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1. On Historical Understandings of Shakespeare's Works
- University of Nebraska Press
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q On Historical Understandings of Shakespeare’s Works When Hamlet wishes to mock Polonius as a timeserving old fool, he asks Polonius to look up at the clouds and see things: hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel? polonius: By th’ mass, and ’tis like a camel, indeed. hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel. polonius: It is backed like a weasel. hamlet: Or like a whale. (Hamlet ..–) Hamlet’s projections make Polonius see. Power creates perception. Hamlet knows that status, ideology, and culture create our reading and seeing. Or some part of them. One can make many lines of Shakespeare’s plays mean at least as many things as Polonius is told to notice. Yet we know that Polonius is looking so very intently at clouds—only clouds. And we, in reading or hearing him, are looking at, well, words—just words put in the mouths of actors to tell a story. As we read them we may project onto them things strange to an Elizabethan or Jacobean audience. We can interpret them in a direction that suits us or our masters through production, lighting, acting styles, gestures, and writing new or eliminating old text. And yet what we are looking On Historical Understandings of Shakespeare’s Works at so intently are words that had many but also boundaried uses in Shakespeare’s time, uses bearing family resemblances to each other.1 Many of the words had meanings and ranges of meanings for their first audiences that they do not now have. In turn, they now have meanings and ranges of meanings that their first audiences could not have known. But what if we could know the words as they were understood when they were first spoken, with some sense of the range of understandings given them then? What if we knew the words in their first contexts, their first uses in the job of work of Elizabethan and Jacobean language ? The quest for the historical Shakespeare that counts for us is not a quest for a man but for an understanding of the words of a man. As critics and scholars of Shakespeare’s plays, we seek ways in which people used language in Shakespeare’s time. All we have are words and how they can be understood.This does not mean that the plays did not have many meanings in their own times, that the same word or sentence could not have had differing meanings in differing contexts—say, at the court or in the Globe among the various groups and classes. Meaning could be redirected by a gesture, an improvisation , a change of context. Hamlet is able to redirect the meaning of The Mousetrap that the itinerant players who come to Ellesmere already know. Through devising the dumb show and adding a few lines, Hamlet changes what the scene says. We have reason, from the two versions of King Lear and from other textual changes in various “good” early texts of the plays, to believe that Shakespeare—or the teams of theater people, editors, compositors, and the like who first saw his plays into print—reconstructed passages of his plays to suit varying political and cultural contexts.2 As if to confirm that players could change things with their acting emphases, Hamlet concerns himself with the possibility that his meaning—to hold the mirror up to Claudius—will be lost in the players’ narcissism and incompetence: hamlet: Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you—trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many [3.236.171.68] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:59 GMT) On Historical Understandings of Shakespeare’s Works of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. . . . O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwigpated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise. . . . a player: I warrant your honour. hamlet: Be not too tame, neither; but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance: that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold as ’twere...