'Endless Variety'
LEIBOWITZ, HERBERT
'Endless Variety' SHAKESPEARE OUR CONTEMPORARY By Jan Kott Doubleday. 264 pp. $4.50. THE LIVING WORLD OF SHAKESPEARE By John Wain St. Martins. 238 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by HERBERT...
...Richard II, an egotist-dreamer-poet-patriot, is a bad but legitimate ruler, while Richard III is an isolated and disfigured usurper: Clearly character is a dominant force in the making of history...
...History is cyclical: The deposing of a king breeds crime, factions, intrigue, and blood-letting, until a new king is enthroned in the robes of legitimacy, and the wheel starts turning again...
...there is evil but there is good...
...It is a schoolboy's commonplace that Shakespeare believed in the idea of a divinely ordered, hierarchical system to which, as Wain says, he gave considerable emotional and imaginative allegiance while scorching it with a tierce irony...
...This interpretation of the play divests it of its philosophical greatness and its poetic power by disingenuously omitting or distorting half of the play, its counterforce...
...These wilful interpretations, written in a style of nervous banality, result, predictably, in a Shakespeare that is truncated, distorted and monotonous...
...And so it goes from essay to essay...
...Kott cannot figure out what to do with Fahtaff, who with his earthy gusto thumbs "his nose at the Grand Mechanism and is liberated from all mechanistic theories of history, or with Henry V, which is dismissed as patriotic propaganda...
...To remodel Shakespeare, Kott is forced to systematically exclude from the Shakespearean world its light, laughter and manysidedness: its essential health...
...Reviewed by HERBERT LEIBOWITZ Department of English, Columbia University The Shakespeare Jan Kott idolizes and offers us in his readings of selected plays is as contemporary and modish as jazz and Genet and alienation...
...whereas the downfall of the grotesque actor means the mockery of the absolute and its desecration...
...Kott is not...
...Lear, unlike Beckett's futile vagabonds, is not "nothing...
...The Grand Mechanism is triumphant...
...A good example of Kott's method of reading his own theories into the plays is his long essay on the Histories, "The Kings...
...All the fashionable cant terms of our age are stuffed into the essay: nullity...
...First of all, the Kings are not anonymous figures buffeted by historical necessity...
...And in the Comedies, his Shakespeare is the precursor of deSade and Genet, the explorer, in surrealistic images and acts, of erotic madness and the "dark spheres of bestiality...
...Shakespeare's conception of history is that it "has no meaning, and stands still, or constantly repeats its cruel cycle...
...All the kings and nobles bear the same names, have the same ambitions, and use the same tactics, hence they are interchangeable...
...One views with misgiving intellectuals rushing to praise this flashy and misleading book...
...But does Shakespeare share these views of an amoral history...
...Henry IV is an opportunistic politician...
...They stand, in Kott's other favorite image, on the Grand Staircase of History, climb up it for awhile and then fall into the abyss...
...Wain is true to that "endless variety...
...Shakespeare Our Contemporary has been hailed as a breakthrough in Shakespearean criticism...
...Kott hears the tempest, but not the music...
...The theme of King Lear is the decay and downfall of the world...
...Prince Hal is never a victim...
...The absolute is transformed into a blind mechanism, a kind of automaton...
...It is revealing, then, that Kott has little to say about the Comedies and the Romances, while Wain is at his best in the chapters he devotes to them...
...That Shakespeare had a profound sense of evil is felt viscerally and spiritually by any reader of Lear...
...They have no freedom of choice...
...he conveys the spaciousness and protean nature of Shakespeare's genius...
...But the movement of the play is toward regeneration and the restoration of an order, subdued and wearied though it may be, based on a root knowledge of the difference between the appearances and the realities of law, justice, and moral order...
...His penchant for allegory leads Kott to neglect the poetry and music, and their power in constructing moral intelligibility and order...
...But even he, alas, stubs his toe on one of the steps of the Grand Staircase and is absorbed by the machine...
...Every play seems like every other...
...Wain possesses the critical virtues Kott lacks—clarity, balance, trenchancy, and an unwillingness to oversimplify...
