Reading Shakespeare Backwards

Abstract

AMttf want to make a point, with particular reference to Shakespeare, about the relation of dramatic structure to our perception of character, but the problem involved depends upon an assumption which I must make clear. I assume that part of our response to any important character any given is, kZA or seems to be, moral. There would be advantages if this were not so. \v e would be able, for one thing, to reject out of hand the shallow, pseudo-ethical interpretations advanced for so many plays, simply by asserting that morality has nothing to do with drama. But I think we must accept that we generally make what seem to us to be ethical judgments, and that these combine with such elements as empathy, or the ironic distance which is its reverse, to produce our total response. Ordinarily, of course, approval and empathy go hand in hand, and so may appear to be the same thing, but a case like that of Macbeth makes the distinction clear enough. Again, sufficient empathy may overshadow orthodox response; for some critics, Macbeth or Falstaff will command so much audience identification that condemnation will be totally irrelevant. But if this occurs, the experience will seem to be a new perception, beyond orthodoxy. Since an audience presumably doesn't really approve of murder, or even of gluttony, it is perhaps misleading to use the word moral in such a case; but least we can say, and anyway I assume, that a sense of approval or disapproval, distinct from the matter of empathy, is normally part of our response to a character any given moment. I keep saying at any given moment because what I want to discuss is the overall response to a character seen as a whole. This is where the matter of structure comes in, and I may conveniently begin with a remark of William Rosen's. Confusion about Antony and Cleopatra is sometimes caused, he says, by critics who have been so overwhelmed by the ending that they read the play backwards, attempting to reconstruct a consistent characterization so that the final glory of Cleopatra may prevail.' Now such a charge could be made against some critics of any of the tragedies whose heroes are their most sympathetic the end, which is to say most of them. And it is a charge which seems serious today, when we are generally anxious to see plays, even Shakespeare's, as plays. We want to read frontwards, and see the structure of a tragedy in theatrical terms. Structure may indeed seem precisely the wrong word, since it weakens the distinction between arrangement in space and arrangement in time. If spatial structures may involve sequence, a normal order of perceptions, literary structures do so even more, and dramatic structures especially. Well, perhaps a sonnet would be seen whole, though there are elements of surprise and suspense in