Upon reading Emerson’s “Shakspeare; or, the Poet”

In Emerson’s Shakspeare; or, the Poet, the “sage of Concord” argues that great poets, contrary to the received view, do not deal in originality. Rather, they are the most free borrowers of ideas from others. This, perhaps, is not so controversial, but it is odd that Emerson goes on to write something like an Ode to the People out of this simple idea:

It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius, in the world, was no man’s work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse. Our English Bible is a wonderful specimen of the strength and music of the English language. But it was not made by one man, or at one time; but centuries and churches brought it to perfection [...]

Undoubtedly, the machinery of culture is a complex thing, and much of Shakespeare might not have been written without Tyndale’s Bible, which obviously could not have been written without the Bible itself, and may have been radically different if not for the spirit of reformation in the Europe of the day. It is also undoubtedly true that Shakespeare would not have been quite the same Shakespeare had he been born thirty years earlier or later. But to reduce his role, as Emerson seems to do, to that of the man who gave the final tug on the final stone of the Great Pyramid, is greatly to misconceive the nature of genius. The bard stood on the shoulders of giants, as Newton did, but those giants were not so different for Shakespeare than they were for Marlowe or for Jonson, yet those two, as brilliant as they were, paled in comparison. All writers since Shakespeare have him to add to the list of cultural progenitors, but there has not yet been anyone who can seriously challenge his position at the top of the canon.

Emerson’s problem seems to be a misconception of the nature of originality. Of Chaucer, he says that “he steals by this apology,—that what he takes has no worth where he finds it, and the greatest where he leaves it.” Chaucer and Shakespeare were indeed liberal borrowers, yet it’s no contradiction to say that they were also highly original. If Shakespeare is called unoriginal for his theft of the story of Amleth and its reuse in Hamlet, then what are we to make of the fact that the Prince of Denmark is nowhere to be found in his forebear? Indeed, if we are to believe Harold Bloom, Hamlet is one of the most original creations in all fiction—one who is not only unprecedentedly new in literature, but also in life. Emerson might retort that this originality is still just a clever reappropriation and rejigging of ideas that existed before—and no one could doubt the truth of that. But then, there is no such thing as ex nihilo originality anyway, and only ever a persuasive illusion of it. As original as Homer is, there is nothing in the Iliad or the Odyssey that did not in some form or other exist before. By this logic, though, human beings are not particularly original creations of nature, because the bare subatomic particles necessary for our existence were there since the Big Bang.

One gets the sense throughout the piece that Emerson has a barely concealed agenda: that of explaining his own genius to the world. He would like his contemporaries to see what he is so convinced of; but, he despairs, “you cannot see the mountain near.” He says of Shakespeare’s genius that “it took a century to make it suspected; and not until two centuries had passed, after his death, did any criticism which we think adequate begin to appear.” Perhaps this is true, but then Ben Jonson did write of Shakespeare that “he was not of an age, but for all time.” Even if Jonson believed he was his rival’s superior, this is hardly the sort of thing one says just to fill a few lines in the preface to the First Folio.

Shakespeare, says Emerson, “was a full man, who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and images, which, seeking vent, found the drama next at hand.” (My italics.) In other words, Emerson would have us think that Shakespeare really was quite similar to himself, but where the Stratford poet chose drama, the Concord poet chose the essay, each as easily and arbitrarily as the other. Suppose Shakespeare had found essays in the mode of Montaigne next at hand, would he have taken to them as successfully? It seems likelier that he relied on the form and the distance of a narratorless narrative to give full vent to his brain’s exhaling thoughts and images.

Perhaps Emerson suffers an anxiety of influence in relation to Shakespeare, in his sense of himself as a poet and as a genius. If there is one thing that we all know of Shakespeare, it’s that we know hardly anything about him. But Emerson insists that,

so far from being the least known, he is the one person, in all modern history, known to us. What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office or function, or district of man’s work, has he not remembered? What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentlemen has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?

