Literature as a Humanity

Abstract

ghosts. Every work of literature is a human creation produced in time, but it is also product of a philosophy of life and is therefore implicitly or explicitly a work of criticism. It expresses perforce certain attitudes of acceptance or alienation; it asserts and denies certain constellations of value; it contains either implicitly or explicitly some critical message. These three: attitude, values, message, interrelated and mutually referential as they must be, are categories or dimensions of literature as criticism. Anyone who reads Shakespeare's history plays attentively can discern traces of a conservative politics. Shakespeare's politics expresses search for order just as unambiguously as two hundred years later Schiller's politics was to express search for freedom. Form and fixity were for Elizabethans generally guide posts of a rational politics and civil wars worst that can befall a state. Just this is political moral of Shakespeare's early Yorkist tetralogy (the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III) which reveals same fear of civil strife and faith in strong centralized monarchical authority asserted by Hobbes in Leviathan sixty years later. Thomas Heywood in his Apology for Actors (1612) wrote of dramatic histories of his time: Plays are written with this aim... to teach subjects obedience to their King, to show people untimely ends of such as have moved tumults, commotions, and insurrections, and to present them with flourishing estate of such as live in obedience, exhorting them to allegiance, discouraging them from all traitorous and fellonous stratagems. If this is so, Shakespeare's great series Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, This content downloaded from 157.55.39.44 on Sat, 24 Sep 2016 04:38:48 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms LITERATURE AS A HUMANITY 59 Richard III states a political attitude, expresses political values, and constitutes a political message. It begins with downfall of Richard II and ends with Richmond's triumph. It registers valuational convulsions that brought England from medieval epoch to Tudor Age. The type of criticism to which this type of Shakespearean analysis is particularly congenial is Marxist, and something of its spirit has been expressed by Jan Kott, Polish Marxist and professor of literature, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Kott too sees history plays not as great works of art which have an autonomous existence, but as registers of the great mechanism of political ambition, murder, and usurpation in which violence is regarded as a historical necessity, as something natural to political life. In Shakespeare's world he sees a contradiction between order of action and moral order which is human fate, but he admits that we interpret Shakespeare in light of our own contemporary experience of war, violence, and Fascist cruelty. Also portions of Shakespeare remind him of insights of Marx and Bertold Brecht. We are here in atmosphere of same school of literary interpretation as that of Lukacs and Goldmann, but with a very different individual slant. Yet what is important is that all three read literature in much same fashion. For Goldmann writer always expresses an attitude a vision du monde. For Lukacs European realism is significant for values it proclaims. For Kott Shakespeare's history plays contain a political message. It is obviously not Marxist ideology which I find worthy of note here but rather method of reading literature as criticism. Theodore Spencer in his Shakespeare and Nature of Man also reads Shakespeare in much same manner, but with a totally different outcome. He finds in Shakespeare attitudes, values, and message of Renaissance Humanism. For my treatment of literature as a humanity, as illuminated respectively by means of arts of communication, arts of continuity, and arts of criticism, I have taken all of my examples from Shakespeare. This is not because subject is unique Dante or Sophocles or Moliere or Goethe could alternatively have been selected but because for any truly great figure of world literature body of criticism is so broad as to include almost every possible approach. And my purpose has indeed been Hegelian to establish that inclusive totality which critical and teaching enterprise demands. We have always unconsciously recognized Procrustian character This content downloaded from 157.55.39.44 on Sat, 24 Sep 2016 04:38:48 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 60 ALBERT WILLIAM LEVI of literaturethe multiple subject and subject matter functions which it serves. Now we can insist that any piece of literature whatsoever, from standpoint of humanities, should be considered in terms of nine categories of language, structure, style, date, situation, audience, attitude, values, message; and these categories, converted into questions, become teaching strategy for courses in literature whatever works are chosen for content, and from whatever global area