A Touch More Rare: Harry Berger, Jr., and the Arts of Interpretation

INTRODUCTION

Nina Levine and David Lee Miller

I am senseless of your wrath; a touch more rare Subdues all pangs, all fears.

CYMBELINE 1.1.136–137

During the last decade of the twentieth century an interesting thing began to happen in the fields of literary criticism and theory, art history, philosophy, cultural theory, and anthropology. This interesting thing, the multidisciplinary branching and growth of the protean works of Harry Berger, Jr., had really been happening steadily since the late 1950s, but two new developments marked the close of the century. One was that Berger, who had spent much of his career scattering brilliant essays across a range of professional journals, began to see them gathered into books edited by younger scholars.¹ The other was that he began to publish new books at a rapid pace. As a result of both these changes, the broad outlines of Harry Berger’s work, its remarkable scope and peculiar force, have been clarified for a wider audience.

Berger’s articles in the field of English Renaissance literature have always had substantial influence among specialists, but the reappearance of these essays, often revised or amplified, in collections from university presses offered an occasion to reassess Berger’s place in the volatile history of critical theory and practice in the second half of the twentieth century. John Lynch and Louis A. Montrose began the process in their introductions to the first two of these collections, Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making, edited by Lynch, and Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics, edited by Montrose, both published by the University of California Press in 1988. In 1997, Peter Erickson edited Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare, published by Stanford University Press with a substantial critical introduction. The following year, five noted scholars responded to Making Trifles in a forum organized and introduced by Lena Cowen Orlin for volume 27of Shakespeare Studies, and Michael Bristol capped a survey of Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama with an eloquent and savvy homage that began by comparing Berger to baseball great Willie Mays:

Reading Harry Berger Jr.’s criticism is like watching Willie Mays play baseball. It’s not that they make what they do look easy, as people used to say about Mays. As a matter of fact half the time what Mays did looked pretty much impossible, except it was obvious he knew he could do it. Berger plays the hard game with the same breathtaking ease and confidence.²

In 2003 Joseph Loewenstein organized a Modern Language Association (MLA) panel on Berger’s work, and in 2005 another collection, Situated Utterances: Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations, focusing on theories of interpretation and cultural change, appeared with an introduction by Judith Anderson.³

With the notable exception of the introductions by Lynch and Anderson, these assessments have limited themselves to Berger’s place as a critic of English Renaissance literature. It is an important place, to be sure. In the Introduction to Revisionary Play, Montrose sees Berger as having helped to lay the groundwork for New Historicism.⁴ No critic of English Renaissance literature in Berger’s generation, he writes, has had at once so formative and so liberating an influence on how we read that literature; and surely none continues today, with such daimonic energy, to engage the work of others and to renew his own.⁵ Erickson, writing in 1997 in Making Trifles, echoes this tribute:

I think I am not alone in finding Harry Berger a liberating, enabling figure because he is so intellectually uninhibited, because he so successfully defies the academic protocols and received intellectual conventions of Renaissance studies. … I know of no one else in his generation … who plays this vital role.⁶

Bristol writes that Making Trifles takes on some of the most baffling problems in all Shakespeare criticism, and he credits its success to the way Berger engages students and colleagues alike:

What makes this a great book is the way it sustains an attitude of genuine socratic irony throughout its length. Berger teaches against resistance, but he never moves to break down or break through resistance. He doesn’t make things easy for his readers—or for his students either—but what is always present along with the toughness is unfailing kindness and unfeigned respect for the men and women he has taught.⁷

The essays in A Touch More Rare offer rich evidence that Berger’s work continues its formative and liberating influence on the work of students and critics, especially in the study of Shakespeare and Spenser. But the essays collected here also broaden the focus considerably, reminding us that our most distinguished critic of Renaissance literature has also written extensively and compellingly on art history, philosophy, and cultural theory. The conversation about his work, placing it and responding to its challenges, needs to extend more fully into these fields as well.

