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“To hear the rest untold“: Shakespeare's Postponed Endings *

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Dennis Kay
Dennis Kay*
Affiliation:
Lincoln College
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Abstract

According to Edmund Spenser, trivial art was merely “painted forgery,” no more than “th'aboundance of an idle braine.” Its antithesis, exemplified by The Faerie Queene, was “matter of just memory” (FQ II.Proem, i). In this distinction, the double sense of “just,” i.e. both “righteous” and “exact,” tellingly suggests the response he desired—demanded even—from readers of his epic. Other works aspiring to the status of high art similarly make demands upon their audience which implicitly continue into the memory of the reader or viewer. It was thus, Ben Jonson argued, that the text of a masque could be elevated above the mere physical spectacle of its performance: it was in the imagination of the audience that the “more removed mysteries,” only shadowed forth in the action of the show, could be fully subjected to the understanding (rather than simply experienced externally by the sense) of the beholders.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , Summer 1984 , pp. 207 - 227
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1984

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Footnotes

*

I should like to thank Professor Elizabeth Story Donno for her kindness in reading this article in two of its versions, and for her many helpful comments and suggestions.

References

1 See Jonson's Preface to Hymenaei (1606); u/v,i/j silently modernized: IT is a noble and just advantage, that the things subjected to understanding have of those which are objected to sense, that the one sort are but momentarie, and meerely taking; the other impressing, and lasting: Else the glorie of all these solemnities had perish'd like a blaze, and gone out, in the beholders eyes. So short-liv'd are the bodies of all things, in comparison of their soules. (Ben Jonson ,ed. C. H. Herford and P. and E. Simpson, 10 vols. [Oxford, 1925-52], VII., 209. All subsequent Jonson references are to this edition.)

2 Five instances are cited by J. C. Maxwell in his New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Pericles (Cambridge, 1956), p. 195.

3 A cautionary and trenchantly witty survey of ironic readings of Shakespeare's endings is provided by Richard Levin, New Readings vs. Old Plays: Recent Trends in the Reinterpretation of English Renaissance Drama (Chicago and London, 1979), pp. 102-25.

4 The term is employed in the Aristoelian sense of J. B. Altman: “the marvelous—that which arouses wonder— is found in a group of incidents that stimulate the mind to new surmise. We are not simply surprised by the unexpected; we are stirred by the dramatist's artful disposition of events to infer a larger rational pattern lying behind them. In doing so, we move toward knowledge, which resides in the discovery of first principle.” (The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama [Berkeley, 1978], p. I.)

5 References to the text of Shakespeare are taken throughout from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. B. Evans (Boston, 1974).

6 Peter, Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe(London , 1978), pp. 91–148, passim;Google Scholar Spufford, M., Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (London , 1981), pp. 3–6.Google Scholar

7 Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories, pp. 62, 79-80, citing Krailsheimer, A.J., ed., The Continental Renaissance, 1500-1600 (Hannondsworth, 1971), pp. 311-31Google Scholar, and Lippincott's, H.P. edition of Sir Nicholas Le Strange, Merry Passages andjeasts: A Manuscript Jestbook (Salzburg, 1974).Google Scholar

8 Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant- Histories, p. 65 (see also pp. 65-67, 144-47); Burke, Popular Culture, pp. 109-10; P. Clark, “The Alehouse and the Alternative Society,“ in Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth-Century History presented to Christopher Hill, ed. D. Pennington and K. Thomas (Oxford, 1978), pp. 47-72; Spufford, M., Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries(Cambridge , 1974), pp. 231-33, 246-47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 In addition to “January” in The Shepherd's Calendar, which describes story-telling by old women around the hearth on a winter's evening, see Clare's Autobiography, in The Prose of John Clare, ed. J. W. and A. Tibble (London, 1931), p. 19 and Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories, pp. 3-18. Wordsworth incorporated into the 1805 Prelude a tale “recorded by my household dame” (Anne Tyson; VIII. 221-311); see The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. J. Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and S. Gill (New York and London, 1979), pp. 278-82.

