Words, Words, Words

Preview

I am neither a Shakespeare scholar, nor a specialist in drama studies, nor a theatre critic. I’m just a theatregoer, reader, and I enjoy Shakespeare. I wrote these essays with people like me in mind, typical theatregoers, not drama scholars, people who enjoy watching a performance and give but a fragile¹ thought to the messages conveyed from the stage. My essays are an attempt to engage in an exchange of ideas with my anonymous fellow-playgoer. Perhaps they will inspire him to think over the plays he has watched and take another look at the words that are said, or maybe to create new narratives of his own …

This book consists of sixteen essays presenting my thoughts on the works of Shakespeare. Reading many of his plays and seeing them performed on the stage has conjured up a lot of impressions and ideas which I have never articulated before. I am a philosopher, so quite naturally, my discourse will be speculative and philosophical in character. The book is a pretext to put down my ideas and impressions on paper.

Writing about Shakespeare is not easy or straightforward, not only for objective reasons. You should know that Polish theatregoers have never enjoyed a particularly strong status in their country’s theatre affairs. Polish directors and actors have always seen the audience as the part of the house that makes up the background to their work, or sometimes – to call a spade a spade – the thought in the back of their mind was that the audience was there to make the show a box office hit. Over the past decades, the relationship between the actor and his audience was marked by a specific tutelage. The actor was the viewer’s mentor and authority; he held this status regardless of how good he was professionally, and at times was liable to fall into megalomania. The COVID-19 pandemic changed all this. It turned out that an empty audience has a destructive effect on the very essence of theatre and psychologically is a bad influence on the actors, something they had never experienced before. Suddenly, the truism that the playgoer is an indispensable part of theatre acquired a new emphasis. But was it strong enough to grant the spectator the right to voice an opinion to be reckoned with? Does watching or reading the plays of Shakespeare qualify you to put your ideas down on paper? Well, of course – anyone may write down whatever they want to.

Some time ago, the Gdańsk Museum organised a preview of the work of a well-known painter generally associated with surrealism and magical realism. My collection of essays was nearly finished. When I went to see the exhibition, I experienced a strange emotion. On closer examination, the pictures which at first glance looked magical lost their appeal, and a surfeit of content and a none-too-good quality of the painter’s workshop showed up. It all gave the impression of having been painted by an efficient amateur. This rather brusque reflection made me reconsider writing this book. I looked over my comments and had second thoughts. Were all the readings I was offering relevant for the reception of Shakespeare? Weren’t some of them a wee bit exalted? And then another thought came to me. Perhaps that painter wasn’t painting to make his pictures perfect or innovative but simply for the sheer fun of painting and for people who like his kind of art. About six thousand pictures were painted every year in seventeenth-century Holland, and most of them were purchased. That volume of output produced in a country as small as Holland included works by Vermeer, Hals, and Rembrandt. The widespread practice of art tends to raise its quality and the quality of its reception. Likewise with this book: basically, it’s not meant to be yet another work of scholarship or novel approach to Shakespeare; it’s supposed to be an insight in its own right, a personal commentary, not overly insistent on the statements it ventures to put forward. If I were to rewrite it after a year or two, it would no doubt be different on at least two counts: first, every time you take a new look at the work of a genius of the Thespian arts, you open up to new areas of experience and ideas, and second, each time you encounter such a genius, you yourself have undergone something of a change as a reader.

What prompted me to write on the works of Shakespeare were reasons which seemed quite obvious. The first was his uniqueness, the multifaceted and philosophical nature of his plays. The second was that I had been in close touch with his work for years, adding to my experience by attending the annual Gdańsk Shakespeare Festival. My third reason was more literary: Shakespeare’s multidimensional language full of metaphor and awesome punch lines, moments of stupendous poetry, intriguing plots and ambivalent characters. All this had been encouraging me to collect up my thoughts. But it was not until I read Truth and Method by the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer that I decided to put them down on paper.

