Gobsmacked

Letters

Vol. 20 No. 16 · 20 August 1998

From Peter Platt

Michael Dobson claims (LRB, 16 July) that I have no sense of Shakespeare’s ironic perspective on the marvellous tradition with which he was involved: I am, he says, ‘alarmingly deaf to Shakespeare’s wry sense of the corniness of some of his own dabblings in this area’. Here, as in several places in the review, I wondered whether Dobson finished my book. All of the Shakespeare chapters, and especially the one on The Tempest, highlight Shakespeare’s use and scrutiny of the marvellous: ‘Shakespeare interrogates both sides of the issue by at once satirising and championing the power of wonder,’ I wrote.

To recognise that I have some sense of Shakespeare’s self-critical, self-mocking tactics would make it very difficult for Dobson to sustain the central distortion of the review: that mine is an overly pious, ‘New Age’, ‘sacramental Shakespeare … a purveyor of sacred mysteries’. To write about Shakespearean wonder, for Dobson, is almost inevitably to disfigure ‘a remarkably secular body of plays’. My Shakespeare is, in fact, a very secular one; the book claims that the figure of wonder – and what Shakespeare does with it – inevitably resists both Christian and critical pieties.

Dobson claims that, in order to be faithful to what he sees as the truth about Early Modern wonder, I should have paid more attention to material, popular cultural and political forms of wonder. He laments the absence of analyses of catchpennies, broadsides and pamphlets. These are not the focus of my book, though I admit in my Preface that there is very interesting work to be done in this area. I also spend several pages in Chapter 3 on wonder books and prodigy pamphets, which were hardly the stuff of an élite culture. Recognising the way in which wonder could be manipulated by those in power, I explored the political uses of the marvellous in court masques. Popular culture and politics were not central to my book, but they were not ‘strenuously resisted’.

My book, Dobson says, does not discuss ‘the way a distinctively Shakespearean version of wonder arose from its social and historical context’, and thus wants to ‘preserve that wonder from the threat of any explanation at all’. This is not so: but my explanations of some of the ways that Shakespearean wonder developed are different from his own. I thought Terence Hawkes had taught us, in the pages of this journal, that there are a variety of ways in which Shakespeare means. My point is that there are other contexts worth exploring as well as the court, social history and the cultural construction of the ‘Shakespeare phenomenon’. There are even different ways of looking at a material Shakespeare. The mechanics of the marvellous in the theatre and the ways that his plays elicited wonder are as important as wondrous events and language.

I think what Dobson really wants to avoid is a discussion of the aesthetic. (The word ‘sacramental’ does not appear in my Shakespeare chapters, but variations of the word ‘aesthetic’ do.) He seems to me to reveal a terror of a return to an overly pious aestheticism. But the role of the affective – the way in which Shakespeare’s plays evoke joy, pity, terror, astonishment – cannot be ignored. I have no interest in a return to New Criticism or l’art pour l’art: Shakespeare studies would be an impoverished thing without the many contexts and discourses foregrounded in the last twenty years. I would argue, however, for a method of reading Shakespeare and Early Modern texts similar to what Leonard Barkan in his forthcoming book calls (a little sheepishly) the ‘New Aestheticism’. This is a theoretically informed aesthetics which recognises that delight and pleasure (and even horror) are as important as instruction to literary, dramatic and visual art.

Peter Platt
Barnard College, New York

Vol. 20 No. 18 · 17 September 1998

From Michael Dobson

I was sorry that my account of a whole batch of recent books on Shakespeare and wonder (LRB, 16 July) couldn’t fit in more than a paragraph or so and a few general remarks about Peter Platt’s Reason Diminished, so I’m quite pleased that its author has compensated for this by reviewing the book much more fully himself (Letters, 20 August). While I’m not surprised that Platt found so much more to say on this subject than I did, I was a little puzzled by some of the views he attributed to me, and especially puzzled by his apparent conviction that most of my article consisted of a sermon, addressed solely to him, about the paramount importance of politics, popular culture and social context over anything even resembling the appreciation of Shakespeare’s artistry. I must thank Platt, though, for pointing out to me that ‘there are a variety of ways in which Shakespeare means’ and that ‘delight and pleasure (and even horror) are as important as instruction to literary, dramatic and visual art.’

Michael Dobson
Roehampton Institute<br />London SW15