As soon as I had my head freed of boring Christmas stuff, I couldn’t wait to test what I had recently established about history of literature. Not least because I knew it would get me into “Shakespeare” again. There are more than a few things I feel I should do first, like drawing the line between reading historical fiction and reading a historical fictional text. In my experience, much of what I do with them is identical but there is also a fundamental difference. Not to speak of the big issue of what I think history really is, as I don’t feel comfortable with the concept of history I have grown up with. From the beginning, I knew I should look into history “ontologically”, which I also knew would be too much of an effort. But at the moment I limit myself to historical texts anyway and seem to have resolved the big issue temporarily in two steps.
The first is to use a simple concept of history that is basically empty. As I have learned from my past efforts, I think of history as WRITING about what people think or know has passed or was valid at a time we know nothing about anymore from first-hand experience – which, judging from my memories of just one or two decades ago, is an unbelievably short time. We really don’t have to die for our memories to become extinct. Writing history, from this point of view, is our way of conjuring up the belief in a different reality which we can still access. This makes the difference between history and fiction appear very small, but I have tried to establish that there is a fundamental difference concerning the status of this reality. Writing history – at least the kind that anybody outside historical faculties cares about – must needs be story-telling, but the stories have to be told in a way to match the facts, like dates, time-lines, respectively can only contain people, institutions, material conditions and so on that have actually existed at such and such a time. Story-telling is necessary but subordinate whereas the fictional realm is not ruled by strict observation of historic truth but by conventions and requirements of story-telling (and other fictional activities like dramatic interaction or aesthetic playing). IF writers commit to some kind of historic or contemporary reality, it comes second and gets “bend” according to these rules.
Getting back into “Shakespeare” with these thoughts at the back of my mind, I tested my belief that there are indeed comedies, tragedies AND histories in Shakespeare – not just because somebody cooked up this classification at some point, but because there are reasons for certain content to be most successfully expressed in either dramatic form. It is not quite the same kind of category, as comedy and tragedy are mutually exclusive – I’ll come to this! – whereas histories, in my experience, can be tragedies, comedies, or neither. I will not go into this in this post, but I hit on the reason for it in my last paragraph. History as subject for fiction will necessarily fall under the rule of literary conventions of story-telling. On the other hand, the closer fiction gets to history by taking up historical events and characters as its subject, the more informed the fictional story-telling or dramatic performance becomes by them, and the fictional rules get weakened. Comedy and tragedy are genuine FICTIONAL forms of story-telling whereas history kind of imposes itself on what is already there and transforms it.
There is another fascinating aspect about these fictional rules that I have come upon a few times recently. I have learned to treat rule breaking in fiction as significant, often in the name of truth seeking, but this also affirms the constitutive character of these rules. Literary rules and conventions arise under certain socio-historic circumstances in order to make fictional texts perfect for attaining their fundamental goals of entertainment, communication with the otherworld, education, representation, social sanctioning, the desire for aesthetic playing and so on. They result in certain preferred literary forms of story-telling, which will be copied and become traditional and thereby have an impact on the content that will get expressed. Consequently, they determine and LIMIT our representation of reality(, insofar this reality gets addressed solely, predominantly, or particularly successfully in fiction.) Until recently, I have mostly overlooked this aspect of “inbuilt” censure which might be much bigger than direct and indirect censure by institutions has ever been. Growing up with these traditions, and getting used to them, we don’t even notice this, as it appears natural to us. Even though writing history will always be subjective and therefore partially reality-blind as well, it has not this fundamental flaw of being ruled by conventions of entertainment and successful story-telling. At its best, it is ruled by the desire to identify blind spots and question established truths. Fiction is FUNDAMENTALLY reality-blind for said reasons – except where it gets subjected to history or contemporary social and political issues. It is not blind to the truth, though, if one allows that these two are not the same, as I obviously do. In my experience, there can be found as much – or more! – truth in fantasy as in naturalistic fiction when it helps me to understand myself or others better.
The second step in resolving the problem of my ignorance and scepticism about history is to do what I am always doing. GETTING BACK TO THE TEXT. This time it was “Measure for Measure” – which I must have read and watched some time last year because it always came up in my conversations with Claudia, and I didn’t really know it. But I had almost no memories about reading or seeing it … With a threateningly empty and grey weekend in front of me, I applied myself to re-reading the play almost sentence by sentence – at least until the beginning of act 3, where the penny dropped! - actually taking notes of what I found interesting, what I thought I understood, or, more importantly, didn’t understand … And, being so much involved with history and looking for historic reasons for texts turning out the way they did, I was reading with a different focus.
