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Circumstantial Shakespeare . Lorna Hutson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. x+190.

2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 114; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/689365

1545-6951

Joel B. Altman,

Law in Society and Culture

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewCircumstantial Shakespeare. Lorna Hutson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. x+190.Joel B. AltmanJoel B. AltmanUniversity of California, Berkeley Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn this highly original study, Lorna Hutson makes a compelling case that Shakespeare fashioned the fully imagined worlds of his plays out of bits of language that Tudor grammar school students learned to insert in their orations and written compositions to render arguments coherent, probable, and vivid—in order to “enmesh them all” (Othello 2.3.362).1 These bits were the rhetorical and dialectical circumstances—where, when, how, why, opportunity, and so on—instruments of judicial inquiry that became the components of a verbal fabric that pieced out the unseen interiorities of represented speakers and evoked extramimetic times and places unrepresented on the stage.The book responds to three important strains in contemporary Shakespeare criticism. The first is the truism that Shakespeare, unlike Jonson, was uninterested in neoclassical theory. Hutson shows how Shakespeare employed not only the circumstances of classical and humanist writers (and of Inns of Court drama) but also practiced the equivalent of Lodovico Castelvetro’s concept of the Aristotelian episode, which enabled him to summon other “theres” and “whens” as needed. The second critical chestnut she roasts is the enduring emphasis on Shakespeare’s uncanny subtlety in portraying character and his carelessness about plot details. Both elements, she argues, are fashioned from the same circumstantial materials and reinforce one another—character emerging from the sjuzhet, the Russian formalist term for dialogue and action, details of plot from the dense fabula or virtual world we project from hints in the sjuzhet. Third, she questions the critical purchase of arguments offered by performance scholars that the lifelike quality of Shakespeare’s dramatis personae derives from theatrical practices inscribed in actors’ cue scripts or from Shakespeare’s familiarity with his company’s actors. Instead, she insists, the scripts provide cues that breathe life into the imaginations of auditors and readers.Hutson’s analyses begin modestly with the recurring topic “when” in the dialogue of Romeo and Juliet. “When” governs not only small arguments about time of day (“It was the nightingale, and not the lark” [3.5.2]) but—as even this example shows—psychologically inflected questions, such as when shall Juliet be ready for marriage? (1.2); how long ago was she weaned? (1.3); when did Capulet and his cousin last dance in a masque? (1.4). In the first instance, Shakespeare not only reduces Juliet’s age from Brooke’s 16 to 14; he shifts the issue from a moment in the narrative following Tybalt’s death and Romeus’s exile to the scene before we meet Juliet, shaping in advance our sense of her vulnerability and of Paris’s importunity, thereby introducing an early note of anxiety concerning Juliet’s future. In the second instance, Shakespeare uses “when” to extend the fabula into spaces, persons, and events long past, and to “characterize” the Nurse who, picking up the question of Juliet’s age, rattles on with details of Juliet’s fall the day the earthquake struck, her husband’s joke, the Capulets’ visit to Mantua, and her daughter Susan’s death, infusing a plangent tone into the addled reminiscence. In the third, Capulet’s earlier resistance to time’s passage is reiterated in his insistence that it has been twenty-five years, not thirty, since he and his cousin have danced. Short conversations, each enabling us, through dilations of the topic “when,” to envision a deeply experienced world.The interpretive value of “considering the circumstances” (80) is brilliantly demonstrated in the chapter on King Lear and Lucrece. Here the emphasis is on a particular aspect of “when” and its cognate topic, “time”: “opportunity” or “timeliness.” The notorious temporal and spatial leaps and gaps in Lear—letters thought on, written, sent, or received, sometimes before their contents can be known; unannounced departures and surprising arrivals (Regan and Cornwall, Oswald, Kent, Lear, and Goneril turning up seriatim at Gloucester’s castle). This is “not just a ‘foreshortening of action’ in the sense of a dramatic economy,” Hutson argues. “Rather, this particular analeptic effect is one of implication—the folding into the present moment of a temporal and spatial elsewhere of forward planning, an impossible then and there which only exists in the form of a readiness to seize the here and now” (71). Thus the “preposterous” topical structure is also thematic, for the antagonists of the play—Goneril, Regan, Edmund—are nothing if not embodiments of “opportunity,” whose spirit drives the action, while the protagonists—Lear, Cordelia, Edgar—are