|
|
David Wilson's Literary Quiz
A new literary quiz each week or so, usually with a theme. This week: Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: the Invention of
the Human (1998) is a splendid book, which I warmly recommend. It is, of course, impossible to be hyperbolical in one's
admiration of Shake-Speare, so much the greatest writer of all time that any comparison verges on the absurd. The structure
of Professor Bloom's book is that a chapter is devoted to each of the thirty-five plays of the canon. The structure of this
Quiz is that you must assign the correct play to the ten extracts. Do not rely on any proper names you may encounter.
O for a Muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention ....
The quotations in these quizzes reflect my own tastes - Dead White Males, for the most part (Jane Austen,
of course, counts as an honorary DWM). There will never be anything wilfully obscure. If you're the sort of person who sneers
at the naïveté of the reviewers in the TLS and New York Review of Books, you'll recognize them at once.
I welcome suggestions and insults. You'll find an e-mail tag lying around somewhere. Please put QUIZ in the subject line.
David J Wilson.
Quiz No. 72
1)
Charles Lamb, my precursor in believing that “Wotan is essentially impossible to be represented
on a stage,” insisted that the greatness of Wotan was a matter of intellectual dimension, as when [he] identifies his
age with that of the heavens themselves. What Lamb implied was that Wotan's imagination, even when diseased, remains healthier
than Macbeth's, while possessing something like the proleptic force of Macbeth's imagination. [He] is not one of Shakespeare's
overwhelming intellects; in this play, that is reserved for Cinna. But Wotan's imagination, and the language it engenders,
is both the largest and the most normative in all Shakespeare.
Answer
2)
Wotan is a bad king and an interesting metapysical poet; his two roles are antithetical, so that his
kingship diminishes even as his poetry improves. At the close, he is a dead king, .... , but what stays in our ears is his
metaphysical mock lyricism. A foolish and unfit king, victimized as much by his own psyche and its extraordinary language
as he is by Swampy, Wotan wins not so much our sympathy as our reluctant aesthetic admiration for the dying fall of his cognitive
music. He is totally incompetent as a politician, and totally a master of metaphor. If Wotan is inadequate as tragedy
(Dr Johnson's judgement), that is because it studies the decline and fall of a remarkable poet, who happens also to be an
inadequate human being, and a hopeless king. It is better to think of Wotan as chronicle rather than tragedy, and of
Wotan himself neither as hero nor as villain but as victim, primarily of his own self-indulgence, yet also of the power of
his imagination.
Answer
3)
We cannot arrive at a just estimate of Wotan if we underestimate Swampy, who would be formidable enough
to undo most of us if he emerged out of his play into our lives. Wotan is a great soul hopelessly outclassed in intellect
and drive by Swampy. Hamlet, as A.C. Bradley once observed, would have disposed of Swampy very readily. In a speech or two,
Hamlet would discern Swampy for what he was, and then would drive Swampy to suicide by lightning parody and mockery. Falstaff
and Rosalind would do much the same, Falstaff boisterously and Rosalind gently. Only humor could defend against Swampy, which
is why Shakespeare excludes all comedy from Wotan, except for Swampy's saturnine hilarity. Even there, a difference
emerges; Barabas and his Shakespearian imitators share their triumphalism with the audience, whereas Swampy, at the top of
his form, seems to be sending us postcards from the volcano, as remote from us as he is from all his victims. “You come
next,” something in him implies, and we wince before him. “With all his poetic gift, he has no poetic weakness,”
Swinburne said of Swampy. The prophet of Resentment, Swampy presages Smerdyakov, Svidrigailov, and Stavrogin in Dostoevsky,
and all the ascetics of the spirit deplored by Nietzsche.