The daimonic energy Montrose admired has been increasingly evident since 1988, when Berger’s work was already entering a new phase. The critic who, from 1957 to 1987, published dozens of essays but only two books (one monograph and one edited collection), has since 1988 published eight books with at least three more expected shortly. All of these volumes, whether they collect previously published essays or present substantially new material, reflect the way Berger operates, turning back upon his earlier arguments, responding to critiques, developing new critiques of his own, expanding their contexts and revising their assumptions until they morph into new arguments and spill over into new fields of inquiry.⁸ His astonishing late-career reinvention of himself as an art historian is only the most notable instance of this dynamic.

The restless energy driving this enterprise has been so prolific that Berger’s career keeps outstripping the reassessments. Acknowledging our subject’s vigorous resistance to valediction, we do nonetheless hope to play catch-up with the twenty essays collected in this volume, written not just in honor of Harry Berger but about him, as teacher and as critic. Here philosophers, classicists, and art historians join literary scholars in responding to the work not just of a major interpreter of English Renaissance literature but of a rigorous, versatile, and distinctive thinker whose aim, whatever his immediate topic, is to characterize the dynamics of cultural change and to theorize the arts of interpretation in the humanities and the social sciences. No one writer or collection will comprehend a body of work so wide-ranging and open-ended; the present volume, for example, does not speak to the important strain of anthropological discourse in Berger’s theoretical arguments. But we do aim to broaden the conversation, challenging scholars in many fields to read, recognize, and respond to a brilliant theorist and practitioner.

With two exceptions, these essays were presented at a conference held in Berger’s honor at the University of South Carolina in October 2006.⁹ We have not tried to impose a uniform decorum on the authors, some of whom expanded their papers to article length while others chose to revise but not to amplify. We have especially not tried to change the decorum of the event, which at times included referring to our subject by his first name. A word of explanation for this unconventional practice may be in order.

Something about Harry Berger tempts students and colleagues not just to call him by his first name but to refer to him that way as well. This is not the sign of membership in a clique, although it does convey personal affection, for the extended community invoked by this usage finally has no borders. The practice reflects a certain vernacular irreverence in the personal and prose styles of the magister; photographs of him lecturing typically show him leaning forward and a bit to one side behind the podium, as if trying to throw some body English onto whatever he’s just said. Calling him Harry recognizes in this skewed stance something beyond manner, something deeply entangled with the energy and ingenuous openness that mark his engagements, in and out of print, with other scholars and their work.¹⁰ Montrose acknowledges this quality when he observes that the project and the person, the subject and the method, strike me as inseparable.¹¹

And so our effort to see Harry steadily and see him whole not only follows the arc of his work across a series of discrete fields and disciplines, it also advances the claims of earlier editors for his distinctive contribution to a strong sense of intellectual community. A number of the writers gathered here—Marshall Grossman and Jeff Dolven, for example—describe the way Harry’s work, with its arch style and singular ethos, is always a deeply attractive form of intellectual conversation. The conspicuous informality of calling him Harry remains in the present volume as one trace of the way this ethos passes from its author into the communities of discourse that form around his work.

There is also, of course, the way Harry himself, in essays on Shakespeare’s history plays, has harried the name he shares with Hal.¹² The redistribution of complicity in his readings of Shakespeare proceeds with an intensity of ethical concern matched only by the exuberance of its punning, and both of these are strategies by which the critic puts himself at risk and in play, hazarding all he has on the languageness of language in every interpretation of the text. Even as he subjects Shakespeare’s characters to a relentlessly skeptical examination of unacknowledged motive and desire, the Harryness of Harry comes out in the way—not defenseless, but undefended (or, in Erickson’s word, uninhibited)—that he opens his own critical history, method, and persona to the same skepticism. As Erickson puts it, Harry’s ability to communicate the critic’s drama at the deepest levels gives to his work the added resonance of implicit self-exploration.¹³ In the 1998 Shakespeare Studies forum, Grossman attributes this ability to Harry’s courage in the transference—his willingness, as it were, to be seen by Shakespeare and to let us see Shakespeare seeing Harry.¹⁴