doomed to be tragically belated.But “circumstantiality” is more than structural and thematic. It is also the source of vivid verbal representation. Hutson provides a useful review of Quintilian’s and Erasmus’s treatments of enargeia, the quality of visuality conveyed by circumstantial language, especially in its formal manifestation as ekphrasis or description of persons, places, events, and works of art. In an analeptic move of her own, she flashes back from Lear to the writing of Lucrece to explore the “imaginary work” pursued by Lucrece when she accuses Night, Opportunity, and Time—topics themselves—of complicity in Tarquin’s rape, a “meditation” in which she rehearses the forensic defense she will offer to Collatine and the Roman lords. In this context the lengthy ekphrasis of the Troy painting becomes preparation for her defense, for as she studies the images of suffering Hecuba, Priam, Hector, and Troilus, “She lends them words, and she their looks doth borrow” (line 1498)—that is, she literally absorbs their images into her fantasy, as Quintilian prescribed, so that their circumstances will incite her own emotions and make her speech that much more persuasive. In a keen-eyed reading of these apostrophes, Hutson points out how Night, Time, and Opportunity take on agency, a verbal trick Shakespeare was to indulge often in his plays.From this aperçu, it is but a short step to remind us that there is no objective world in a Shakespeare play but only the illusion of one generated by the ethical and emotional dialogue of the sjuzhet. This leads to an ingenious reading of the functions of “where” and “how” in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, whose contradictory place names—Milan is variously “the Emperor’s court,” Padua, and Verona—make us wonder about the location of the action. Though she doesn’t resolve the textual anomaly, Hutson shrewdly subsumes it in the circumstance “where”—the governing topic of the argument in utramque partem that opens the play—as Valentine extols the active life abroad and denigrates “living dully sluggardiz’d at home” (1.1.7) devoted to love, like Proteus. Then, what had begun as a literally topographical difference—home/abroad—turns inward as the topic “manner” or “how” emerges when Proteus, imitating Valentine, lays bare the material aspirations at the heart of his friend’s quest. Not the life of action over contemplation is to be preferred, but the life of courtly advantage, replete with false professions of emotion, parodied by Launce’s enactment of his own tearful leave taking in which his hard-hearted dog Crab (a true skeptic) refuses to participate.Schooled in circumstantial analysis, one approaches the final chapter, “Motive in Macbeth,” with high anticipation: “When shall we three meet again?” “Where the place?” (1.1.1, 6). But Hutson doesn’t take that route. Instead, she links three features of the play to offer a political reading that emphasizes its tragic perversion of topical thinking: the severing of circumstances from the search for justice; the subsequent development of a guilty collective unconscious in the polity; and the underlying historical difference—tacitly acknowledged in the play—between an English monarchy that is product and agent of common law jurisprudence and a Scottish system in which the monarchy is only bound in theory to serve the public good. Fixing on the dialogue of 2.2, she argues that this “post-mortem” scene is shaped by the forensic “argument of innocence and the possibility of witness” (147) in the service of criminality. Thus the topic “opportunity” fills the scene but yields anxious dialogue evoking grooms’ snores, an owl’s scream, crickets’ cries, one who “did laugh in’s sleep,” “knocking” (2.2.10, 54)—uttered by frightened regicides and reaching a climax in Macbeth’s eulogy of innocent sleep, now forever lost. Unlike such English history plays as 2 Henry VI and Richard II, she contends, where legal inquiry or procedure is invoked in the name of justice, the guilt of Malcolm and Donalbain is presumed, and even the skeptical nobles Banquo and Macduff are complicit. As a result, “cruel are the times, when we are traitors, / And do not know ourselves,” says Rosse to Lady Macduff (4.2.18–19). Scotland must be purged by England’s Edward the Confessor. The circumstances fit the thesis.Earlier, Hutson raises the question of whether Shakespeare’s fellow playwrights also used circumstances to compose “character” and “world.” As we might expect, it is Jonson who most fully savors the inferential probabilities of the topics. Although she offers some observations regarding Marlowe’s and Lyly’s practices, and a fascinating analysis of the psychological and political reach of “how” and “where” in Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy, these accounts, she admits, are just placeholders for future investigation. Given the vast erudition she manifests here, and her talent for ferreting out fresh meaning from familiar material, let us hope she will take up her own suggestion.Notes1. All quotations of Shakespeare are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). 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