In his opus vitae, Gadamer reviews the relationship between the artist and his recipient, underpinning the status of the latter and encouraging him to speak up. Gadamer says that not only does the dramatic artist find support in the idea of the playgoer, but the very presence of playgoers is of signal import for the construction of the performance about to be presented on the stage. He says that the place the spectator commands in the theatre is so important that he is incorporated into the tragedy. This confirms the key role the playgoer plays in the play. The way he plays his part highlights the sense in the dramatic configuration. If its coherence is dissipated, then a tragedy which should be played out and viewed as a unified series of tragic events loses its raison d’être.²

The phenomenon of every theatre production is created when three parties, the playwright, the director and actors, and the spectators meet and interact with each other. On each occasion it is a unique and individual experience, and gives rise to a one-off narrative. The same play, put on again in the same theatre and viewed by the same playgoer conjures up a different impression, lets him reinterpret it differently, and gives a different end result. “The same viewer” is now a different viewer; the same actors are now different actors. Each and every performance is always played out in a uniquely different, intimate playwright–theatre–audience triangle.

In the early 1990s, Witold Lutosławski and Mikołaj Górecki, two giants in the history of Polish music, made a broadcast on Polish radio in which they talked about something they had both experienced on several occasions. They wondered why it was that when they were giving a concert in some place, with their orchestra playing to audiences with a diverse taste of sophistication, sometimes (though seldom!) they would establish an extraordinary rapport with the audience. At such times, the special atmosphere made the music they played unique, and everyone – the conductor, the musicians, and the listeners – felt it. But when they conducted the same orchestra playing the same music in the same hall the following day, to an audience made up of people from the same locality, they could never recreate that atmosphere. Both composers agreed there was something mysterious about great art which sometimes for reasons unknown breaks free of the bounds of reality and lets its partakers feel this transcendence. It happens thanks to a singular kind of magic, made by the place, the people, and the moment in time. At such times the feel of the art, the perception of the music turned into something extraordinary and out of this world. That’s what sometimes happens with the works of Shakespeare: to experience and appreciate them profoundly and authentically, you need to have special circumstances, which sometimes can actually be conjured up.

With drama, there are other conditions which must be met than those for music. Understanding the words is extremely important. The performer of a play presents his interpretation of the script and adapts it in his own way. Gadamer puts a question: can the full sense of a text – any text – be expressed unless it is received by a recipient who understands it? In other words, is understanding and appreciation part and parcel of the expression of the sense of a text, just as performance expresses the sense of a piece of music? Can we still speak of understanding and appreciation if we treat the sense of a text as liberally as a musician treats the music he is playing or as an actor treats the lines he is saying?³

Shakespeare’s texts are often subject to alterations, drastic cuts and omissions. Sometimes some characters, scenes, or even entire subplots are skipped. Such measures need not dilute the main plot, but there is a condition which must be met. The director must not take a clichéd approach to the play but manage to pinpoint its essential message and incorporate it in the aspect which is of special interest to him. Providing he pursues and develops one of the problems in which the works of Shakespeare abound, arrives at an authentic reading, which he can only do if he is fully committed, and transmits it in the language of today.

Reading a play is a purely internal process. A play presented in public or in a stage performance must, I believe, be fully free of all circumstantial and incidental occurrence. The paramount requisite in literature is the linguistic message and discovering it by reading the text.⁴ This idea of Gadamer’s is applicable primarily to great works of literature. In spite of having been created in different circumstances, relating to a world that no longer exists, and read many years later, works of this kind still present us with their author’s message, and sometimes with even more, if the work happens to carry values and contents which their creator did not intend to put into them. Irrespectively of the moment in history when such a text is received, it still conveys its message to the reader thanks to the universal values inherent in it. Gadamer explains why and how this phenomenon occurs:

What belongs to world literature has its place in the consciousness of all. It belongs to the “world.” Now the world which considers a work to belong to world literature may be far removed from the original world in which this work was born. It is at any rate no longer the same “world.” But even then the normative sense contained in the idea of world literature means that works that belong to world literature remain eloquent although the world to which they speak is quite different. … Thus it is by no means the case that world literature is an alienated form of that which constitutes the mode of being of a work according to its original purpose. It is rather the historical mode of being of literature that makes it possible for something to belong to world literature.⁵

A text can be trustworthy and consistent with truth despite the lapse of time on account of its universality and undeniable greatness, which makes it comprehensible at every point in time.