10 For a recent study, see Nancy, Lindheim, The Structures of Sidney's “Arcadia” (Toronto , 1982), pp. 87–108, 199-201.Google Scholar

11 This is especially true of the distribution of the story of Plangus and Erona, itself a part of the story of Pyrocles and Musidorus, between Philoclea, Pamela and Basilius; see Lawry, J.S., Sidney's Two Arcadias: Pattern and Proceeding (Ithaca , 1972), pp. 94–145, 219-29.Google Scholar

12 See Terence Cave, “Recognition and the Reader,” in Schaffer, E.S., ed., Comparative Criticism: A Yearbook , vol. 2 (Cambridge , 1980), pp. 49–69.Google Scholar

13 The Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. A. Feuillerat, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1912-1926), vol. 1(1912), 199, 338.

14 See Michael O'Connell, Mirror and Veil: The Historical Dimension of Spenser's “Faerie Queene” (Chapel Hill, 1977), pp. 69-98.

15 Ralph, Berry, The Shakespeare Inset: Word and Picture(London , 1965), pp. 14–25. 52-55.Google Scholar

16 Maxwell (ed. cit., p. 195) notes that it is “a typical Sh.ending.“

17 See Nicholas Brooke's suggestive “Shakespeare and Baroque Art,” Proceedings of the British Academy, LXIII (1977), 53-69, passim, esp. pp. 66-68.

18 See Mary Ann, Caws, The Eye in the Text: Essays on Perception, Mannerist to Modern (Princeton , 1981), p. 49;Google Scholar also Louis, Marin, “Toward a Theory of Reading in the Visual Arts: Poussin's The Arcadian Shepherds,” in The Reader in the Text. Essays on Audience and Interpretation, ed. Susan, R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (Princeton , 1980), pp. 293– 324.Google Scholar

19 Berry, The Shakespeare Inset, pp. 61-63.

20 Generic modulation of this kind is related to the attitudes to frames and structures,the “violation of expected symmetry” analyzed by Brooke (“Shakespeare and Baroque Art,” p. 59), and by other students of the Baroque. On the specific relation of tragedy to epic and history, the most eloquent articulation of the anti-Aristotelian, anti-neoclassical position is Tasso's: I cannot deny that tragedy brings its fable to a conclusion in less time and gives a more concentrated pleasure; but the same thing holds true of the delight to be found in tragedy and in epic as of the power in large and small bodies: no one would choose to be small, even if the power of the small body were more concentrated and that of the large more diffuse. But in fact, there is greater power in the large body; and in the same way the pleasure of epic is greater, indeed is true pleasure, whereas tragedy's is mingled with weeping and tears, full of bitterness throughout. So too I grant that tragedy is simpler and more unified, yet it cannot thereby escape every sort of compositeness and doubleness, so that it is somehow composite and double. And as among composite bodies the perfect are those that intermingle and temper all elements and qualities, so among fables the most composite are the best. But I certainly will not grant that tragedy achieves its end better; on the contrary, it moves toward it along an oblique and tortuous road, while epic takes the direct way. For if there are two ways of improving us through example, one inciting us to good works by showing the reward of excellence and an almost divine worth, the other frightening us from evil with penalties, the first is the way of epic, the second that of tragedy, which for this reason is less useful and gives less delight. For man is not so ferocious and wicked by nature as to take his highest pleasure in the pain and unhappiness of those whom some human failing brings to wretchedness. ( Torquato, Tasso, Discourses on the Heroic Poem , translated by Cavalchini, M. and Samuel, I. [Oxford , 1973], pp. 204–205.Google Scholar) On Tasso's theory of genres, see Patterson, A.M., “Tasso and Neoplatonism: The Growth of his Epic Theory,” Studies in the Renaissance , 18 (1971), 105-33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Also Caws, The Eye in the Text, pp. 14-15.

21 Two elements are at work here. First, the processes of digestion and understanding are traditionally twinned; and Renaissance works (Ovid's Banquet of Sence, Coryate's Crudities, First Fruites, etc.) fully explore and exploit their metaphorical equivalence. Secondly, the occasion of storytelling episodes was frequently a meal (see F.Q. Ill, ix, 32, Sidney, Works, I., 18-29, etc.); thus the rituals of communal eating and narrative exchange were temporally and physically, as well as metaphorically, coincidental. See the account of Erasmus’ Gonvivium religiosum (The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. C. R. Thompson [Chicago and London, 1965], pp. 46-47) in T. Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford, 1978), pp. 101-108.

22 James L., Calderwood, “Hamlet: The Name of Action,” MLQ , 39 (1978), 331-62Google Scholar, points to the aptness of Horatio's name for his function as orator (p. 334). See also Calderwood's To Be and Not to Be: Negation and Metadrama in “Hamlet” (New York, 1983), pp. 117-22, 182-4.

