Rousell Redux

8/13/2019 Rousell Redux

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Shakespeare always presents both his ideas and his character types contrapuntally,

offering a response and a qualification, another way of looking at things, within the play

itself. Despite a concerted attempt to find it, there is no Shakespearean point of view,

so that claims like Shakespeare said or Shakespeare believed or Shakespeare tells

usclaims that sometimes seem to imply an authoritative and consistent philosophical

consciousnesscan always be eposed by looking at the contet of the quotation.Shakespeare!s plays do not have a single voice, a lyric ", or a focali#ed character

through whom the audience or reader is tacitly epected to interpret the play. $ven in the

etreme case of %amlet!s musings, or in the more general case of the dramatic soliloquy,

a powerful Shakespearean medium &often, again, ecerpted as if it were an embedded

lyric poem, a performance piece', the audience is given etensive evidence within the

play to (udge and evaluate the truth claims and ethical assertions that are so eloquently

set forth by these charismatic speakers.

)here has always been a productive tension between the idea of the play as a poem ora tet and the idea of the play as a performance. Some portions of Shakespeare!s plays

are inaccessible to us because they are made up of spectacles or performances rather

than words. $amples include the masque in )he )empest* the apparitions in +acbeth*

the tilt, or challenge, in ericles* the descended god -upiter in ymbeline* and music

throughout the comedies, including the music that is the food of love in /rsino!s

opening speech in )welfth 0ight, but that has, by the end of the speech, become not so

sweet now as it was before. 1attle scenes, like those in the $nglish history plays and in

2ntony and leopatra, are also moments of high visual interest and onstage action,

important to the tenor and pace of the play, and easy to underestimate &or skip over

entirely' if one reads the plays as literature rather than visuali#ing them as theater

Some of the earlier, unauthori#ed copies have their own liveliness, a freshness that

offers a glimpse of the spirit of this emerging and transgressive early modern theater. 2

good eample can be found in the much3maligned 4irst 5uarto version of one of

%amlet!s most famous speeches6

)o be or not to be", there!s the point,)o Die, to sleep, is that all7 ", all60o, to sleep, to

dream, ", mary, there it goes,4or in that dream of death, when we awake,2nd bornebefore an everlasting -udge,4rom whence no passenger ever returned,)he

undiscovered country, at whose sight)he happy smile, and the accursed damned.1ut for

this, the (oyful hope of this,8ho!d bear the scorns and flattery of the world,Scorned by

the right rich, the rich cursed of the poor7)he widow being oppressed, the orphan

wronged,)he taste of hunger, or a tyrant!s reign,2nd thousand more calamities

besides,)o grunt and sweat under this weary life,8hen that he his full quietus make,8ith

a bare bodkin, who would this endure,1ut for a hope of something after death78hich


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pu##les the brain, and doth confound the sense, 8hich makes us rather bear those evils

we have,)han fly to others that we know not of.", that, / this conscience makes cowards

of us all9.

%amlet, 4irst 5uarto, :.;.?;

Shakespeare appears very frequently in @eats!s letters, never more powerfully than in

his celebrated notion of negative capability, in which he described his sudden reali#ation,

after a debate with a very definite3minded friend, of the essential quality to form a +an

of 2chievement especially in Aiterature and which Shakespeare possessed so

enormously" mean 0egative apability, that is when man is capable of being in

uncertainties, +ysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.;B 2

poet, especially a great poet, needs to leave his mind open to ideas and to conflicting

realities, and the preeminent model for this was Shakespeare. )he poetical haracter

avoids the egotistical sublime, @eats wrote in another letter. "t has no character9. "t

has as much delight in conceiving an "ago as an "mogen.;C "ago is here imagined as

the arch3villain.

eter 1rook!s landmark production of 2 +idsummer 0ight!s Dream at the oyal

Shakespeare )heatre in ;EF= transformed the play, taking what had been a vehicle for

gau#y sets and lambent lighting and transforming it into a white space with toys and a

trape#e. 1ut before him, +a einhardt in Germany had sensed something else about

the Dream, something dark and dangerous. 8hen einhardt came to %ollywood in the

years before 8orld 8ar "", he made a film of 2 +idsummer 0ight!s Dream, with +ickey

ooney as uck and -oe $. 1rown as 4lute, that told another story about the play.