As in conversation, understanding must here seek to strengthen the meaning of what is said. What is stated in the text must be detached from all contingent factors and grasped in its full ideality, in which alone it has validity. Thus, precisely because it entirely detaches the sense of what is said from the person saying it, the written word makes the reader, in his understanding of it, the arbiter of its claim to truth. The reader experiences in all its validity what is addressed to him and what he understands.⁶

True masterpieces convey truths which refer to the universal values of our culture. The great tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides have not lost anything of their currency despite the fact that they were created two and a half thousand years ago. The task of the creator of a performance is to extract those truths from the text, grasp the meaning of ancient texts, and bring a defunct language back to life. He will only be able to accomplish this if he reads and deciphers them, and transposes them into the language of today, and into the problems which he understands, which have affected or hurt him.

This brings us to the second aspect of the relationship between language and understanding. Not only is the special object of understanding, namely literary tradition, of a linguistic nature, but understanding itself has a fundamental connection with language … understanding is already interpretation because it creates the hermeneutical horizon within which the meaning of a text is realised. But in order to be able to express the meaning of a text in its objective content we must translate it into our own language. This, however, involves relating it to the whole complex of possible meanings in which we linguistically move.⁷

The banal observation that Shakespeare’s plays are being reread anew all the time is well-founded. A director working on a Shakespeare play faces a problem which crops up every time a masterpiece is to be put on the stage, and is especially important if the masterpiece in question is one of Shakespeare’s plays. It’s not enough to play them well, so you can say something; you have to know what you want to say by playing Shakespeare. The plays of Shakespeare are so rich and profound they can be performed in an infinite number of different ways, you just have to have a reason to do it. That is the key factor determining the quality of your production. That is how to bring your spectators into the play, which is to be played out between the drama, its director, and the viewer. Brought in to play out the drama, the viewer will catch the sense of the play and, as Gadamer put it, he will join in the tragedy as it is played out.⁸

If the director has a problem to solve, personal or philosophical, or concerning worldview or anything else, if he takes an emotional attitude to his problem and decides to resolve it using Shakespeare, he stands a good chance of making his production a major event in Gadamer’s sense of the term “play.” If he is not in such a situation, his chances of creating a good production will plummet. If you don’t have the right approach to the works of Shakespeare it would be better for you, the play and its audience not to start at all. You can’t play Shakespeare if you keep cool as a cucumber, professionally distanced off, because it will show in the performance, you won’t manage to cover it up.

You won’t understand the language of a literary work if you don’t see any connections in it with our present-day problems; if the play you are offering is a fake and does not make much sense.

As we were able to show that the being of the work of art is play which needs to be perceived by the spectator in order to be completed, so it is universally true of texts that only in the process of understanding is the dead trace of meaning transformed back into living meaning.⁹

Understanding the text of the play a director intends to put on the stage will help him bring it to life and endow it with a legible meaning. The full reception of a literary work is achieved when it resonates with the reader. Gadamer writes,

Our understanding is not specifically concerned with the achievement of form that belongs to it as a work of art, but with what it says to us.¹⁰

Its text will deliver up its sense if you establish an authentic dialogue with it.