It is fitting, then, that this volume opens with Leonard Barkan’s invitation to enlist in Harry’s imaginary forces. Originally an MLA talk, Barkan’s essay is itself both a performance-about-performance and a compelling personal response to Berger’s account of the way dramatic texts oppose their own performativity. As chorus to this history, Barkan moves between the podium and audience, keeping track of Berger’s own playful place-shifting as a performer-of-performance. The reciprocity between speaking and listening, so deftly rendered by Barkan’s account, lets us hear something of Berger’s voice—the genial edge, the intimacy, the comic’s timing. It also gives us a glimpse of Berger as auditor, listening closely with unfenced ears, and reminds us of this volume’s own performative beginnings, as conference talks delivered to an audience that included Harry himself, always in the front row, forward in his seat, the close listener and ideal interlocutor.

Barkan’s words also remind us that the performances in A Touch More Rare are written as well as spoken. In this, they reach beyond the celebratory occasion, joining forces with Berger’s accomplishment of many years to make imaginary puissance of their own. The tone is often courtly and laudatory, but the conversation is also pointedly candid and rigorous, giving and taking, resisting and reflecting.

The other essays in Part I take up questions about complicity, ethical discourses, and moral criticism that are central to Berger’s work on Shakespeare. For Kenneth Gross, these questions ask us to ponder the relation between a speaker’s disabling self-hatred, with its attendant evasions and displacements, and a critical practice devoted to a laying bare of the self and its subterfuges. If Berger’s criticism performs a kind of moral work—and Gross thinks it does—it refuses mere authority for a mode of loving suspicion, remaining playfully skeptical of its subjects and its own ethical positions. Susanne Wofford’s essay returns to the vexed question of moral criticism, differentiating the harried critic from the New Critic. Asking what Berger’s notion of complicity means for anagnorisis, or recognition, Wofford rereads Lear’s words to Gloucester—If thou wilt read my fortunes, take my eyes—to argue for a qualified catharsis, affirmed by a critical practice that makes us vulnerable to the accusations that may arise from within our own discourse. Bradley Greenburg extends Berger’s work on ethical discourses in Shakespeare’s history plays to include writers as well as speakers, in an essay that looks at both Shakespeare’s and Henry V’s displacements in relation to Falstaff. Thomas Cartelli closes out the section by taking Berger to the movies to consider the redistribution of complicities in Michael Radford’s Merchant of Venice, a film whose complicity with a global culture industry, Cartelli avers, both mutes and denies the play’s unsettling ambivalences.

The three essays in Part II address what Katherine Eggert aptly describes as Berger’s "career-long study of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. They do so by returning to the Bower of Bliss, the preferred staging ground for major interventions in the poem’s critical history since the early nineteenth century.¹⁵ Taking up Berger’s own recent return to this episode in a tour de force called Wring Out the Old: Squeezing the Text, 1951–2001, these essays—like Catherine Gimelli Martin’s in the next section—recognize that to engage a critical practice so devoted to close reading, the critic must bring her own intensely disciplined attention to the exact phrasing of poetic texts."¹⁶ At the same time, they also recognize the large theoretical and interpretive stakes of these readings, which seek in the details of language answers to the central aesthetic and moral questions this episode has always raised for its interpreters.

Lauren Silberman, whose articles on Spenser helped to shape feminist reconsiderations of The Faerie Queene in the 1980s and nineties, proposes a major shift of perspective away from gender ideologies and toward a renewed emphasis on religious history. Her essay does not argue that the attention Berger and other critics have given to gynephobia and the discourses of gender is misplaced but rather that a strategic shift away from the psychological terms of this approach may offer new ways of understanding the eroticism of the Bower. Judith Anderson and Katherine Eggert both respond to—and, in complementary, mutually illuminating ways, both resist—Berger’s understanding of this eroticism as exclusively masculine. Where misogyny is brilliantly exposed and rejected, writes Anderson, I’m worried that androcentrism might still be alive and well, and, indeed, reinstated. Traces of feminine presence, fantasy, and pleasure in the imagery of Spenser’s descriptions lead to an argument in which Anderson, citing Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of the image, dwells on the sensuous surfaces of textual figures and explores the pleasures of "methexis, a participation or a contagion through which the image seizes us."¹⁷ Eggert approaches these issues through a consideration of the Bower’s Genius, who figures forth a strategy for not internalizing pleasure which the text then transmute[s] into Acrasia’s strategy for producing it. Here the motif of porting, in all its senses, does much the same critical work that methexis does for Anderson, rediscovering linked traces of pleasure and the feminine within Berger’s scene of fear, resistance to pleasure, and masculine self-critique.