...Since Kott denies to the characters moral autonomy, they emerge as shadowy figuies in a political pantomime or tragic charade...
...Existential bleakness, the absurd, the metaphysical void, death "the only serious alienation...
...Thus Lear in his hellish journey has his preconceptions of cosmic order shattered, and discovers, like Beckett's characters, that there is nothing, that life is absurd...
...which influenced the Royal Shakespeare Company's recent production of Lear, is full of a pseudo-profundity...
...A Polish professor living under the shadow of a totalitarian system and in a century which has witnessed the most gruesome carnage of all time, Kott understandably loathes history and politics as degrading, depersonalizing and farcical...
...Kott falsifies the Shakespearean world view by wrenching the plays to fit his thesis...
...Henry V is surely intended as the normative king, who rules with a stern flexibility and harmonizes all divisive forces...
...Man is imprisoned in history, a victim who must surrender all values of honor, order...
...there is a world of difference—of character, of moral stature and political skill, of the language they speak—between the three Henries and the two Richards...
...Second, even the early History plays contain an implicit idea of order: Henry VII, the founder of the Tudor dynasty and the unifier of the Houses of York and Lancaster, appears at the end of Richard III to purge England of the pestilence spread by Richard...
...in the History plays, a sort of Elizabethan Brecht, who grasped the brutal nihilism of politics and of history itself...
...Shakespeare's plays," Dr...
...Uncomfortable with the openness and wit and lyricism of the plays, Kott, like a Marxist revisionist, updates them to conform with his own rigid orthodoxies...
...There is suffering but there is grace...
...Richard III is therefore the key play for Kott, because it most brutally shows the pitiless thrust of history, the butchery and utter venality of politics...
...the trial scene on the heath is like the aimless conversation in Wailing for Godot...
...Johnson reminds us in his Preface to Shakespeare, "[exhibit] the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination...
...The leaps in subject and style, the steady growth from period to period, the rich diversity of Shakespeare, arc sacrificed to the demonstration of some abstract scheme or ideological construct...
...Its originality is illusory...
...The earth is left empty and bleeding...
...In his interpretations he follows the curves of the plays and traces out their multiple perspectives, relating images to themes, themes to structure, and play to play...
...The deformed Richard is sometimes identified as the twisted human face of the Grand Mechanism, and sometimes as the very demiurge of history...
...Kott's most celebrated essay, "King Lear or Endgame...
...Kott's rhetoric is passionate: fake Baroque like Lust Year at Marienbad...
...Yes: and rightly...
...Obviously not...
...Henry VI is not an executioner, he is something of a saint...
...and rational government...
...Lear's harrowing ordeal compels him to touch experience at its extremes, to reach self-knowledge through madness and irremediable loss...
...The "gored state" is to be healed by Edgar and Albany...
...The downfall of the tragic hero is a confirmation and recognition of the absolute...
...there is treachery but there is fidelity...
...In Wain's words: "All this titanic expenditure of effort and suffering to teach two stupid old men how to live...
...something has come out of nothing: a Lear who has learned what love and man are...
...But he also imagined power and authority wielded with justice, patience, and even magnanimity...
...endowed with supernatural power, this Grand Mechanism, as Kott calls it, implacably crushes all men and all things...
...For Shakespeare in the two tetralogies, Kott argues, History itself is the protagonist...
...They take turns as executioner and victim...
...Possessed of a fine ear, and aware of the enhancing power of poetry in drama, he illuminates not only the text, but the spirit and spell...
...for the colossal extravagance of means, the cosmic excess of upheaval and waste, celebrates the range and importance of the nature of man...
...As Wain points out, Shakespeare, concerned with the problem of how men are to govern themselves, observed in the struggle for the crown and political stability, that treachery, murder and catastrophe are unloosed: Such is the remorselessness of the world...
...Though Kott pays ostentatious homage to Shakespeare, in effect he cares most for his own myths...
...In the Tragedies, his Shakespeare is the godfather of the Theater of the Absurd and the Theater of Futility...
Vol. 47 • December 1964 • No. 25
