“Bring Back Bradley: Shakespearean criticism and the problem of graphocentrism”
(Excerpt)
John Jacobs
Deakin University
(The full article can be found here on In/Stead Journal.)
[“Graphocentrism” – analysing a play as if it were a written text only, rather than a performance text.]
A.C.Bradley
I have given my essay the title ‘Bring Back Bradley’ because of a wonderful quality that some of his writing possesses, even though most of the time he in fact falls as squarely into the graphocentric trap as any other writer discussed here.
Like the darlings of many generations, Bradley was undoubtedly ‘the bete noir of the next’ (Katharine Cook, 1972): his lectures on Shakespeare were still provoking rage more than fifty years after their publication in 1904. Up until the 1970s it is quite difficult to find a work of Shakespearian criticism which omits all reference to his name. In 1988 Peter Davison wrote that, despite the attacks by, amongst others, F.R.Leavis, ‘his stock still rides high and with justice…..his passionate engagement with his subject is perennially attractive’. Whilst Davison’s rather quaint phrasing itself recalls the Edwardian Bradley’s, there are passages in the lectures which really do confirm what Davison is saying: the account of Emilia, for example, in lecture six. For Bradley, Emilia’s retort ‘A halter pardon him, and hell gnaw his bones’ (IV-ii, 138) says what
we long to say, and helps us. And who has not felt in the last scene how her glorious carelessness of her own life, and her outbursts against Othello…lift the overwhelming weight of calamity that oppresses us, and bring us an extraordinary lightening of the heart. (p.198)
The dispensing here with Bradley’s customary term ‘the reader’ and the emphatic repetitions of ‘we’ suggest a body of people responding together: an audience. Here is the quality of ‘engagement’ to which Davison is referring. Elsewhere Bradley defines plays repeatedly as texts for reading rather than for performance. The phrasing of some later criticism, such as ‘to the reader, or audience’ are absent, and the premise is maintained throughout. The majority of earlier interpretations of Iago’s character, for example, are described in lecture six as being ‘inadequate not only to Shakespeare’s conception, but, I believe, to the impressions of most readers of taste who are bewildered by analysis’ (p.170.) Iago’s ‘extraordinary deadness of feeling’ is something ‘few readers are in danger of ignoring’. Bradley goes on to praise ‘the poet who painted Macbeth and Shylock’; and in the end the improbability of the entire success of Iago’s design ‘forces itself on the reader’ (p.190.)
There is in lecture six a sole explicit reference to the play as play rather than novel or poem, to which Bradley is led quite accidentally by probing the function of the soliloquies:
…with Shakespeare soliloquy generally gives information regarding the secret springs as well as the outward course of the plot; and, moreover, it is a curious point of technique with him that the soliloquies of his villains sometimes read almost like explanations offered to the audience (p.182.)
The fragility of this moment is evident in ‘curious’ (Bradley never goes on to explore why), ‘almost’ and ‘read’, the last of which terms leads to a familiar confusion: audiences do not read soliloquies, at least not in the sense in which Bradley appears to be using the word in 1904; they listen to them and look at the actor performing them. Why did Bradley find this ‘technique’ of explanation curious and pass on quickly to a new point rather than explore it further? The answer appears to lie in a failure to consider either the diverse dramatic genres on which Renaissance plays were based (an omission shared with, amongst many other later critics, Rymer) or the playing conditions in the theatres of Shakespeare’s time. The explanatory element in soliloquy goes back to the very first ‘actor’ in the Western tradition, Thespis, and flourishes in the plays of Euripides and others. In outdoor (medieval) and semi-outdoor (Globe) theatre-spaces this direct ‘offer’, to use Bradley’s term, at once secures the audience’s attention (no easy matter in such spaces) and makes its members party to what is unfolding in their midst. To Bradley this is curious, for to him, as to a host of critics following him, the soliloquies are more readily associated with meditation and reflection. Yet Iago’s soliloquies work also, as we have already seen, as generation of plot, as exposition, and as the fashioning of Iago as quasi-author figure.
Bradley’s letters show that he went to the theatre, but he most likely would only have seen Othello performed on the other side of a proscenium-arch. Proscenium-arch theatre divides speaker from audience and hence lends itself to a view of soliloquy as private meditation rather than audience-address. Such playing conditions contrast sharply with those which pertained in, for example, the Globe, in which an actor standing on the front of the platform was in fact standing in the very middle of a circular or polygonal building, in an afternoon light embracing both himself and the audience which surrounded him on three sides.
In the light of this narrow perspective it is hardly surprising that Bradley’s discussion cannot fathom the ‘secret springs’ of which he writes, and that his Iago remains as much a ‘character’ (p.186) as he was to Rymer, a ‘thoroughly bad, cold man’, in whose psychology ‘there is no mystery’(p.188.)
Nevertheless, because of his passion and intuition, I prefer Bradley’s lecture to all the other essays reviewed in the present discussion, even Greenblatt’s.
In a future article I would like to explore the Othello -criticism of the last fifteen years, with a view mainly to establishing to what extent graphocentrism remains a problem in performance studies.
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