Is Shakespeare a Patriarchal Bard?: A Hermeneutical Approach

Abstract

Is Shakespeare a ”patriarchal bard”? The answer can be yes and no, and they can be both true. It depends on who the interpreter is and in what age the interpreter is. In the twentieth century, the central innovation in Hermeneutics is associated with the work of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and his student Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002). The general achievement they contribute to the modern hermeneutics is that they move the science of interpretation from the epistemological arena forward into the ontological ground. This means that understanding is neither conceived as dead object nor fixed knowledge, and we are not concerned with understanding something. Rather, something is grasped as our way of being-in-the-world, as the fundamental way we exist prior to any cognition or intellectual activity. Understanding is always ”concretization,” always includes application to the present, and thus produces an ongoing process of concept formation. Gadamer clearly points out our misunderstanding about the definition of the ”classical” as something old or something past or something dead. In fact, ”classical,” according to him, is ”through constantly proving itself (Bewahrung), allows something true (ein Wahres) to come into being.” The ”autonomy of reading” and the ”liveness of tradition” are what Gadamer asserts in his writing. This research is going to rely on Gadamer's conception of tradition with theory of interpretation in his magnum opus, Truth and Method, and some of the New Historic Literary School's current idea about history for support to read and interpret Shakespeare's comedies towards finding the answer of his being accused as a ”patriarchal bard” by some modern interpreters. Besides the patriarchal power expressed in the titles, structures, contents of his plays, Shakespeare's characterization of women in them also attracts lots of denunciation. Women's disobedience was naturally identified as causes of disorder or crisis. Women's subordination becomes insurance of the recovery of order, the necessarily formulaic guarantee of the comic conclusion. The absence or exclusion of mothers, the passiveness or silence of women, the subordination or reconciliation of women as comic conclusion, and the disguise of women as men to hide their identity to turn around the crisis are all the irrefutable evidences of women being excluded, disabled, subordinated, oppressed, subdued, marginalized, demeaned, and disenfranchised. It will be pointed out that patriarchy is not a slogan smuggled in from the 20(superscript th) or 21(superscript st) century and imposed on the plays but an exact term for the social structure that close reading reveals within the plays.