The essays of Part III on Critical and Cultural Theory take as their common text Berger’s expansive opening chapter in Situated Utterances, The Interpretive Shuttle: The Structure of Critical Practice after World War II. At once magisterial and modestly personal, this chapter sweeps over half a century of theory and practice with the aim of reassessing mid-century New Criticism—not only to see the positive features of the enterprise but also to restore them in a new form.¹⁸ For Berger, to restore is to revise, reconstruct, and reenvision, and so it leads to a critical practice that resists closure, continuously moving back and forth between the poles of textualization and detextualization. The authors in this section give close attention to Berger’s own movements within the time-space of critical practice since World War II. Concentrating on the early criticism, Roland Greene shows that Berger did not come late to the reconstruction business but was already reforming New Criticism in his first book, The Allegorical Temper (1957), with a deeply observant and inventive criticism that opened up the autonomous text of institutional close reading to new worlds of intellectual history. Drawing mainly on essays from the past two decades, Graham Hammill reconsiders Berger’s commitment to the aesthetic, deftly tracing in his criticism a dialectic of art and culture that retains a sense of art’s otherness. Catherine Gimelli Martin, also drawing on the later essays, shuttles between New Criticism and poststructuralism in a closely argued critique of Berger’s reading of narrative as rhetoric in The Faerie Queene. Together, these essays give a sense of the breathtaking span of Berger’s critical practice, its abiding interests and assumptions, and above all the generative give-and-take provoked by the theory revolution.

If Berger’s intellectual capaciousness pushes against received notions of Renaissance literature and contemporary theory, it also ventures into the reaches of art history, philosophy, and classical studies. This interdisciplinarity is on dazzling display in his recent turn to portraiture, culminating in two book-length studies that bring close reading to Dutch and Italian portrait painting: Fictions of the Pose (2000) and Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief (2007). For art historians, Berger arrived as a new kid on the block, in the words of one reviewer, radicalizing standard practices with his more literary reading of early modern portraiture as "endless theater: all pose, hence all fiction, with no hint or promise of an ‘authentic self’ to anchor the show."¹⁹ The essays of Part IV take up this analysis of visual arts. For Peter Erickson, Berger’s writings on portraiture prompt a lyrical reading of Derek Walcott, illuminated by the shared themes of Rembrandt and prodigality. Eleanor Leach gives a classicist’s take on portraiture; to recent debates about sprezzatura she adds the example of the Roman orator, asking whether rhetorical and courtly posing might be extended to Roman sculptural portraits. Bradford Collins, citing some extraordinary failures of vision in twentieth-century art history, calls for making Berger’s decelerated close looking standard practice for the profession.

Berger’s passion for border crossings is also on display in his work on Plato. As we learn from several contributors to this volume, Plato has long held an important place in Berger’s classrooms—from the early days at Yale to Santa Cruz and most recently the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he taught a graduate course on Plato. His essays on the dialogues, published over a thirty-five-year period, could easily comprise several volumes in their own right. A study of Plato’s Republic is forthcoming from Fordham University Press. Jay Farness and Jill Frank explore Berger’s Plato, recognizing once again the way his analysis makes the question of reading practices central. As Farness argues, Berger’s close attention to the text radically revises conventional thinking about Platonic irony, not only by giving us more nuanced readings of Socratic irony but by opening up the dialogues themselves to deeper structural ironies, which Farness then puts to work in his own lucid readings of Plato. Just as Berger offers to situate Socrates in the Plato section of Situated Utterances, so Frank situates Berger’s Plato, adducing a politics for Berger’s reading practices through his reading of Plato. Philosophy for Berger’s Plato is not about flying high but sitting with Socrates and fighting the good fight. Frank’s reading of Berger’s reading of Plato locates that fight not in appeals to authority or war but in a mode of critical practice that entails not being locked into being for or against, but opening spaces for disagreement about who and what is good and about the good itself.