The identity of

words-the simple, fundamental fact of language, thatthere are fewer terms of designation than there are things

to designate-is itself a two-sided experience: it reveals

words as the unexpected meeting place of the most distant

figures of reality. (It is distance abolished; at the point of

contact, differences are brought together in a uniue

form: dual, ambiguous, !inotaur-li"e.# It demonstrates


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the duality of language which starts from a simple core,

divides itself in two, and produces new figures. (It$s a proliferation

of distance, a void created in the wa"e of the

double, a labyrinthine extension of corridors which seem

similar and yet are different.#

In their wealth of poverty

words always refer away from and lead bac" to themselves;

The Cushions of the Billiard Table

they are lost and found again; they fix a vanishing point on

the hori%on by repeated division, and then return to the

starting point in a perfect curve. The mystified guests

must have reali%ed this while going around the billiard

table, when they discovered that the straight line of words

was identical to their circular path.

&ighteenth-century grammarians well understood thismarvelous property of language to extract wealth from its

own poverty. In their purely empirical concept of signs,

they admired the way a word was capable of separating

itself from the visible form to which it was tied by its 'signification'

in order to settle on another form, designating

it with an ambiguity which is both its resource and limitation.

t that point language indicates the source of an

internal movement; its ties to its meaning can undergo a

metamorphosis without its having to change its form, as if

it had turned in on itself, tracing around a fixed point (the'meaning' of the word, as they used to say# a circle of

possibilities which allows for chance, coincidence, effects,

and all the rules of the game.

)et$s consult *umarsais,+ one of the subtlest grammarians

of the period: 'The same words obviously had to be

used in different ways. It$s been found that this admirable

expedient could ma"e discourse more energetic and

pleasing. or has it been overloo"ed that it could be

turned into a game and a source of pleasure. Thus by

necessity and by choice, words are often turned away fromtheir original meaning to ta"e on a new one which is more

or less removed but that still maintains a connection. This

new meaning is called $tropological,$ and this conversion,

this turning away which produces it, is called a $trope.$ 'In

the space created by this displacement, all the forms of

rhetoric come to life-the twists and turns, as *umarsais+esar *umarsais,Les Tropes, vols. (/aris, 0101#. The first edition is dated 023-.


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*&T4 * T4& )567IT4

would put it: catachresis, metonymy, metalepsis, synecdoche,

antonomasia, litotes, metaphors, hypallage, and

many other hieroglyphs drawn by the rotation of words

into the voluminous mass of language.

7oussel$s experiment is located in what could be calledthe 'tropological space' of vocabulary. It$s not uite the

grammarian$s space, or rather it is this same space, but

treated differently. It is not where the canonical figures of

speech originate, but that neutral space within language

where the hollowness of the word is shown as an insidious

void, arid and a trap. 7oussel considers this game, which

rhetoric exploited to extend its meaning, as a gap that

is stretched open as wide as possible and meticulously

measured. 4e felt there is, beyond the uasi-liberties of

expression, an absolute emptiness of being that he mustsurround, dominate, and overwhelm with pure invention:

that is what he calls, in opposition to reality, thought

('8ith me imagination is everything'#. 4e doesn$t want to

duplicate the reality of another world, but, in the spontaneous

duality of language, he wants to discover an unexpected

space, and to cover it with things never said before.

The forms he will construct above this void will methodicallyreverse the 'elements of style.' 3tyle is-according to

the necessity of the words used-the possibility, mas"ed

and identified at the same time, of saying the same thingbut in other ways. ll of 7oussel$s language, in its reversal

of style, surreptitiously tries to say two things with the same

words. The twisting, slight turn of words which ordinarilyallows them to ma"e a tropological 'move' that brings

into play their fundamental freedom is used by 7oussel to

form an inexorable circle which returns words to their

point of origin by force of his constraining rules.

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Rousell Redux