I think as highly as Emerson of Shakespeare’s wisdom, but fail to see his point here. I would, in fact, ask the opposite of all these rhetorical questions. When we see a performance of King Lear, or read Measure for Measure, we don’t really learn anything at all, other than about human nature—although it’s probably more correct to say that we are sensitised to it, and our imaginations are expanded to embrace parts of it whose existence we never dared picture. Clearly, it is Emerson who would like to be the sage who was wiser than all sages, and the Talma who could instruct all Napoleons.

Even if it is true that Shakespeare really did settle all points of morals and manners, that still does not tell us much about the man’s personality. That is rather akin to saying “we know for certain that Shakespeare was a great writer, therefore we do indeed know something about him—he must have been a sensitive man, and he must have been the sort of person who takes writing seriously.” A man’s knowledge or talent tells us only a bare minimum about the man himself. Believers contend that God is omnipotent and omniscient, but that tells us nothing about where he stood on the Christological debate in the early years of the church, what his favourite colour is, or what he likes to do in his spare time.

But Emerson does also say the following:

The Genius draws up the ladder after him, when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives way to a new, who sees the works, and ask in vain for a history. Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare; and even he can tell nothing, except to the Shakspeare in us; that is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour.

So on the one hand, Shakespeare draws up the ladder after him, and on the other, he is the most thoroughly known of all authors, because we have heard his pronouncements on everything of any import. What are we to make of this apparent contradiction?

Perhaps Emerson means to tell us that we can’t get at the workings of Shakespeare’s mind, but that that is immaterial given our knowledge of what his mind was able to produce? But that still seems a little unsatisfactory. Aristotle may be said to be the first universal man, but the fact that his abilities were so varied in itself tells us nothing about the man, other than that his abilities were so varied. It would seem to follow by force of reason that, if we hear a man’s pronouncements on everything, we might know something of his views, because many facts are correct opinions, no matter how much controversy they might court. And so if there is a correct opinion to be had about whether monarchy is the best form of government, Shakespeare might have expressed it in the Henriad, say—yet we glean nothing from it on the matter. If there is a correct opinion to be had about the best action of a king, he might have expressed it in King Lear—but we are none the wiser. The fact is that if we happen to find such “pronouncements”, these are incidental to Shakespeare’s truest interest in human nature. And on this Shakespeare hardly ever pronounces at all, he merely shows. Who is to know what Shakespeare’s stance was on the conduct of Macbeth? Surely we cannot argue that Shakespeare uses the play to remind us all that murder is wrong and that it leads to terrible consequences for those who do it—we hardly need High Shakespearean tragedy for that. Indeed, the opposite might be argued. As Nietzsche says in Daybreak (section 240), “Whoever thinks that Shakespeare’s theatre has a moral effect, and that the sight of Macbeth irresistibly repels one from the evil of ambition, is in error: and he is again in error if he thinks Shakespeare himself felt as he feels. He who is really possessed by raging ambition beholds this its image with joy; and if the hero perishes by his passion this precisely is the sharpest spice in the hot draught of this joy.”

One wonders whether the idea of Shakespeare’s inscrutability has not been rather overplayed by those who have written about him. The fact that he created such diverse personalities almost necessarily implies that it’s difficult to get at the man himself. But this inscrutability is due in very large part to a combination of historical factors—the sparse personal records, the cultural flowering of the period (which meant that minds were opened), and enough censorship to make a pragmatic writer scared to express controversial opinions—as well as to the plays and poems. If some significant discovery were to be made tomorrow about Shakespeare’s life, or if his correspondence were to be found beneath the floorboards of his Stratford house, it would very likely throw the plays in a different light, and we would probably see which of his characters was closest to him. Suddenly all those who desire easy explanation of the plays will be gorged on interpretive possibilities—but even if the plays will continue to defy such explanation, the man himself will not have escaped the Evil Eye of historical evidence.

Emerson’s ambivalence about the knowability of Shakespeare’s soul suggests a deeper ambivalence about the position of his own genius in relation to posterity. It is a perennial myth of Western civilization (and perhaps elsewhere too) that genius is mysterious and unfathomable. Emerson, therefore, had to remain so, whilst also being a full man who liked to talk, and who liked to pronounce his opinions on everything of import. Such a balance is hard to strike, to say the least—and perhaps explains the inscrutability, and even incoherence, of much of his writing.