Article: "Set Me Where You Stand": Revising the Abyss

Just about the time that the sixties were achieving identity as the sixties, Maynard Mack gave three lectures for the Department of English at Berkeley in which he anticipated, with admirable learning and a particular animus (to which I will later return), the current critique of revisionism. The critique, of course, was only to be expected, after a generation in which the receding dissidence of the sixties, sublimated, recycled, and reified in theory, was the dominant force in our scholarship. That it came with a new historicism and confessions of complicity, identity politics and a rhetoric of transgression, bodies that matter and gender bending (reminding us, in a rather gleeful propaedeutic on the epistemology of the closet, that not only Ophelia, but even Gertrude was a boy!) must have been for the scholar who had illumined the world of Hamlet, if something more than fantasy, surely passing strange. ¹ It was just passing onto the scene, however, when the lectures were published in 1965, as King Lear in Our Time. ² Reviewing the stage history and bringing it up to date, the book confirmed the learning that was, from Professor Mack, also to be expected, though the learning might soon be taken to task for the limitations of its history and his faith in the autonomous text, from its time to our time, essential meanings intact, or as Stephen Greenblatt put it about the work of art, “a pure flame that lies at the source of our speculations.” ³ Not only did Mack ignore, in the apparatus of cultural production, an echo chamber of maybe unsettling, concomitant texts, but along with the unruly symbiosis between the social and the poetic, the sometimes incontinent, site-specific fact that neither “the Globe on the Banksyde” nor “Whitehall vppon Sainct Stephen’s night,” where the play was performed for the King (nor the Stationer’s Register, which noted that occasion and entitled the text to be printed), was impartial political territory; nor, for that matter, was the lecture hall at Berkeley, before or after the visitations of Michel Foucault.

It may have been too early for any of the new historicists now established there to have been at the lectures, taking issue with Mack, but at a time when the dubious crossing of disciplines may be overreaching itself, causing revisionist history to be confronted with rules of evidence, his learning may have the virtue of not claiming too much for itself, or not as much for itself as it does for the wisdom of Shakespeare. I realize as I say it, putting my finger in the flame, that “Shakespeare” has become an institution, which in assuming superior value discredits the other word “wisdom,” by now in cultural studies archaic or obsolete. No matter: for what occurs in Lear even wisdom is insufficient. And so it was when Samuel Johnson, shocked by the death of Cordelia, said he was not sure he could endure reading of it again, or the last scenes of the play, until he had a chance to revise them as an editor. ⁴ That remark, I must confess, was more disturbing to Mack than it has ever been to me, since there is probably no more credible response to those scenes—if not “the promised end,” the “image of that horror” ⁵ —than being unable to bear it. That Dr. Johnson would bear it by rewriting it may be the sort of revisionism that any sort of historicist might find somewhat hard to take, though such practice was later justified in the materialist theater of Brecht, who even in the debates with Lukács (where he defended Joycean formalism as a better brand of socialist realism) and long before Fredric Jameson, insisted that we historicize.

But what makes history or unmakes it, and the modes of legitimation, were not really Mack’s concern as he wrote at the end of his book “about all that the earth has known,” since we came crying hither, “of disease, famine, earthquake, war” (KL 116), the extent of it unexplainable, by history or metahistory, or the book of Revelation. In...