The Bardoclasts' Case: Further Reflections

In considering the "Bardoclasts'" case recently I concerned myself mainly with the charge that seemed easiest to assess--namely that Shakespeare was an "Establishment" poet who was not merely of conservative sympathies, but exceedingly and unremittingly flattering of the Powerful and disdainful of the People. Indeed, it has seemed to me that that charge was virtually irrefutable, so much so that George Orwell, in specifically attacking Lev Tolstoy's essay on Shakespeare in his own piece ("Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool"), actually embraced the charge and made it one of the bases of his counterattack rather than trying to refute it (very readily agreeing that Shakespeare "was not a saint or would-be saint," had a "considerable streak of worldliness," "liked to stand with the rich and powerful," etc.).

The aesthetic merits and demerits of Shakespeare's work are a trickier matter. However, it does seem to me safe to say that just as the Bardolators have done Shakespeare a disservice by treating him as something he was not content-wise (a perfect "moral teacher" for all times), they have done him a disservice by making him something he was not where form also was concerned. At least to go by G. Wilson Knight, nineteenth century critics of this stripe, attempting to reconcile their Bardolatry with their era's realist literary standard, the hallmark of which is its centering on characters who think, feel, act in ways so much in accord with what we have (presumably) observed in real life that fiction about them feels to us as if it were an account of real events, or even a real event unfolding before our own eyes, hailed Shakespeare as a supreme realist--claiming for Shakespeare a perfection according to a standard alien from the standpoint of 1600. Indeed, Knight quite plausibly argues that had it not been for this bit of foolishness Tolstoy, reacting to what to that supreme realist was the incomprehensible idolization of Shakespeare as such, would have had no occasion to write his essay.

All this said, we are left with the question of what we can appreciate Shakespeare for, rather than what we cannot. The usual answer Shakespeare's admirers offer is Shakespeare's language itself, the supremacy of which even many a Bardoclast who takes Shakespeare to task for his politics happily grants. Upton Sinclair, for example, was withering in his criticism of Shakespeare's politics, but totally concedes this point, declaring in Mammonart that Shakespeare was "gifted with the most marvelous tongue that has yet appeared on Earth. Golden, glowing, gorgeous words poured out of him at a moment's notice"--and just as Orwell was to use Shakespeare's being an Establishment poet as a basis for assailing Shakespeare's critics, Sinclair made this a basis for his own charges against them. The fact that those words poured out of him so readily, in Sinclair's view, "saved him the need of thinking," with the result that the ideas that Shakespeare expressed in the golden, glowing, gorgeous words are "commonplace, many are worldly and cheap, many are the harsh prejudices of his time and class" (for instance, what "To thine own self be true" really means) and the golden, glowing, gorgeous language "tempts us into sharing his emotions without thinking," a temptation for which many have indeed fallen.

Yet this is more open to disputation than the Bardolators appreciate--a fact underlined by their tendency to argue in a priori fashion. Responding to foreign Bardoclasts they argue that a foreigner cannot appreciate the beauties of Shakespeare's poetry. Yet I am not so sure that this really follows. Poetry is not wholly unknown to make an impression even in translation. And being foreign-born does not necessarily mean a complete lack of feel for the English language. (Can anyone deny that, for example, Vladimir Nabokov had a feel for English? Even as one espousing the unpopular opinion that Nabokov is wildly overpraised I certainly do not deny his gifts here.) This point seems especially worth raising in the case of Tolstoy, who tells us that he did read the plays in English (as well as in Russian and German), and because it is the case that anyone who can read the plays in English with even a literal understanding has a far greater competence in that language than the great majority of the native speakers of English. (Thus do high school students read their Shakespeare in "No Fear" editions translating Shakespeare's English into the idiom of the twenty-first century, and think this just as natural as reading Homer in translation.) Would such competence, and experience, not likely impart to someone who acquired it--and still more, a figure with the extraordinary literary gifts of a Tolstoy--some basis for an aesthetic judgment at least as good as that of some native speakers?

Moreover, it seems to me worth acknowledging that not every native English speaker is quite so immediately overwhelmed by Shakespeare's language as such critics would have it (and not just the No Fear edition-reading students). The gorgeous, glowing words that a Sinclair praised can sound purple to a modern ear--while even long before that one could have argued, as William Wordsworth did, for the most satisfying poetry often being that speech which is most natural (as Shakespeare's was not natural).

In fairness, I do not consider the counterargument as necessarily settling the matter. What is important is that the counterargument exists on this point, and is rather better than flimsy, leaving the claims of the Bardolator, and the middlebrow who repeats what they say unthinkingly, very much open to debate.