There is a singular difference between the plays of Shakespeare and other literary masterpieces. To explain it, let me once again quote Gadamer:

These differences can certainly also be considered from the point of view of literary form. But the essential difference of these various “languages” obviously lies elsewhere: namely, in the distinction between the claims to truth that each makes.¹¹

If the producer or business manager of the theatre decides to “do Shakespeare” and chooses a play at random, while the director has plenty of ideas and puts on a spectacular première full of theatrical fireworks, usually the result is that you won’t find any meaningful references to today’s problems in such a production. A performance will be put on, it will be efficient but lifeless. There won’t be much of Shakespeare in it, not even if the jury of the festival awards it the Golden Yorick.

Gadamer argues in Truth and Method that play is the essence of a work of art. Play is accomplished when the spectator effects his reception as mediated by the performers of the show. However, the lifeless sense of the text cannot be brought back to life until the spectator grasps its meaning. A performance does not acquire a sense unless it has a spectator, just as a written text must have a reader to bring it back to life. The text of a stage play is activated first by its performers, while the spectator may compare the “live sense” they offer him with how he understands the text. Understanding the text – its appreciation – is the key factor in the appraisal of the play, and hence the exceptional status of the spectator, who determines the quality and sense of what is offered in the performance. A work of art is accomplished only during its presentation; a work of literature is materialised only by its reception. The sense of all texts whatsoever is fully accomplished only once they acquire a recipient who can understand them – who can make sense of them. In other words, understanding – appreciation – is part and parcel of fully achieving the sense of a text.¹²

The aim of my scrutiny of the plays of Shakespeare was to arrive at a fairly detailed, close appreciation of their sense. Since text appreciation is the key component of the play a dramatist offers, then as soon as we become its spectators, we are straightaway drawn into his play, displaying its sense and aware of the unique and individual nature of what we are experiencing. The individual nature of text appreciation is the basic and non-negotiable issue. These essays present my own, intimate and very personal reception of Shakespeare and do not aspire to be a universally valid review. They are a bit like looking at Caravaggio’s paintings of stories from the Bible, history or chronicles, but in the painter’s narrative, to which we in turn apply our own filter composed of what we know, our sensitivity and imagination, what we have read, seen, and experienced. Some of these emotions and intuitions are so intimate or ephemeral that they can’t be put into words, but that doesn’t make them any less important – perhaps they’re even more important – than all the rest. They are the prevailing emotions and intuitions one experiences whenever one encounters a text in an extraordinary, well-nigh mystical atmosphere. It’s rather like the situation with dark matter, which cannot be seen or felt but there is far more of it than can be seen, and the world could not have come into existence without it.

To paraphrase Heidegger, for me these essays have been like a clearing, which suddenly comes to light and is experienced in the here and now. It is not fully articulated, yet it offers a response to those experiences and emotions conjured up during a performance.

These essays are a special type of dialogue with the texts of Shakespeare’s plays and have assumed the form of an idiosyncratic platform for a discussion to which I invite philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and historians. The ideas my guests present have helped me build the bridges to connect up my impressions on reading the works of Shakespeare. I have followed Gadamer’s theory of the reception of works of art to select my speakers and interpret their enunciations, as determined by the Shakespearian texts I consider and the feelings I experienced in a second encounter with them, that is while watching them being performed.

My essays contain references to books I have read which ostensibly have no connection either with Shakespeare or any of his plays. Yet all of them have inspired one or other of my comments. Together they constitute a signal context, sometimes distant, sometimes based on the principle of free association, yet always salient. They open up new, previously unknown intellectual spaces which were waiting hidden away in the depths of my sub-conscious like a compactified extra dimension which suddenly unfolds and reveals worlds previously unknown.

The tools I borrowed from philosophy and other disciplines of scholarship and applied in my enquiries to arrive at a better understanding of a Shakespearean text sometimes turned out to fall short of giving a full description of the reader’s world. The resources of language fall short of facilitating a full description. I found it hard to verbalise many of my emotions, experiences, and impressions, basically possible only on an existential level. Many of my attempts at a description from the essential aspect look shallow, lame, and incomplete.