Frank’s Berger may well be the exemplary citizen of a utopian settlement, as Marshall Grossman puts it. It is to this virtual settlement, or intellectual community, that the final group of essays turns. There are, of course, multiple communities at work here—pedagogical, literary, theoretical, and critical—and fittingly, the essays proceed by analogy, taking their models not from rarefied utopian fantasies but from Berger’s own critical texts and subjects. Like the other essays in this volume, the essays in Part VI give powerful witness to the particular ways in which Berger’s critical practice is also a social and political practice, enacting community through its complex play of conversation and critique and acknowledgment. This reciprocity of criticism and community leads Grossman to a meditation on the seminal and the inimitable, pursued through a series of analogies opening like nested boxes fashioned from Berger’s theoretical and critical texts. William Oram also singles out imitatio to describe Berger’s teaching style in the 1960s, a pedagogy based on imitation and discovery and the expectation that students would then go their own ways.

Jeff Dolven finds models for intellectual community in a characteristically Bergerian fusion of old and new: in the courtly conversations of The Absence of Grace (2000), with their courteous challenges, which are also bracing invitations, and in contemporary language theory and language games by which the detachment from subjects that Harry finds so congenial in discourse theory becomes a model of how to behave yourself when you are talking to other people. As Dolven reminds us in words that echo throughout this volume, the capacity for self-critique is pervasive in Berger’s work. We can trace its forms in his pedagogical style, in his continually arresting readings, and, perhaps most of all, in the critical practice itself, a practice that insists again and again on its own open-endedness, always deferring the last word for a life in the revisionary enclave.

We conclude this volume with an essay from Berger himself that is at once a brief memoir and a renewed instance of backlooping, or moving forward by looking back. It is a strenuous form of celebration and not without its destructive edge, as the epigraph from Nietzsche indicates. When Berger presented the Bower of Bliss essay referred to above as a talk at the Cambridge Spenser conference in 2001, he was placed near the beginning of the program in a session entitled Where We’ve Been. The ironic title he gave the essay, Wring Out the Old, was surely intended in part to reflect dismay at the prospect of shrinking in our collective rear-view mirror, but there was no real cause for concern. When a member of the roundtable that concluded the conference observed that we should beware of linear narratives: if Harry Berger is ‘where we’ve been,’ we may not have gotten there yet, the program was interrupted by a long, thoroughly celebratory burst of applause. The purpose of this volume is not to wring out the old but to ring in the next, as we invite scholars and students in diverse disciplines to take part in the jubilant, tough-minded labor of revisionary play.

PART ONE

Drama

CHAPTER 1

Enlisting in Harry Berger’s Imaginary Forces

Leonard Barkan

Let us say it is the ultimate tribute to Harry Berger that the editors of this volume have permitted me to retain the occasional quality of its first performance, which was an MLA session in 2003. After all, Harry is himself one of the great theorists of performance, and also one of the great performers. He is also, for all his many meticulous and magisterial scholarly tomes, one of the great teachers by personal conversation, someone who (as Socrates tells Phaedrus) writes on the soul of his listeners. With all those lofty pretexts, I beg my readers’ indulgence if I take them back to an earlier celebratory occasion when these words were spoken and, with very few changes, transcribe them into words that are written.

I begin with two anecdotes.