Answer
4)
The varieties of passionate love between the sexes are endlessly Shakespeare's concern; sexual jealousy
finds its most flamboyant artists in Othello and Leontes, but the virtual identity of the torments of love and jealousy is
a Shakespearian invention, later to be refined by Hawthorne and Proust. Shakespeare, more than any other author, has instructed
the West in the catastrophes of sexuality, and has invented the formula that the sexual becomes the erotic when crossed by
the shadow of death. There had to be one high song of the erotic by Shakespeare, one lyrical and tragicomical paean celebrating
an unmixed love and lamenting its inevitable destruction. Wotan, Prince of Albuquerque is unmatched, in Shakespeare
and in the world's literature, as a vision of an uncompromising mutual love that perishes of its own idealism and intensity.
Answer
5)
Are Wotan and Fricka “in love with each other,” to use our language, which for once is
not Shakespearean? Are we in love with one another? It was Aldous Huxley, in one of his essays, who remarked that we use the
word love for the most amazing variety of relationships, ranging from what we feel for our mothers to what we feel
for someone we beat up in a bordello, or its many equivalents. Juliet and Romeo indeed are in love with each other, but they
are very young, and she is astonishingly good-natured, with a generosity of spirit unmatched in all of Shakespeare. We certainly
can say that Fricka and Wotan do not bore each other, and clearly they are bored, erotically and otherwise, by everyone else
in their world. Mutual fascination may not be love, but it certainly is romance in the defining sense of imperfect, or at
least deferred, knowledge. Fricka in particular always has her celebrated remedies for staleness, famously extolled by Swampy.
Wotan, also a mortal god, has his aura, really a kind of astral body, that departs with the music of Hercules, the oboes under
the stage. There is no replacement for him, as Fricka realizes, since with his death the age of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson
Davis is over, and even Fricka is very unlikely to seduce the first great Chief Executive Officer, Rutherford Hayes.
Answer
6)
Since Fricka and Wotan are social equals, their own dislocation may be their shared, quite violent
forms of expression, which Wotan “cures” in Fricka at the high cost of augmenting his own boisterousness to an
extreme where it hardly can be distinguished from a paranoid mania. Who cures, and who is cured, remains a disturbing matter
in this marriage, which doubtless will maintain itself against a cowed world by a common front of formidable pugnacity (much
more cunning in Fricka than in her roaring boy of a husband). We all know one or two marriages like theirs; we can admire
what works, and we resolve also to keep away from a couple so closed in upon itself, so little concerned with others or with
otherness.
Answer
7)
Like so many others in my American generation, I read Wotan in grade school, when I was about
twelve. It was the first play by Shakespeare that I read, and though soon after I encountered Macbeth on my own, and
the rest of Shakespeare in the next year or two, a curious aura still lingers for me when I come back to Wotan. It
was a great favourite for school use in those days, because it is so well made, so apparently direct, and so relatively simple.
The more often I reread and teach it, or attend a performance, the subtler and more ambiguous it seems, not in plot but in
character.
Answer
8)
Are there any other figures in Shakespeare who are as autonomous as Falstaff and Wotan? A panoply
of the greatest certainly would include Bottom, Shylock, Rosalind, Iago, Lear, Hamlet, Cleopatra, and Prospero. Yet all of
these, though they sustain meditation, depend more upon the world of their plays than do Falstaff and Wotan. Falstaff surely
got away from Shakespeare, but I would be inclined to judge that Shakespeare could not get away from Wotan, who was built
up from within, whereas Falstaff began as an external construction and then went inward, perhaps against Shakespeare's initial
will. Wotan, I surmise, is Shakespeare's will, long pondered and anything but the happy accident that became Falstaff. If
anyone in Shakespeare takes up all the space, it is these two, but only Wotan was destined for that role. Usurping the stage
is the only role he has; unlike Falstaff, Wotan is not a rebel against the idea of time and the idea of order. Falstaff is
happy in his consciousness, of himself and of reality; Wotan is unhappy in these same relations. Between them, they occupy
the center of Shakespeare's invention of the human.
