The Form and the Pressure: Shakespeare's Haunting of Bertolt Brecht

The Form and the Pressure: Shakespeare's Haunting of Bertolt Brecht JOHN FUEGI • "Brecht a ete toute sa vie litteralement hante par Shakespeare.,,1 WITH SEEMING FINALITY, PETER BROOK DECLARES IN The Empty Space: "No one seriously concerned with the theater can bypass Brecht. Brecht is the key figure of our time, and all theater work today at some point starts or returns to his statements and achievements.,,2 Yet, having granted the primacy of Brecht's importance to the modern stage, we find Mr. Brook declaring only pages later: "So it is in the second half of the twentieth century in England where I am writing these words, we are faced with the infuriating fact that Shakespeare is still our model.,,3 Though Mr. Brook does not tie the two statements together in the tendentious way I have done so here, the statements themselves may be juxtaposed in order to illuminate a major paradox of the contemporary theater. If Brecht be the innovative artist and original thinker that Brook suggests he is - and that Brecht himself so often claimed to be (for example, "I am the Einstein of the new stage form,,4) - how then is it possible that a representative of late feudal thinking in England should still manage to serve the late twentieth century as a model? Why have we not totally jettisoned Shakespeare's supposedly antiquated model, with its burden of hierarchical values, ghosts, and other claptrap, and wholeheartedly embraced instead a new model created specifically for a new world view in our scientific century by our leading Marxist theoretician and playwright? Whatever "answers" can be given to such deliberately provocative questions can best come, I believe, from a close examination of Brecht's own lifelong love-hate relationship with his Elizabethan forerunner. Only if we can understand both Brecht's early vitriolic statements and his later rapproche291 292 JOHN FUEGI ment with Shakespeare can we then explain why a close study of the "new" (Brecht) has led us, however reluctantly, back to the "old" (Shakespeare). Needless to say, the subject of Brecht's preoccupation with Shakespeare has not escaped the attention of critics.5 Though Brecht himself spoke of the Elizabethan theater as a "theater full of V-effects,,,6 and critics such as Paul Rilla and Eric Bentley saw very early that many of Brecht's techniques constItuted a radical renaissance of Elizabethan stage practice, it was not until Helge Hultberg's 1959 essay' that a systematic attempt was made at a comparative study. For Hultberg, relying largely on Brecht's pre-1936 theoretical pronouncements, Brecht's relationship to Shakespeare was strictly negative. Attempts to balance Mr. Hultberg's adamant view have appeared regularly since. Most recently, in Brecht und Shakespeare (Bonn, 1970) the Canadian scholar Rodney T. K. Symington has argued for virtually the opposite position from that taken by Hultberg. Symington's attempt to establish that Brecht's view of Shakespeare was exclusively positive somewhat mars an otherwise extremely useful source study in which the author demonstrates in convincing detail Brecht's lifelong interest in Macbeth, Hamlet,A Midsummer Night's Dream,Measure for Measure, Richard III, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, and Coriolanus. Those who follow closely the argument of Hultberg's thesis and Symington's antithesis will find, paradoxically, much merit in both positions. Hultberg, though not always completely accurate in the evidence he musters in support of Brecht's early anti-aesthetic, anti-Shakespearean stance,S is sufficiently convincing that we must take his arguments seriously. But Symington, in revealing that Hultberg's argument is less applicable to later plays and to later critical pronouncements, is equally deserving of our close attention. It may be helpful to the general reader, therefore, to show why these two serious and competent scholars have reached such fundamentally different conclusions. Helge Hultberg's main concern, as I have noted above, is with Brecht the newly converted Marxist9 and Brecht's fighting slogans of the twenties as he attempts to replace the sterile playing of what he saw as reactionary and bourgeois classics with a politically progressive theater. As Hultberg shows, it is after Brecht's immersion in Marxist theory in the mid-twenties...