I’m pleased to report that both the writing of my upcoming book on Shakespeare and the related online study group looking at King Lear are coming along swimmingly. Both have already yielded surprising results, at least from my point of view.
One of the surprises is that the general modern understanding of Shakespeare is woefully inadequate. I had never bothered to read the secondary literature on the Bard. I assumed it must be extensive and mostly high quality. After all, people have been obsessing over Shakespeare for hundreds of years. Every schoolkid is made to read his stories. There are constant film remakes, yearly festivals, and all the rest. We are saturated in Shakespeare. And, yet, the most popular analyses of King Lear or Hamlet from learned scholars on the subject are a bunch of hand-waving nonsense that seem custom-designed to miss the point.
In some respects, this is nothing new. Freud famously claimed that the story of Hamlet was an example of the Oedipus Complex, because apparently having your father murdered, your mother instantly remarried, and your ascent to the throne thwarted by your uncle is not good enough reason for a young man to get a little depressed. Must be unresolved mommy and daddy issues from childhood. Sure thing, Sigmund.
Another culprit is Spengler. He correctly identifies that Shakespeare elevates what he calls “incident” into “destiny”. But he contrasts this with other writers whose work is based on “causality”. Of these writers, he says, “Instead of the incident, we get a Problem.” By implication, Spengler is saying there are no “problems” in Shakespeare.
But this is the exact error that sits at the heart of so much of the shoddy analysis that passes for mainstream scholarship. King Lear has a problem to solve. Hamlet has a problem to solve. If you don’t know what their problem is then you can’t see that they are exercising their agency to try and solve it. The character ceases to be a full human and becomes some kind of fluffy abstraction. That is why we get Freud saying that Hamlet is just another example of the Oedipus Complex or Spengler saying that Lear’s innate character faults are passed down to his daughters, which completely ignores the fact that Lear’s favourite daughter, Cordelia, does not have any of the supposed failings of her father.
The absurdity is that the conflict between destiny and free will (what Spengler calls causality) is one of the main themes that Shakespeare deals with in all his plays. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in our selves. All of Shakespeare’s greatest heroes fight against destiny, not an abstract idea of destiny, but their own personal destiny embodied in a specific set of challenges that are simultaneously unique and general.
(If Spengler was honest with himself, he too was fighting against destiny. At least, the destiny of Germany. The way in which he misunderstood Shakespeare was the way in which he misunderstood himself).
Thus, the problem with seemingly all scholarly interpretations of Shakespeare, and stories more generally, is that they are ideological in nature. This practice became especially a problem in the 19th century. Let’s not even start with the idiotic Marxist interpretations. The psychoanalytic ones are not much better. The problem persists in our time with well-known commentators like Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom. Even one of my otherwise favourite bloggers, John Michael Greer, recently presented a long, waffling series of posts that completely missed the point of what Wagner was doing with the Ring Cycle and, especially, Parsifal.
All of this leads to the conclusion I reached in my last post. It really does seem that nobody has ever thought to deal with stories as stories because seemingly nobody has ever set out to ask the most basic of questions: what is a story? The closest we get is Aristotle’s work from more than two millennia ago and Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey concept, which was a great breakthrough but which he applied only to the subset of stories called “myths” and which suffered from its excessive devotion to Jungian theory.
What we need, then, is a method for understanding stories. This would be similar to the scientific method in that, once you have it, you can apply it to any domain. Of course, the scientific method is not applicable everywhere, and neither would a method of interpreting stories. But once you have learned the method, you should be able to analyse any story from an ancient tribal myth to Shakespeare to a TV cartoon.
Spengler was correct in this: stories are part of cultures. They embody a worldview. But that worldview only opens up once you have understood the story as a story. To do so requires the rigorous application of technique.
Why does any of this matter? Well, apart from unlocking the secret to a full understanding of the greatest storytellers, consider that the problem of ideology is not limited to literary analysis. Look at the world around us; we are drowning in ideology. Our entire political and cultural discourse is one group of ideologues screeching at another group. Each has only part of the story because each is viewing the world through a limited prism. These limited prisms cut down the meaning of what it is to be human. But, like humpty dumpty, you can’t reconstruct humanity from a set of fractured ideologies. Even if you try, the whole becomes far less than the sum of its parts. That is why we live in an anti-human age.
Shakespeare is the perfect antidote to all this because there is not an ounce of ideology in his work. There is just humanity in all its good and bad aspects. Shakespeare’s works are the crown jewels of secular humanism, which says with Terence, Augustine, and Montaigne, “I am a human, and nothing human is foreign to me.” As our society gets twisted and torn by ideologues on all sides, there’s never been a better time to learn what the Bard has to teach.
With that said, I’ll be extending the hiatus of the blog for another month so that I can focus my attention on the upcoming book where I hope to outline both the method of understanding stories and how that method unlocks the deeper meanings of Shakespeare.
In the same vein, I’d like to run another Shakespeare study group in March so I can get some more practice trying to communicate these ideas in a form that makes sense. This time, the text under study will be Hamlet.
Due to time zone differences, the current study group has been run in an asynchronous, text-based fashion using a Discord chatroom. I’m happy to do it that way again. However, if logistics enable it, I would love to try a once-a-week videoconference format.
If you are interested in taking part, I’ve set up a form where you can register your interest. Just put your details down, and I’ll follow up by email with further info. The group will run for four weeks beginning in early March, and you just need to have read or watched Hamlet before we start.
Otherwise, the blog should be back sometime in the middle of next month. See ya then.
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Addendum: I just realised that Shakespeare covered the problem of ideology in the story of Macbeth. The three witches give Macbeth statements that are true on the surface, but which contain hidden implications. Macbeth takes them to be eternal truths and stakes his entire future on them. He is brought undone by the fact that he is unable to conceive that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy (almost literally “dreamt” because he sees them while hallucinating via the witches’ brew).
Macbeth is highly prophetic since the 20th century saw this exact dynamic play out as a bunch of people were convinced they had whole truth (fascists, communists) when all they had were ideologies. They ended up killing as wantonly as Macbeth does.