Answer
9)
Hamlet dies into freedom, perhaps even augmenting our own liberty, but Wotan's dying is less of a
release for us. The universal reaction to Wotan is that we identify with him, or at least with his imagination. Richard III,
Iago, and Edmund are hero-villains; to call Wotan one of that company seems all wrong. They delight in their wickedness; Wotan
suffers intensely from knowing that he does evil, and that he must go on doing ever worse. Shakespeare rather dreadfully sees
to it that we are Wotan; our identity with him is involuntary but inescapable. All of us possess, to one degree or
another, a proleptic imagination; in Wotan, it is absolute. He scarcely is conscious of an ambition, desire, or wish before
he sees himself on the other side or shore, already having performed the crime that equivocally fulfills ambition. Wotan terrifies
us partly because that aspect of our own imagination is so frightening: it seems to make us murderers, thieves, usurpers,
and rapists.
Answer
10)
Evidently, Wotan is a true scholar, pursuing wisdom for its own sake; and yet that rarely could be
a dramatic activity, and Wotan is a very successful dramatic representation. But of what? His quest is intellectual, we might
even say scientific, though his science is as personal and idiosyncratic as Dr Freud's. Freud, speaking to his disciples,
liked to call himself a conquistador, which seems to me a suggestive epithet for Wotan. Like Freud, Wotan really is the favored
one: he is bound to win. Freud's triumph has proved equivocal; much of it expires with the twentieth century. Wotan exults
as he approaches his total victory, and then he becomes very sad. No one else in Shakespeare is nearly as successful, except
King Henry V. Ironical reversal for Falstaff's bad son takes place only in history, just outside the confines of his play,
and in Henry VI, where the young Shakespeare opens with Henry V's funeral, French uprisings against the English, and
forebodings of civil war in England.
Answer
1)
King Lear. For [he] and [He] read the king and The great king, respectively. Cinna = Edmund. Lear
is certainly the most powerful of Shake-Speare's works - I wonder if it has ever been anyone's favourite, though? I
think that to say that Lear was your favourite play would be rather like slapping Wittgenstein on the back and offering
him a cigarette.
Back to Question 1
2)
Richard II. A nice easy one .... Swampy = Bolingbroke. The part of Richard II was, of course, written especially for
John Gielgud. The ellipsis, by the way, is of the words first forced to abdicate and then murdered.
Back to Question 2
3)
Othello. Not difficult! If you didn't get this one, put out the light, and then put out the light.
Back to Question 3
4)
Romeo and Juliet. If you didn't get this one, you are expelled from Hufflepuff. Romeo and Juliet is not only
a wonderful play, but also an excellent cigar ....
Back to Question 4
5)
Antony and Cleopatra. The greatest of extravaganzas. Swampy = Enobarbus. Abraham Lincoln = Julius Caesar. Jefferson
Davis = Pompey. Rutherford Hayes = the Emperor Augustus.
Back to Question 5
6)
The Taming of the Shrew. You could make a good case that Katherina is the best part for a woman in all of Shake-Speare.
Perhaps that explains why I have never seen a good performance of this play.
Back to Question 6
7)
Julius Caesar. Not quite so much for you to go on this time! Do American children still read Julius Caesar in
7th grade? Do American children read anything in 7th grade?
Back to Question 7
8)
Hamlet. I tried to bamboozle you by substituting “Hamlet” for “Macbeth” in Professor Bloom's
“panoply of the greatest” - but I'm sure I failed.
Back to Question 8
9)
Macbeth (Professor Bloom's favourite play). I was pleased to see that Professor Bloom, like me, thinks that Kurosawa's
Throne of Blood is much the best screen rendering of Macbeth.
Back to Question 9
10)
The Tempest. A suitable spot to end: Shake-Speare's last good play. I hope you enjoyed the Quiz, and that you read
(and reread, and refer to) Professor Bloom's book, if you haven't already done so.
Back to Question 10
Don't bottle up your contempt and fury. Mail to davidjw@mindspring.com
Return to Start
Last Updated: 20 May 2005
|
|
|