Word Against Word: Shakespearean Utterance (review)

Among recent books on Shakespeare and language, James R. Siemon's Word Against Word: Shakespearean Utterance stands out for the breadth of its scholarship, the subtlety and range of its analysis, and its return to the now rather neglected work of Mikhail Bakhtin. Ostensibly an analysis of Richard II, the book offers both more and less than that. Readers looking for a comprehensive interpretation of Shakespeare's play will be disappointed, but they will come away considerably enriched in other respects.

Siemon's point of departure, aptly conveyed in his title, is the Bakhtinian concept of the dialogical utterance. Bakhtin's problematic denigration of drama as a genre is perhaps the main reason why he has not been especially influential in Shakespeare studies. While acknowledging what he calls "the essential Carnival element in the organization of Shakespeare's drama,"¹ Bakhtin focused on the novel as the most dialogical of literary forms. This led him to overlook the degree to which Shakespeare's texts in particular condense the heteroglossic clash of "word against word" that Bakhtin saw as the essence of language in use. Dialogue in drama is not the sealed, monological dialectic that Voloshinov and Bakhtin took it to be but contains a world of other voices. It is, as they held of every utterance, an enthymeme: it relies on much more than it says explicitly, assuming through its form multiple utterances, evaluations, and ideologies. The enthymemic nature of the utterance means that one is necessarily concerned with recovering a now historically distant (if not lost) world of social accents with which any utterance is implicitly in contact. At the same time, one cannot simply deal in the broad brushstrokes of social ideology, personal attitude, or historical position. One must pay as close attention to the "words on the page" as any "close reader."

There is not space enough here for me to summarize Siemon's complex analysis, but his considerable achievement may be simply expressed. "Listening around," as he wittily puts it (2 and passim), for all the resonances of the utterance and its framing anecdote, reveals an astonishing complexity and instability of what are usually taken to be fairly integrated "discourses": of social distinction, agency, complicity, lyrical lament, power, and individuality. Shakespeare's play, he observes, "constantly suggests the ways in which one discourse or ideology takes form, shape, limitation—its very meaning—within and among others" (142). But Siemon's approach takes him far beyond Richard II, or even Shakespeare, to an extraordinarily rich discussion of Lyly, Donne, and Nashe in relation to Shakespeare's peculiar mixture of linguistic forms and ideological accents, through which the elements of social difference, for example, "appear loosened from any too tight tethering to a single typifying individual, location, or valuation; they come to interact in new and surprising ways" (57).

Siemon reveals that no single character or group of characters may be said to stand without complication for the settled values of a past feudal order or the emerging notions of royal absolutism or capitalist utility. "[T]he voice of the new disorder and the old order," Siemon argues, "are represented as fundamentally related to one another in the values they profess" (132-33). The next chapter extends and deepens this argument in a remarkably dense and wide-ranging exemplification of his thesis that "characters articulate themselves, name their values, and define their ideological positions in utterances that seem to cross themselves as well as one another, suggesting old alliances, interior divisions, misrecognitions, and cross purposes within as well as among 'individual' interlocutors" (137-38). Here Siemon casts new light on the problematic issue of individuation in Richard's poetic or lyrical self-reflection via an insightful analysis of Gaunt's embroilment in "the social demands of utterance" (148) when the latter declares, concerning his own judgment upon his son, "you gave leave to my unwilling tongue / Against my will to do myself this wrong" (1.3.245-46). In Richard's case...