NEW SAVANNA: What does evolution have to teach us about Shakespeare’s reputation? [founder effect]

Monday, September 16, 2019

What does evolution have to teach us about Shakespeare’s reputation? [founder effect]

For some decades now I’ve been a bit puzzled by Shakespeare’s status. I don’t doubt that he’s good, but THAT good? Really? I mean, apparently he’s so good that the Klingons claim him for their own, and they’re not even real. No, Shakespeare IS good, but there’s more to his reputation than mere technical or aesthetic excellence–or is it that there’s more to aesthetic excellence than craft, skill, and grace? [1]

When someone asserts that Ussain Bolt is the greatest sprinter of all time, I know what they mean. He’s won many internal competitions and he’s the world record holder in the 100, 200, meter sprints, and the 4 by 100 meter relay. Excellence in running is easily measured. When someone says Bolt is a faster sprinter than, say, Karl Lewis I know what they mean. Bolt ran the 100 meters in 9.58 seconds, Lewis in 9.86. Bolt is 0.30 seconds faster than Lewis. Simple, clear, objective.

To assert that Shakespeare is the world’s best writer is to assert, not only that he’s merely better than, but that he is far and away better than, say, Rabindranath Tagore, George Eliot, Alexander Pushkin, Honoré de Balzac, Miguel de Cervantes, Dante Alighieri, Murasaki Shikibu, Sophocles, and so forth through a long list – and we haven’t even gotten to the Klingon masters. By what measure is Shakespeare head and shoulders above those many others? Oh, I’m sure learned reasons can be given; Harold Bloom has likely given three-quarters of them at one time or another. But none of them includes a simple objective measure like time to sprint 100 meters.

It’s not that simple, not at all. For one thing, it’s a subjective matter. The fact that this judgment is subjective does not, of course, mean we cannot talk and reason about it. Intersubjectivity is real, after all. We’ve been talking and reasoning about it for centuries and the upshot is that Shakespeare is the best.

But something else is going on, something other than mere subjectivity.

The founder effect

What do I mean by founder effect? It’s a term from evolutionary biology. Oleg Sobchuk [2] explains it this way [pp. 93-94]:

Imagine a group of monkeys living in an imaginary Unhappy valley. The valley is called Unhappy, because there are too many monkeys and too little food. In the search for more bananas and oranges, a group of four monkeys (who happen to be shorter than the rest of their group – just by chance) takes a risky trip to an unknown land, possibly full of predators. However, they get lucky: they find another valley with lots of bananas and no monkey competitors. So, these four settle in the Happy valley. They give birth to many children, all of which share the genes of this initial small group. As a result, most of the monkeys in the new colony are short – like their four ancestors. And – it is important to stress – they are short not because this trait is adaptive (i.e., it was not selected for), but simply due to chance. It just happened that the founders were short – by chance.

But what does that have to do with Shakespeare?

Sobchuk goes on to point out [p. 96]:

The contemporary literary field – Modern European literature – began to take shape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The main reason for this was the invention of the modern nation state: a radically new way to organize societies (Hobsbawm 1992). And at the avant-garde of nationalism were Germans. They did not have a united state, and they felt the need to obtain it more than anyone else. A state united by a single nation, a single language, and... a single literature. German intellectuals started thinking about their literary canon earlier than the intellectuals in other countries. They started inventing the canon.

And they decided to center it on Shakespeare. Why? Sobchuk continues:

An appeal to the senses, feelings, and imagination – this is what Shakespeare’s plays could provide for readers tired of the over-formalized and rational classicist drama. [...] However, it also happened that this was a decisive place and time in the history of European literature. It was the moment when, along with the formation of the modern nation state, modern national literature was formed, having a canon of “geniuses” at its center. Shakespeare was not the founder of modern literature, but he was chosen by the founders.

To repeat Sobchuk, we have the emergence of a new form of political organization, the nation state, accompanied by the institutionalization of a literary canon to support that political form. Shakespeare was chosen to anchor that canon.

But there is more to Shakespeare’s suitability for this role than “an appeal to the senses, feelings, and imagination”.

