Virtual Grub Street: Shakespeare as Literary Theorist

In writing my new book — a variorum edition of Edward de Vere’s Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584)[1] — it was incumbent upon me to choose representative citations from among contemporary scholarly work as well as traditional. The divergence from the 1990s onward, in particular, was, as expected, striking.

I was impressed with just how much the divergence amounted to a Shakespeare topic of its own. Elizabeth Wightman, for one example, informs the reader:

Shakespeare reproduces and enhances the contradictions of earlier versions of the Troy story, so that the exempla which are supposed to signify a singular virtue instead point to a confusing variety of possible motives and interpretations.[2]

For her, Shakespeare is a post-modern theorist.

She is not entirely wrong. Vere did write the play in order to show the disparity between the chivalric image the English Royal Court had of itself and the actual craven self-interest that lurked just below its surface. Whether or not he ever specifically saw it in terms of a greater iconoclasm, he must have realized that the theme had wider implications.

As for the character Cressida, Wightman’s approach is once again not altogether misbegotten.

More than any other of Shakespeare’s plays, Troilus and Cressida thematizes vision, and Cressida in particular is defined by the male gaze as she is read or misread by others.[3]

While Shakespeare did not likely have a single thought specifically about “male gaze” throughout his entire life, it would not be possible to deny that he himself looked from a male gaze. Thankfully, Wightman stayed away from declaring his life’s work one great spree of “mansplaining”.

To the extent, however, that we might concede that Troilus and Cressida “thematizes vision,” it is not because Shakespeare made a conscious theoretical decision. It is far more likely that it is because a great deal of the play was written before he had mastered how to draw upon all of his characters’ senses in order to make them more fully human. Ms. Wightman’s theoretical study takes us further away from Shakespeare and his play rather than closer to them.

James Simpson is harder to appreciate even with provisos:

He uses the possibilities of the ephemera tradition to demolish the pretensions of the classical traditions, just as he demolishes the enclaves of the late medieval tradition created by Chaucer. In breaking down the protected spaces of Chaucer’s narrative, Shakespeare conducts a kind of literary demolition, taking every chance he can get to demolish the emotional and ethical nobility of a range of Trojan War traditions.[4]

The trendy post-Colonial phrase “protected spaces” aside, Vere chose the Ephemera tradition because it provided the closest parallel to the conditions which he was depicting. He needed Achilles to be the bad guy of the story. The Ephemera tradition provided that.

As I have shown, Chaucer was far less a source of Ulysses and Agamemnon than he was of the later expansion of the play into Troilus and Cressida. A look at the texts separately makes this perfectly clear. The additional text, on the other hand, is almost entirely based upon Chaucer. There is no sign that Shakespeare noted “protected spaces” in Chaucer’s narrative or that he took the man as his source in order to subject him to “literary demolition”.

For the theorists Wightman and Simpson, Shakespeare was also a theorist. He necessarily started with an abstract aim and from it built a play.

As I have shown, Ulysses and Agamemnon started with a very practical not an abstract aim. And I suggest that such was always the case in all of the poems and plays. We should be thankful it was because theories result in mediocre works at best.

[1] The Early Plays of Edward de Vere (William Shakespeare): Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584). Richmond, VA: The Virtual Vanaprastha, 2018. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JD7KM1T

[2] Wightman, Elizabeth Laura. Shakespeare’s Deconstruction of Exempla in Troilus and Cressida. University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon: Private, 2005. ii.

[3] Ibid., 45.

[4] Simpson, James. “‘The formless ruin of oblivion’: Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and literary defacement." Love, History and Emotion in Chaucer and Shakespeare: Troilus and Criseyde and Troilus and Cressida, eds. Johnston, Andrew James, Russell West-Pavlov, and Elisabeth Kempf. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. 18.

Edward de Vere’s Ulysses and Agamemnon. Highlighting the Real Issue. October 30, 2018. “When I did return to investigate more deeply, the results were astonishing. All tests indicated that the earlier play was incorporated in its entirety.”
The Battle Over Shakespeare's Early and Late Plays. September 24, 2018. "Vere had been writing The Tempest for his daughter’s upcoming wedding. Upon his death, his friend William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, who was known to have collected every printed and manuscript word he could get his hands on about the ongoing explorations in the South Atlantic, likely put on the final touches."
Shakespeare on Gravity. August 26, 2018. “So carelessly does Shakespeare throw out such an extraordinary divination. His achievement in thus, as it were, rivalling Newton may seem in a certain sense even more extraordinary than Goethe's botanical and osteological discoveries;…”
Let the sky rain potatoes! December 16, 2017. "In fact, the sweet potato had only just begun to be a delicacy within the reach of splurging poets and playwrights and members of the middle classes at the time that The Merry Wives of Windsor (the play from which Falstaff is quoted) was written. The old soldier liked to keep abreast of the new fads."
Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.