23 Ian Donaldson, “All's Well That Ends Well: Shakespeare's Play of Endings,” Essays in Criticism, 27 (1977), 34-55; also Richard A., Levin, “All's Well That Ends Well, and ‘All Seems Well',” Shakespeare Studies , XIII (1980), 131-44.Google Scholar

24 See Altman, Tudor Play of Mind, Chapter I; Donaldson argues in relation to All's Well that “its problems of ending [are] not merely formal problems but also the problems of life itself (“Shakespeare's Play of Endings,” p. 54).

25 Such implication represents a sophistication of the audience's role in works such as Gascoigne's Supposes (1566); another example is As You Like It, whose resolution is inaugurated by Orlando's question “Is't possible …?” (V.ii. 1), and includes Touchstone's “much virtue in If “ (V.iv. 103).

26 This is to reject the view that Measure for Measure is “not a fully satisfying emotional experience because it deprives us of the sense of harmony and completeness … which is the accompanying sensation of a great work” ( Miles, R., The Problem of Measure for Measure: A Historical Investigation [London , 1976], p. 286 Google Scholar), in favor of a position eloquently stated by Harriett Hawkins: “Critical efforts to exorcise the play's demons, to disregard Shakespeare's illumination of the darker regions of the soul … deny the play one of its boldest claims to truth. And to impose any external … solutions … is, in fact, to deny this play its rightful claim to greatness. Finally, it seems impertinent to consider it the duty of criticism to solve problems that Shakespeare himself refused to solve. What remain pertinent are the problems posed” (” ‘The Devil's Party': Virtues and Vices in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Survey, 31 [1978], 113). See also Chaudhuri, S., Infirm Glory: Shakespeare and the Renaissance Image of Man(Oxford , 1981), pp. 154-63.Google Scholar

27 Emrys, Jones, Scenic Form in Shakespeare (Oxford , 1971), pp. 145-48.Google Scholar

28 Montaigne, , The Essayes , tr. John, Florio (London , 1603), I.xviii, pp. 29–30.Google Scholar

29 This is closer to the views of Barbara Everett, “ ‘Spanish’ Othello: The Making of Shakespeare's Moor,” Shakespeare Survey, 35 (1982), 101-12 than to the more reductive Bradleian perspective of Kastan, D.S., Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time(London , 1982), pp. 81–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Andrew S., Cairncross, “Shakespeare and Ariosto: Much Ado About Nothing, King Lear, and Othello,” Renaissance Quarterly , 29 (1976), 178-82.Google Scholar

30 The Sermons of John Donne, ed. G. R. Potter and E. M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley, 1953-62), VI, 41.

31 Carey, J., “Donne and Coins,” in English Renaissance Studies Presented to Dame Helen Gardner in honour of her Seventieth Birthday, ed. Carey, J., (Oxford , 1980), pp. 151- 63,esp. p. 159.Google Scholar

32 See also the even more remarkable recognition scene in Cymbeline V.v., where the exchange of information is enacted as a prelude to the declaration of a general peace.

33 See Ernest B., Oilman, “ ‘All eyes': Prospero's Inverted Masque,” Renaissance Quarterly, 33 (1980), 214-30;Google Scholar more generally, see Wolfgang, Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” in Ralph Cohen, ed., New Directions in Literary History (Baltimore, 1974), pp. 129-32.Google Scholar

34 BenJonson, VI., 139-40.

36 See Blissett, W., “Your Majesty is Welcome to a Fair,” Elizabethan Theatre , IV (1974), 80–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37 Brooke, “Shakespeare and Baroque Art,” p. 57.

38 Caws, The Eye in the Text, p. 36. See also Cyrus Hoy, “Jacobean Tragedy and the Mannerist Style,” Shakespeare Survey, 26 (1973), 49-67.

39 Cited by Cave, Cornucopian Text, p. 109n (translation, p. 341).

40 Peter, Alexander, Shakespeare's Life and Art (London , 1939), p. 214.Google Scholar

41 Montaigne, Essayes, tr. Florio, Ill.xiii, p. 635. Sec Cathlecn M. Bauschatz, “Montaigne's Conception of Reading in the Context of Renaissance Poetics and Modern Criticism,” in The Reader in the Text, pp. 264-91; also Cave, Cornucopian Text, pp. 313-21.