Shakespeare and the invention of the modern

Let us turn for a moment to Harold Bloom [3]:

Western psychology is much more a Shakespearean invention than a Biblical invention, let alone, obviously, a Homeric, or Sophoclean, or even Platonic, never mind a Cartesian or Jungian invention. It’s not just that Shakespeare gives us most of our representations of cognition as such; I’m not so sure he doesn’t largely invent what we think of as cognition. I remember saying something like this to a seminar consisting of professional teachers of Shakespeare and one of them got very indignant and said, You are confusing Shakespeare with God. I don’t see why one shouldn’t, as it were. Most of what we know about how to represent cognition and personality in language was permanently altered by Shakespeare.

Frankly, I think that’s a bit overwrought – “I’m not so sure he doesn’t largely invent what we think of as cognition.” But I do think Bloom is looking in the right place.

Some years ago I published a pair of papers that make a similar point in more sophisticated and contemporary language. The first, “The Evolution of Narrative and the Self” [4] argues that over the long term story-telling has provided ever more sophisticated “templates” for organizing of the psyche; Shakespeare laid imaginative foundations that came to fruition with the emergence of the novel over a century later. We can see this in the interiority that Hamlet has but which is utterly lacking in, Amleth, his twelfth century literary predecessor [p. 142]:

Something had happened which made Amleth's madness ploy less effective. An individual can escape contradictory social demands by opting out of society. But if the contradictory demands are within the individual, if they are intrapsychic, then stepping outside of society won't help. If anything, it makes matters worse by leaving the individual completely at the mercy of his/her inner contradictions, with no contravening forces from others. That, crude as it is, seems to me the difference between Amleth and Hamlet. For Amleth, the problem was how to negotiate contradictory demands on him made by external social forces. For Hamlet, the contradictory demands were largely internal, making the pretense of madness but a step toward becoming, in reality, mad.

The difference between the story of Amleth and Shakespeare's Hamlet parallels the difference between the Oedipus story as it was in Homer's time and as it came to be in Sophocles’s. Just as the superego evolved between thirteenth century Greece and fifth century Greece, so it had to be recreated between twelfth century Denmark and seventeenth century England. The Elizabethan audience demanded defense against their dark impulses while the Medieval audience settled for some slight of hand which let the impulses work toward a happy ending.

In “At the Edge of the Modern, or Why is Prospero Shakespeare’s Greatest Creation?” [5] I consider four plays – Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest – and argue that laid the psychological foundations for the modern nuclear family [p. 274-275]:

According to [Lawrence] Stone the English family was, during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, reconstructed to accommodate affective individualism, which stressed autonomy, privacy, and long-term emotional commitment. Stone sees a three part movement, from the Open Lineage Family (1450 - 1700), to the Restricted Patriarchal Nuclear Family (1550 - 1700), and finally to the closed Domesticated Nuclear Family (1640 - 1800) - note the overlap in the dates, the evolution is gradual and affects different strata of society in different ways. My argument is that while the marital and familial conventions in Shakespeare's plays are those of the earlier family types, he is using them to work out the inner dynamics of the domesticated nuclear family, which is restricted to a couples and their children. The male integration of masculine and feminine characteristics which Shakespeare finally achieved in the late romances is suited to the domesticated nuclear family, but irrelevant for the earlier types. If we think of literary works as equipment for living (Burke 1973), providing us with ways of organizing our experience, then Shakespeare's plays provided people with ways of organizing experience which were consonant with the demands of the nuclear family, which didn't appear in any very strong way until after Shakespeare's career was over.

The play in which this affective shift is most explicitly thematized is Romeo and Juliet - that the story existed in many versions in Europe makes it quite clear that the conflict it captures was an important one. Romeo and Juliet are caught between their private desires for one another and the public feud between their families. Those private desires became the ideological foundation of the domesticated nuclear family, a family contracted out of the mutual affection and desire of the couple and extending only to their children. The public feud between the Montagues and the Capulets reflects the dynamics of open lineage. Mere marriage centers on the lineage; it is an alliance, political, economic, and social, between two families. In this alliance the bride is assimilated to the groom's lineage. The personal, and private, affection between Romeo and Juliet was at variance with the public conflict between their lineages. With the claims of both person and lineage being deemed valid, there was no outcome possible but stasis. A new couple is constituted, but only in a death which ends their lineages.

Social space is becoming differentiated into a private and public realm and family life is becoming reconstituted around the private relationships among family members.

