Shaky scholarship

This is Shakespeare

By Emma Smith Pelican £20

‘Lots of what we trot out about Shakespeare and iambic pentameter and the divine right of kings and “Merrie England” and his enormous vocabulary blah blah blah are just not true, and just not important.’

So writes Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies and Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford, in the introduction to this new, audiencefriendly introduction to Shakespearean drama.

It is an arresting statement, with its breezy modern grammar, but one feels immediately bound to ask who is trotting out such topics and where.

In the case of the pentameter, it is Emma Smith herself in the book under review. Twice she points out an initial trochee, or reversed first foot, an observation that Stephen Potter had already marked down as a useful piece of ‘gamesmanship’ – pretending to superior knowledge – in 1950.

As for Shakespeare and ‘Merrie England’, I expect one would be hardpressed to find this collocation in use outside the rackety commercial world of coach tours and tea rooms.

The problems with this sentence – selling her subject short when she in fact has nothing else to sell – are the problems with the book as a whole.

In spite of presenting herself as the new broom, much of what Smith sweeps into her 20 largely academic essays on individual plays is necessarily old. Glossy contemporary references apart, her chief authorities include A C Bradley, E M W Tillyard, G Wilson Knight, Jan Kott, Northrop Frye and Bergson on laughter – all texts that A-level students were earnestly underlining 40 years ago.

Then what is new? Smith makes much of what she calls Shakespeare’s ‘gappiness’. ‘Gappiness is Shakespeare’s dominant and defining characteristic.’ What is ‘gappiness’? ‘Shakespeare’s plays are woven of what’s said and what’s unsaid with holes in between… That means that the clues to personality that we might expect from a novel, or from a film, are not there… No authorial or narrative voice tells us more than the speeches of the characters themselves.’

Unfortunately, by this definition, ‘gappiness’ is simply a property of drama and does not distinguish Shakespeare from any other dramatist before or since. And it gets worse: ‘gappiness’, so defined, is necessarily also a property of prose fiction, indeed of any writing, as we can never know any more than we are told by the authorial or narrative voice.

If Henry James writes, ‘Milly entered the room’, we have no idea what she looked like, or what she was feeling, or whether she was singing and dancing when she did so, unless he happens to tell us, which he may not. ‘Gappiness’ does not distinguish Shakespeare from any other writer, including Emma Smith or even yours truly.

Another example of overreaching: commenting on Othello’s final speech, in which he compares himself to ‘the base Indian’ who ‘threw a pearl away/ Richer than all his tribe’, Smith writes, ‘His dead wife is not mentioned except in the passing metaphor of a discarded pearl, a conventional image for femininity, associating it with purity and exchange value, rather than individuality.’

Othello, not satisfied with having murdered his wife, is now adding insult to injury by likening her to commercial goods and traducing her individuality by lumping her in with women in general – ie, helpfully signalling his own misogyny.

The image of the pearl is more complicated than that. Although Othello has given it the characteristically exotic wrapping of the Indian and his tribe, it is first of all a scriptural metaphor. The ‘pearl of great price’ is an image of the Kingdom of Heaven that for

which the merchant sold all he had: the one thing necessary.

Far from denying her individuality, or even paying tribute to it, he is likening his wife to the ultimate good, that for which there can be no restitution, like the grieving father in the medieval poem Pearl.

Now one may not think better of Othello for having said it, but it makes the psychology of his response a little more intriguing than Smith in her eagerness to pander to fashionable concerns has claimed.

There is no doubt that, as a scholar, Professor Smith knows a great deal about Shakespeare and the plays. Indeed it is noticeable that, whenever she treats of the mechanics of genre or the practicalities of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, her writing assumes an easy authority.

However, in pursuit of the elusive grail of appealing to the uninitiated, too often she allows her critical language to become strained and coarse.