It is safe to say that not many Modern Language Association talks remain in the mind, word for word, after many years—which makes one particular occasion stick especially in my mind. I can’t recall the city, or the hotel, or the year, but I remember that Harry Berger was speaking about Henry V. He was doing his own very special take on the play’s speech-making, the rhetorical efforts of the Chorus and of the king himself. It wasn’t shocking or new to see these as interrelated; that is, to observe similarities between the way Henry urges his men into battle and the way that the prologues impress upon the audience an analogous sense of imagination and communal engagement in the theatrical process. What did remain forever engraved on me as I view the play, however, was his reading of the famous opening chorus in the light of the military rhetoric that is to come. He read some of the celebrated lines:

Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;

Into a thousand parts divide one man,

And make imaginary puissance

Think when we talk of horses, that you see them

Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth;

For ‘tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,

Carry them here and there; jumping o’er times,

Turning the accomplishment of many years

Into an hour-glass.

                                          (Henry V, Prologue, 23–31)

And he said—maybe it was even an aside, not part of the written text in front of him (does Harry speak with a written text in front of him?)—What’s this guy trying to do? He’s trying to get us to join the army! The play has never been the same for me since.

It’s a few years later, and there is a small conference at Stanford on early modern literature and culture: a day and a half of a rather packed schedule, including brief papers and a couple of longer keynote addresses. Though Harry is not one of the speakers, he attends faithfully, sits in the front row, performs as a highly energetic discussant (even outside the discussion periods). The second keynote paper, while a bit long, was not without interest, but it traveled rather far, and with argumentation that was more allusive than it was syllogistic. I imagine that it wasn’t quite what the audience was expecting, and they probably needed a little help in giving it the benefit of the doubt, in letting themselves appreciate its poetics in the absence of its philology.

The speaker finishes, there is a moment of silence during which the question of whether or not there will be applause hangs very heavy over the room (not to mention over the speaker), when from that front row, scarcely four feet from the podium, comes a loud stage whisper in a familiar accent: God, that was cool! The speaker’s happy fate was assured, and he—or should I say I?—could go on to engage in a splendid give-and-take both with Harry and with the rest of the room.

So, an introduction to Harry Berger: a brilliant sensitivity to rhetoric; spectacular generosity; and not only that, but generosity toward a piece of work that by no means possessed the kind of steel-trap reasoning and intensity of textual focus that characterize his own acts of persuasive literary rhetoric. I say this as though it were an attempt to sum up Harry’s work, but the truth is that I balk at any attempt to capture the essence of the work in a few categories. To follow his fifty years of publications is to watch the unfolding of some great natural plant, as variegated as it is organic. It begins with Spenser and allegory, formalism and the history of ideas. It takes on wider cultural spread: theories of history, psychoanalysis. It annexes Shakespeare. It seizes on metafictions. It undertakes bodies, texts, bodies in texts, and bodies of texts. It doubles back on Spenser with radically increased dimensionality of texte and hors-texte. It hears and sees theater in unexpected places. And just when you think that the growth is all going to be concentrated on the inward dimension—toward an ever greater scrutiny of the language project—there is suddenly a boisterous outcropping in a whole new direction, toward perspective, vision, and the social and epistemological conditions of Renaissance visual culture. And all of this—I cannot emphasize that enough, all—while it grows out of a critical atmosphere that is rife with isms, partis pris, and assiduous discipleship masquerading as transgression, is maddeningly, thrillingly impossible to stereotype as to its methodological allegiances.