This implies in turn that a new public realm must become constituted on some basis other than familial ties between great families. That other basis – a formalized system of social roles in abstract organizations grounded in law – will become the foundation of the nation-state which Sobchuk mentioned. And we can see the seeds of that in Henry IV, Part 2, which turns on various duets between Prince Hal and his buddy Sir John Falstaff.

Falstaff is a down-and-out knight who spends his time drinking with his pals and trading in petty crime. Prince Hal, heir apparent to the throne of England, is one of those pals. When Hal ascends to the throne, becoming Henry V, Falstaff approaches him at the coronation, gleefully anticipating good times to come now that his boon companion, good old Hal, rules the land. He addresses the King as “Hal” and is severely, unexpectedly, and very publicly reprimanded (Henry V, Part II, Act 5, scene 5):

I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
I have long dream'd of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swell'd, so old and so profane;
But, being awaked, I do despise my dream.
Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;
Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape
For thee thrice wider than for other men.
Reply not to me with a fool-born jest:
Presume not that I am the thing I was;
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn'd away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.
When thou dost hear I am as I have been,
Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,
The tutor and the feeder of my riots:
Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death,
As I have done the rest of my misleaders,
Not to come near our person by ten mile.
For competence of life I will allow you,
That lack of means enforce you not to evil:
And, as we hear you do reform yourselves,
We will, according to your strengths and qualities,
Give you advancement. Be it your charge, my lord,
To see perform'd the tenor of our word. Set on.

Notice how Hal explicitly distinguishes his two selves, the private person (“the thing I was”, “my former self”) and his new status as king (“our person”, “we hear you”). As a consequence of this distinction the King must necessarily have a different relationship with Sir John than Hal did.

Such a speech is natural to the occasion, the coronation of the King. For it is in that ceremony that a person leaves one social status (a term of art in the social sciences) and assumes another, that of monarch. This is a type of ceremony that anthropologists call a rite of passage. Christenings, baptisms, bar/bat Mitzvahs, weddings, funerals, and graduations are other examples of rites of passages. In each case a person leaves one station in society and assumes another. Depending on various factors, such ceremonies may be simple, with few present, or complex and staged before a large audience.

A complex ceremony before a large audience is a kind of theater. As such, it is a natural way for a dramatist to explore and present, at some length, the distinction between private and public person. The institutionalization of that distinction is essential to the formation of the nation-state.

Was Shakespeare the only writer exploring these themes at that time? Of course not. But he may well have explored them more variously and deeply. He may even have been better than his contemporaries, and even some who came before and some who became after. But here I’m offering a judgment that’s more like asserting that Ussain Bolt is a better sprinter than Carl Lewis than like Harold Bloom’s elevation of the Bard to a super-human empyrean realm.

That elevation represents the effect of the canon formation that Sobchuk discusses. That amplification of Shakespeare’s reach has less to do with Shakespeare’s imagination and craft and more to do with our socio-cultural needs and desires. As Sobchuk notes [p. 97]:

The status of such enormousness cannot possibly be a result of the actions of a single human being. Shakespeare holds the top spot of the power-law distribution with a terrific breakaway, which cannot possibly be explained by the actions of an individual – however talented.

Twice a founder

I am in effect arguing that Shakespeare has twice benefited from the founder effect. In the first instance he was a member of a cohort of artists who laid the psycho-cultural foundations for the modern world, a founder generation. In that context he was better than the others, but only in an ordinary way, the way Ussain Bolt is better than Carl Lewis, or that George Eliot is better than, say, Thomas Hardy (or vice versa, depending on your taste). It took another founding, the institutionalization of national literatures in the Western literary canon, to elevate Shakespeare to his present almost mythic status.

References

[1] I’ve discussed the problematic status of Shakespeare’s excellence in earlier posts:

Just how good is Shakespeare anyhow?, New Savanna, July 3, 2019, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2019/07/just-how-good-is-shakespeare-anyhow.html.

I was right, Shakespeare isn’t real (Lit Lab 17) [#DH], New Savanna, September 30, 2018, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2018/09/i-was-right-shakespeare-isnt-real-lit.html.

Bardolatry, Tyler Cowen edition: Is Shakespeare a real person or a mostly mythic being? New Savanna, April 30, 2017, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2017/04/bardolatry-tyler-cowen-edition-is.html.