes. Junius, The Rvine of Rome, p. 115.