The world Shakespeare originally described is separated from our world by the distance of time, yet his works still speak to us, inspire and stimulate us. Although we are now living in a different world, we can still read the sense of his plays holistically, yet driven along a hermeneutic spiral, we are reaching deeper down into his meanings and expanding their range. Genuine masterpieces, which carry timeless truths and invoke universal cultural values transcend their symbolic locution, and the language of poetry is one of the few universal means available to man to experience transcendence.

I have concentrated on philosophical and cultural aspects, generally passing over issues concerning Shakespeare’s language and how it has been treated by Polish translators. Though of course language is an extremely important ingredient of each of his works, generating its music and atmosphere, stimulating the tension in it and creating an experiential space. Many of Shakespeare’s expressions and phrases have turned into English idioms, and his translators have grafted them into the cultural code of their languages as well, providing keys to new, instantly clear conceptual fields. I have also passed over this very important aspect in Shakespeare, in the belief that I may admire but cannot analyse it because I do not have the right qualifications.

Does philosophy offer a good perspective for viewing the works of Shakespeare? Some people may say that in the twenty-first century, with its predominance of the natural sciences, philosophy has turned into a relic of the past. According to Tadeusz Gadacz, the twentieth century produced well over a hundred eminent philosophers who all left their mark on the discipline with their new systems. By the turn of the century, the trend ground to a halt and philosophy is no longer a magnet attracting brilliant minds. This role has been taken over by physics, astrophysics, cosmology, computer science, and biology. Scholarship has witnessed the ascent of the particularised sciences, which allure the geniuses of today.¹³

Yet I will observe that sometimes philosophy did not receive much esteem in the past, either. As far back as the times of Plato, at the very beginning of its career, philosophy and its followers did not enjoy a good opinion. Several passages in the Dialogues of Plato show this. In his conversation with Socrates in Book Six of Plato’s Republic, Adeimantus says,

… of those who turn to philosophy, not merely touching upon it to complete their education and dropping it while still young, but lingering too long in the study of it, the majority become cranks, not to say rascals, and those accounted the finest spirits among them are still rendered useless to society by the pursuit which you commend.¹⁴

In Gorgias, Callicles criticises philosophy as a scholarly discipline which is not serious:

For philosophy, you know, Socrates, is a charming thing, if a man has to do with it moderately in his younger days; but if he continues to spend his time on it too long, it is ruin to any man. … It is a fine thing to partake of philosophy just for the sake of education, and it is no disgrace for a lad to follow it: but when a man already advancing in years continues in its pursuit, the affair, Socrates, becomes ridiculous: and for my part I have much the same feeling towards students of philosophy as towards those who lisp or play tricks. For when I see a little child, to whom it is still natural to talk in that way, lisping or playing some trick, I enjoy it, and it strikes me as pretty and ingenuous and suitable to the infant’s age; whereas if I hear a small child talk distinctly, I find it a disagreeable thing, and it offends my ears and seems to me more befitting a slave. But when one hears a grown man lisp, or sees him play tricks, it strikes one as something ridiculous and unmanly, that deserves a whipping. Just the same, then, is my feeling towards the followers of philosophy. For when I see philosophy in a young lad I approve of it; I consider it suitable, and I regard him as a person of liberal mind; whereas one who does not follow it I account illiberal and never likely to expect of himself any fine or generous action. But when I see an elderly man still going on with philosophy and not getting rid of it, that is the gentleman, Socrates, whom I think in need of a whipping.¹⁵

Socrates finishes the long discussion with his opponent by exhorting him to follow him on the road of philosophy, as it is the road for happiness in this life and after death. Dear Reader, once you have read these sixteen essays, decide for yourself which of these attitudes, Callicles’ or Socrates’, suits you better. Shakespeare probably did not know this passage from Gorgias, and maybe that is why there is such a lot of philosophy in his works; but even if he did know Callicles’ opinion, he might simply have begged to differ.