Now, I outline all this not just to praise Harry but also to establish how impossible it would be to offer a unified field theory of his work, turning the accomplishment of many years / Into an hour-glass. And from that glorious fact I take welcome permission to contract my own focus to one strand of this production, rather scandalously personal. One of my favorite books, which is also one of the strangest books ever written, is Nicholson Baker’s U and I, in which he spends nearly two hundred pages detailing his lifelong obsession with John Updike. In this verbal act of stalking, Baker goes through every possible form of imitatio (ranging from sentence structure to psoriasis) that has bound him to his idol as both a person and a writer. The climax of all this pitiless self-exposure at the end of the book is a set of compensatory efforts to suggest that there may have been, after all, some infinitesimal respects in which Updike might have actually been interested in him. True, they did meet on a couple of occasions (narrated with a sense of the pathetic self-presentation that Baker managed to achieve each time). And Baker holds out some perverse hope that a gawky, scrofulous, unlikable character in Roger’s Version might be a portrait of himself, based on one of these clumsy encounters. Alas, general opinion doesn’t support such a contention. But Baker snatches victory from the jaws of defeat by discovering a tiny phrase of Updike’s (from The Witches of Eastwick) which exhibits some plausible relation to a gruesome little image from an earlier story of his own that Updike had, in fact, mildly praised. And so Baker is able to end U and I with a triumphant, table-turning disclosure. Updike had actually borrowed Baker’s idea about what it feels like to play the cello with a callus on your middle finger.

Why am I telling you all this? Because—your worst fears have come true—I am going to take as point of entry into Harry Berger’s work a place where he cites me. It happens to be the first article I ever published, called "The Theatrical Consistency of Richard II," and I cite it less to flog a long-buried trifle of my own than to summon up a sense of one particular corner within Shakespeare studies, rather a forgotten one in some respects, in the 1970s and 1980s—for which I’m afraid that I must once again wax autobiographical.

In brief: my whole professional life has been characterized by various multiple personalities. The particular one that afflicted me the earliest and the longest was between doing literary scholarship and doing theater. The most striking quality of this opposition was how completely separate I tended to keep my identities. At the same moment that I was writing a dissertation (and thence a book) in which, probably, the word theater was never mentioned, I was playing hooky from graduate school, from assistant professor and associate professorhood, by working as an actor and a director. Not, mind you, specializing in Coriolanus or Murder in the Cathedral but vehicles more like The Odd Couple and Hello, Dolly!

At a certain moment after sending this first, wholly untheatrical book off to the publisher, I decided to undertake a cure for my schizophrenia and turn myself into a theatrically based literary critic of Shakespeare. The National Endowment for the Humanities bought the idea, and I went off to London to read everything that had already been written in this vein. In certain respects, it was a heady time for such efforts. There were plenty of people, not just in theaters but also in English departments, telling us that Shakespeare was above all a man of the theater, that his works were scripts and not poems, and that he needed to be liberated from the suffocations of the study. Interestingly, these cries for a return to the playhouse cut across two approaches that were otherwise diametrically opposed. Some were beginning to build (conceptually or literally) what they took to be hyperauthentic recreations of Elizabethan theaters and locate the plays inside them. Others—and, again, these might be scholarly publications or actual performances—were radicalizing Shakespeare into being our contemporary; that is, if one understood the contemporary as disillusioned, absurdist, and nihilistic. Either way, Shakespeare was being understood as needing to be defined by the frame of theater and not of literary criticism.

Meanwhile, there were the beginnings of an equivalent pedagogical revolution. I used to visit sessions at MLA that no sensible person would attend, where we heard about triumphant experiments of seizing poor hapless students from their seats in lecture halls—guilty creatures sitting at a play—and making them get up and recite Cordelia or Enobarbus.

In the midst of all this, I found myself deeply perplexed. First of all, the clarion cry for Shakespeare-onstage-and-not-on-the-page was coming from quite a lot of people who had little or no actual theater experience. I had actually done the blocking for fight scenes, performed long speeches before dozens of inattentive audiences, worried about the relative merits of leko and fresnel, sung Tit-willow next to a three-hundred-pound Katisha: surely that ought to have a payoff in the literary imagining of Shakespeare. But the truth is that I didn’t like most of what I was reading in theatrical criticism of Shakespeare, and I saw no way that I could do it better. There was descriptive theatrical history, which was analytically undernourished and which was based on a text that was insufficiently recapturable and tangled up tautologically in such interpretive arguments as were being made. There were books providing analysis by theater artists—one of them was blurbed by saying it proved that the actors who play Shakespeare discover more about his intentions and his paradoxes than all the research departments in all the colleges of the English-speaking world—which tended to the very particular, the ahistorical, and the self-justifying.