I just had this interesting conversation with my sister who came upon “Abaelard and Heloise” doing research for her writing project. She said that some things Heloise wrote might have been written by a contemporary feminist, and I readily believed her because I had this experience time and again. If I focus on my own experience, as I usually do, a lot of what I read of historic text surprises me exactly for this reason. How CLOSE people actually were to what we are now. And I think we are right to feel this kinship most of the time. It is one of the reasons I think that the conception of history I grew up with is fundamentally flawed. The focus of history always being on linear change and what prompted it, we tend to overlook SIMULTANEOUSNESS – which is a much bigger part of how we experience reality but much more difficult to explain as it doesn’t appear to require an explanation. We have no evidence that it was NOT possible for people at any such time to fall in love as we do, to struggle with the same issues as we do (insofar they already existed) and so on – it was just not possible for them to EXPRESS these things for diverse reasons, one of them being rules and conventions that determine who can utter which content with what degree of public impact. Therefore the biggest part of history might remain forever untold, and the area we lighten up with our historic torches too small for the picture to be representative. One of the most shocking and ironic moments of “It’s a Sin” was about this middle-aged homosexual couple which, of course, doesn’t exist because nobody acknowledges their existence. On the other hand, they have been there for decades, living together in their apartment, with everybody they know being aware of their relationship. The shock and irony relating to how much of our reality might be non-existent in this way. Depending on our perspective, up to a hundred percent!
On the other hand, I am convinced that what Heloise was feeling and thinking is also different of what women are feeling and thinking today, so different that I am unable to understand the difference, but I have also always been interested in it. Most of the time, the difference resides in what we DON’T read. There is a completely different CONTEXT to what appears to be the same predicament, the same thoughts and feeling. There are always these moments that appear to us most significant because we recognise them, like in “Measure for Measure” when Angelo says to Isabella who threatens to publicly accuse him of his sexual blackmailing: “Who will believe you?” There we are, right back in 2017 where “Me Too” kicked off. It is the moment that will make sparks on a stage – and probably did on the Globe’s stage at the time. But, as I realized looking closely at the play, it is just sparks in the middle of an immeasurable historical darkness.
So, in the first place, the change of focus made me turn up a lot more of what I DON’T understand.
This task was actually made easier – or less frustrating – by the fact that it is a COMEDY, and I am aware that I don’t understand these anyway. Tragedies are usually easily accessible to me. - Yet … is it really? I mean: Is it really a COMEDY? Notions of “tragicomedy” and “problem play” popped up, and I had the first bit of real fun when I dismissed them vigorously and ironically. I KNOW that this is a comedy! How do I know it? From past experience I am aware that it has very little to do with how funny a play is. There are funny characters in comedies as well as in tragedies, and the funniest Shakespeare I have ever seen was the Globe’s recent “Titus Andronicus” - and “Richard III” with Ralph Fiennes … No, I know that this is a comedy because NOBODY – not even the most incurable villain – IS ALLOWED TO DIE. Instead, in the end as much of them as are eligible get MARRIED – preferably against their own will!
At this moment I understood that I had finally figured out the most important thing about tragedy and comedy – “classic” comedy and tragedy that is, as in post-medieval and pre-modern. At least I was on the right track to resolving the problem I had always had with these concepts. I had already come to terms with the notion that comedies, in “Shakespeare”, don’t have to be funny. For one thing because I know that they must have been much more so for Elizabethans because humour is dependant on the actual moment and particularly context-sensitive, and therefore, compared to tragic content, short-lived. Shakespeare’s comedies usually get much funnier “the moment” they get on a stage but must have been hilarious on an Elizabethan stage, probably even more so during the season they were first performed because of references to recent events we couldn’t even detect. But this humour is not LIMITED to comedy. It is not just possible to play “Richard III” or “Titus Andronicus” with black humour, it’s the way of making the most of these plays. On the other hand, in my experience comedy gets really good the moment I STOP laughing. In fact, I have always used a much better intrinsic criterion to separate tragedy and comedy which are in fact MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE. It is the simple fact that comedies have to end well whereas tragedies have to end badly. This is the reason why “tragicomedy”, in my experience, is misapplied, at least in “Shakespeare”. If I want to, I can talk about tragicomedy for example when I relate to Chekhov, where these strict conventions don’t apply anymore. His plays have tragic endings without anybody dying.
“Measure for measure” is a stellar example for how strong this rule actually was at the time because, as it is a comedy, nobody CAN die or be executed, even if they deserve it, because the audience wouldn’t go with it. And great tragedies like “Hamlet” or “King Lear” tend to finish off everybody of consequence – (sometimes even people of no consequence at all! As is constantly overlooked, the poor fool gets hanged, which was probably the only bit of classic tragedy that ever moved me). The desired outcome of tragedies is as many deaths as possible, the desired outcome of comedies as many marriages as possible. This tendency to hyperbole usually prompts me to take neither tragic nor comic endings seriously, but I kind of accept tragedy as “logical” whereas I constantly question comedy endings as blatantly absurd. Reading “Measure for Measure”, I got a step further “behind” the absurdity of so many ill-advised or forced marriages, realizing that, if somebody insists in this way, they MUST mean something by it. Marriage, however absurd, seems like the answer for EVERYTHING. This might appear absurd in a historic environment where one out of three marriages fails and the others mostly survive because people learn either to ignore each other or to cope with severe disappointment, social stress and violence, but …
It was this moment I realized that I had already DONE a lot of historic reading. I already had understood that, for Elizabethans, marriage had a completely different - kind of “second-level” - meaning above the obvious of social and financial benefit, sex, and breeding. And I had even kind of anticipated what it was, finally establishing the link between tragedy and comedy. I compressed it into a thought that would still need a lot of editing but which pointed my historic reading of the play in the right direction:
Death and marriage, tragedy and comedy, IN TERMS OF RESTORING THE FAILING ORDER OF THINGS, are just two sides of the same coin.
