Renaissance Forum: Volume 6, Number 2, Winter 2003: Sam Trainor

Ewan Fernie. 2002. Shame in Shakespeare. London and New York: Routledge. 274 pp. ISBN 0-415-25827-8. Ł60 (hb)/ISBN 0-415-25828-6. Ł16.99 (pb).

According to Terence Hawkes, the general editor, Routledge's Accents on Shakespeare series is 'cutting edge', 'a platform for the work of the liveliest young scholars and teachers at their most outspoken and provocative'. Kiernan Ryan on the cover calls it: 'a streetwise series of books [. . .] engaged, imaginative, heretical, and occasionally outrageous'. I'm down with that. To be honest though, it makes me think of the 1960s rather than the twenty-first century. I imagined some kind of post-critical Who smashing up their Arden Editions, a theoretical Hendrix squirting Swan Vestas lighter fluid on his Greenblattocaster. What I didn't think I'd find was a reaffirmation of the redemptive role of tragedy, a rather pious call for more humility and more humiliation, the Bard referred to as 'the Bard', and a prosaic penchant for the word 'bespeaks'.
In essence, what Fernie gives us is an idea of Renaissance literature gleaned directly from Renaissance literature. As much as he might try (sometimes with unaccountable success) to garner sympathy from thinkers such as Nietzsche, Sartre, Kristeva and Lacan, his quasi-theological approach comes straight out of the sermons of John Donne. He rejects the dichotomy of private guilt versus public shame, assuring the congregated readership that shame is a universalizing phenomenon which exposes the individual not to public pillory – 'the public aspect of shame has been exaggerated' – but to the scrutiny (within an introverted subject) of an omnipresent God. Shame is an eschatological response, a foreshadowing of the Day of Judgement, a fragmentation of the sinful self, and therefore (in the author's slightly shame-faced Christian theory) a force for good. Shame is the unpalatable impossibility of self revealed to that self and God. The process follows a trajectory of paralysis, self-objectification and (in Donne's terms) an ultimately redemptive 'dissolution, dispersal, dissipation'. Fernie's intention is to demonstrate the centrality of this view of shame in Shakespeare's England, to show that Shakespeare thought like this himself, and to reveal the logic and the processes of shame as the divining principle in Shakespeare's tragedies.
The strength of this argument lies in its proximity to an Elizabethan mindset. Fernie begins, for example, by tracing shame in literature up to the late Renaissance. His overview is divided into two categories: Classical and Christian. Classical (Graeco-Roman) shame is primarily masculine and secular; Christian (Medieval) shame is feminized and sacred. Classical tragic heroes (Herakles, Ajax, Oedipus) are enervated by self-consciousness upon realizing their tragic errors (sexual and/or violent): seeing themselves as others see them they become degraded and distracted. Where, though, Classical shame is something to be overcome or pitied, saintly Christian figures are exponents (as it were) of shame as a cosmically empowering purgative. Crucially, Fernie sees the crucifixion (as he later sees Shakespearean tragedy) as a spectacle of emasculating shame rather than of heroic death; it is in taking part in this unifying spectacle that Christians gain salvation. The lines are drawn rather too neatly here between the dichotomy of Classical and Christian. But we discover why when the author moves on to portray Renaissance shame in terms of a struggle between these two opposing forces. This makes internal sense. An acutely reductive account of the history of shame is quite persuasively revealed, with some sensitive close reading, to be precisely how figures like Spenser (more Medievally) and Marlowe (more Classically) thought of it.
Shakespeare, of course, is revealed as the artist who encompasses and reconciles these models. He encodes their struggles in his own redemptive shame-dramas. Despite some revealing explorations of the Sonnets, it's tragedy that Fernie chooses to examine in most detail: 'the shameful genre par excellence, since it degrades a heightened representative on a raised stage before a large audience'. This is in fact a logical result of Fernie's theoretical approach; his insistence that shame is universal rather than societal bears a telling resemblance to Philip Sidney's definition of tragedy. The shamed tragic hero is compared, unlike a guilty comic character, to the universe.
Richard II is co-opted as the prototype. His process of paralysis, self-objectification, fragmentation in the broken mirror, and dissipation into a metaphoric cloud is used as the template for the degradations of Hamlet, Othello and Lear. Crucially, Fernie demonstrates that Richard glimpses the redemptive outcome of this process. He casts it as an 'awakening', in a (Platonic) Christian sense. Here we find the author's core message: Shakespeare sees shame as both the (Classical) source of degradation and distraction of the hero and as the (Christian) route to its transcendence. For the audience, the universalizing atonement involved has something like a redemptive congregational effect.
Hamlet, in this light, is read as a play about a hero who suffers the shame of Elsinore and – in going through its process of distraction, degradation and self-dissipation – becomes its righteous agent. This is a weird philosophy: at-one-ment from self-fragmentation, resolution via dissolution. It is Hamlet's recognition 'amongst the debris of mortality [. . .] that degradation is a necessary and natural component of human life' that 'makes revenge conceivable'. Fernie makes it explicit that shame allows Hamlet 'to obscurely see God'. Hamlet has to go through the gnostic process of discovering and metaphorically universalizing his shame before he can wilfully play out his doom.