Amidst all of this, the serious attempts to conceive of a theatrical Shakespeare criticism that possessed the kind of imagination, historical sensitivity, and formalist system-building that characterized the best nontheatrical literary criticism of the postwar decades seemed to me always to falter. Looking back on it, I suppose that I was stuck between a theatrical reading—let’s say, a director’s concept for a particular production, which is a reading—and a literary-critical reading, which, for all one’s frequent claims of pluralism, is still based on getting at the heart of some essential and unchanging feature of the text. (Indeed, if you read this excellent work now—books by Wilson Knight or J. L. Styan or Alan Dessen—you see this problematic played out in the disjunctions between historical claims about the Elizabethan theater and transhistorical claims about the essential theatricality of the text.) My own solution was a piece of plausible double-talk about the difference between theatrical effects, which was what I felt the stage-oriented critics were purveying, and theatrical causes; this was, essentially, my own version of thematic criticism focused on something like imputed spectator response. I imagined I could provide for Shakespeare’s works a sequential map of emotions that inevitably played themselves out in the theater. But it didn’t work for me, as witnessed by the fact that after a couple of years I had produced only that one article.

Now we get to Harry. In a series of essays, such as "Text and Performance in Shakespeare: The Example of Macbeth and A Textual Dramaturgy: Representing the Limits of Theater in Richard II," first published during the eighties, Harry managed to cut through the whole Gordian knot that had paralyzed my thinking (though I paid no attention, having gone on to other problems that I thought I could solve). What Harry did, in essence, was to question all the premises behind any knee-jerk assumptions about readership and spectatorship. After all, it was in those years that the literary profession was jolted by Derrida’s account of bad faith in the assumed relation between spoken and written language. Though I don’t know that Harry ever drew the parallel, one could certainly say that seeing performance as the normal condition of Shakespeare and reading as the belated, artificial condition might be construed as a similar act of bad faith—in other words, an attempt to sweep under the carpet all the artificialities (call it all the différance) endemic even in performance.

Whether this is the key motive or not, what had happened in the interval between my blundering around with Shakespeare-in-the-theater and Harry’s essays was, first of all, the unmooring of formalism, of thematic criticism, of organic and positivist accounts that grew out of reactions against what was called the intentional fallacy—in short, the theory revolution in both its deconstructive and its Marxist phalanxes. Which meant, viewed from the perspective of my problems in the early seventies, that one needed to see all readings as contingent, that knowledge neither of theater nor of history nor of the formal properties of literary texts provided incontrovertible authority. In addition, what followed in this same time frame was the reaction against all the supersubtle, against-the-grain, triumphantly ahistorical analyses that came with this revolution. This reaction took up the banner of Shakespeare-onstage not because of any special interest in theater itself but because the hypothesis of the playhouse, that is, of what an individual spectator could glean in the two hours’ traffic of the stage, seemed to provide an incontrovertible limit on how much interpreting was epistemologically or, indeed, ontologically possible.

Now, Harry doesn’t like limits to interpretation. So he questions whether theatrical spectators are necessarily naïve and whether armchair readers are necessarily wily, as though the first group always behave like groundlings and the second group like people with PhDs from Irvine. He points out that even if Elizabethan audiences were full of illiterates and playtexts not designed to be published, still Shakespeare himself existed and wrote in a culture of reading, indeed, very wide reading, and of texts that are themselves generated out of a culture of reading, defining language via reading. Conversely, he points out all the special conditions of theatricality that go with any act of reading Shakespeare in one’s armchair, not just pale replications of a playhouse experience but a quite independent and different form of theater. In fact, out of this professional debate, which had itself become wearisome and internecine, Harry forged a large-scale interpretive grid for Shakespeare’s plays, seeing them as combat zones of critique between the experience-as-script and the experience-as-text.

With this stroke, just for starters, the magisterial work of Jonas Barish on antitheatricalism, and its distinguished inheritance within the New Historicism, can be imported from the social perimeter