Othello, on the other hand, comes out as a shame-triangle: Desdemona as the Christian ideal of feminine shame who characteristically universalizes her experience, Othello as the Classical tragic hero who is degraded by the realization of his shameful actions, and Iago as shame's demonic orchestrator. In this scheme, Othello isn't just a Herakles who has mistakenly killed his wife, he has actually been led to destroy the embodiment of Christian shame itself. It is ambiguous whether he attains the salvation on the dead lips of his wife that Fernie argues might justify his suicide, but Fernie's analysis of Shakespeare's final tableau has stayed with me: the hero literally embracing Christian shame at the point of death.
Fernie dismisses Macbeth 'as more concerned with shamelessness' (and therefore presumably more Marlovian) and moves on to King Lear, the apotheosis of the shame tragedy. He provides a characteristically optimistic reading which identifies the play's sophisticated and thorough-going exploration of dramatic shame – with all its mirror-plots and its array of shamed and shaming characters and spectacles – as the source of the protagonist's unprecedented spiritual enlightenment. Fernie hears in Lear's echo of Oedipus's howl a harmonic transformation from the inarticulate wail of ultimate loss, to one that doubles as a cry of infinitely painful triumph. Lear is 'exalted, having at last achieved true knowledge and love [. . .] His unique distinction among tragic heroes is that he dies pointing away from himself, at somebody else'.
I regret the author's unwillingness to move on from this towards The Winter's Tale, and to examine how a selfless redemption – pointing away from the masculine self to the idealized feminine other (Leontes to Hermione) – is made into a joyful comedy by the staging of a resurrection. Instead, Fernie chooses to look at the two late Roman tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, and to recapitulate Shakespeare's view of the paucity of a Classical culture in the absence of universal shame. This is, Fernie argues, what Shakespeare says is wrong with Rome. Presumably he wants to warn Renaissance man and the Renaissance state not to abandon the only thing available to check their hubris.
By concluding with these Roman tragedies Fernie manages to keep his universalist approach free of the social relativism and self-conscious theatricality of comedy. This is a mistake. There is a certain blindness here to the pluralism of the theatre. The author's tendency to reduce the audience to a singularity in the unifying spectacle of private universal shame (which makes its response conveniently similar to both that of an isolated silent reader, and that of God) means that he ignores the class dynamics of de-gradation. Surely Lear grovelling plays differently in the pit than in the balcony; the reactionary message of shame-tragedy is that ennobling degradation is only available to those whose a priori nobility gives them a distance to fall. Edgar is degraded as Poor Tom precisely because Poor Tom could never be de-graded, or (therefore) ennobled. Furthermore, Fernie misses out on certain glaring deconstructive possibilities for his treatment of degrading drama in the etymological proximity of 'shame' and 'sham'.
My complaints, however, are the gripes of Marx and Derrida. If Fernie's vision has blind-spots, they are the result of his sensitive immersion in the pre-Marxist, pre-Derridean period. I think he has been goaded by the neon manifesto of the imprint to appear much more tendentious than he is. On the evidence of this book, the author is a good old-fashioned critic of Renaissance literature, one whose sensitivity to Early Modern social and religious thought has been gleaned primarily from the best source possible – the creative literature – and whose acuity in application of it to his readings derives from genuine imaginative engagement.
In a recent review of Stephen Greenblatt's Hamlet in Purgatory, he admires the author's success in 'salvaging something of the mind of the past', which he puts down to Greenblatt's turn back to the text, his 'rediscovery of the play and the traditions of Purgatory as it were from the inside' ('Greenblatt in Purgatory' Renaissance Forum 6.1). This is Fernie's kind of thing: New Historicism gone a bit New Critical. Paradoxical as it might sound, this is precisely what he's up to here. And it works. This book bespeaks of a historical critic who can think his way into the period. The enthusiasm, the unapologetic universalism, the Christian ethics, the struggles with a nascent 'self', he surrenders to these things instead of holding them at bay. He treats the subject as just that: a subject not an object. And, for better or worse, he lets 'the Bard' rather than some overweening theory direct his argument and his style. I like that – the Stanislavsky method of historicism – the spy from the future who gets lost in his literary cover.
What I don't like though is the preachy application of this early modern view of shame to contemporary society. Don't ask what you can do for shame, he implies in his conclusion, but what shame can do for you: namely, 'explode [. . .] the imprisoning idol of selfhood [. . .] from its own internal tensions [. . .] The spiritual and political health of our species depends on it'. Dr Fernie is proscribing a course of redemptive humiliation for the entire species: not a very humble thing to do. This zealous addendum misfires tastelessly (especially where it treats AIDS and homosexuality) making the approach seem reactionary rather than 'streetwise'. Frankly, it bespeaks of fogeyism: unlikely to impress the new generation of undergraduates which the series targets, precisely because, like Christian Rock, it tries too hard to do just that.
In a typically unusual appropriation, Fernie quotes the post-Heideggerian philosopher Emmanuel Levinas in support of his Elizabethan view of the millennium: 'sometimes I think that the whole of philosophy is only a meditation of Shakespeare'. That's just silly. It sounds like Stephen Dedalus. But Fernie amply demonstrates that it makes sense when reading Shakespeare. As a basis of contemporary cultural criticism though, it's embarrassing enough to raise a blush. To quote a student on Romeo and Juliet: 'Neat story. Shame about the end'.

SAM TRAINOR
UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW