It makes me a little uneasy addressing the SAA membership at this time. We’re living through a bad historical moment (I am writing in early November), and I feel obliged to acknowledge that fact, though I’m aware that you have heard many voices on the subject and have yourselves thought and said a great deal about it. Like many people I feel caught between grief and irony, commitment and skepticism, an ambivalence no doubt intensified by my observing events from a Canadian perspective. But, since I also believe that this double perspective is characteristically Shakespearean, it seems appropriate to think about the crisis in terms of what we members of the SAA encounter when we teach and write about Shakespeare. 

Since Shakespeare can be used for almost any purpose, commercial or propagandistic, one part of our job as Shakespeareans might be to keep him honest, that is, be alert to, and critical of, the social uses to which he is variously put. Another is to allow ourselves and our students to feel how the plays can speak about both the weight and complexity of events as they unfold, and to try to put such feelings in historical context. I think it’s fair to say that our moment of pitched oppositions and patriotic blandishments is the sort of thing that Shakespeare thought about, not only in the histories but even in Troilus and Cressida, a play I’ve just finished editing and thus very much on my mind. Usually regarded as Shakespeare’s most ironic, most scathing critique of human idiocy in the twin fields of love and war, and hence apparently appropriate only to a cynical perspective on what is currently taking place, it offers other vistas, too, especially when nudged by other texts. Not long ago, I heard Belfast poet Michael Longley read "Ceasefire," his sonnet about the meeting, after Hector’s death, of Priam and Achilles. The episode occurs in the final book of the Iliad. Shakespeare, of course, does not dramatize this edgy, sympathetic encounter, instead giving us Priam’s earlier plea to his son to remain home on the fateful day ("I myself am / Like a prophet suddenly enrapt / To tell thee that this day is ominous"), and then his reluctant capitulation to Hector’s need for approval and blessing ("Farewell, the gods with safety stand about thee"). And of course Achilles’ murder of his rival is more savage than just about anything else in this savage play (it is the Myrmidons, not the gods, who "stand about" Hector). All the more reason to listen to Longley, I thought:

Put in mind of his own father and moved to tears 
Achilles took him by the hand and pushed the old king
Gently away, but Priam curled up at his feet and
Wept with him until their sadness filled the building.
Taking Hector’s corpse into his own hands Achilles
Made sure it was washed, and for the old king’s sake,
Laid out in uniform, ready for Priam to carry
Wrapped like a present home to Troy at daybreak.

The echoes of the present in Longley’s Ilium, the understated evocation of the contemporary scene in northern Ireland, the sense of the folly of enmity and the hope of its melting into something like love, or admiration at least, above all the painful awareness of what has been done—all this made me think not only of our difficult present, but also of Homer and of Shakespeare’s only wrestle with that "divine" (in Chapman’s epithet) precursor. Shakespeare’s play is bitterly ironic, but hearing Longley reminded me of its other moments—of fear and sadness, yearning and gentleness—not always noticed but part of the tapestry. Priam, for example, unable to speak to the son whose day he knows has come, silent until his banal but deeply felt wish for Hector’s safety; Cassandra’s prophetic cries; Andromache’s futile wish to turn her husband from his determined course; and, more largely in the play as a whole, the wish that so many of the characters express for just a bit of light. They emerge from their narcissism occasionally, briefly, with a restless sense that what they have is not enough (Helen: "this love will undo us all")—offering glimpses that soften the irony and blur the cynicism, just a little.

All this sent me back to Homer and that somber, magnificent ending. The extended discussion between Priam and Achilles, which Longley brilliantly compresses into a few lines, is tense with danger, the fury of Achilles only just contained in sympathy, raising fear in the steady persistent old king. Then follow the laments over Hector’s body (Helen’s is the last), the leaping flames, the burial of the "snowy bones," all performed while armed guards hold constant watch, "For feare of false surprise" from their cousin-enemies. Lastly, "all the towne / In Jove-nurst Priam’s court partooke a passing sumptuous feast. / And so horse-taming Hector’s rites gave up his soule to Rest."

We read, clearly, out of where we are. I am reading out of a mixed sense of mourning, ironic dismay, and pained hopefulness. Embattled cities are lined up in my mind: Troy, Yprès, Sarajevo, Belfast, New York, Kabul, attended by the bitter poetry of war, which, remembering the cost, always elegaic, finds both skepticism and hope in the form and sound of words. Our present context has raised for me a question about Shakespeare study and teaching, an old one, faced but not resolved when I first began teaching, while the Vietnam War was still going on and I thought myself complicit somehow with war and the systems that bred it—a feeling that I tried to impress on my eager Canadian students who gazed at me with uncomprehending friendliness (unlike me, they hadn’t just spent six years in the U.S.). But I still feel the force of that wondering, kicked up like an old shell buried for years. The question, simply, is "why do it"?

One answer might be—for the irony, the faceted perspectives available both within and across texts. That is part of what we seek when we speak of historical situated-ness, cultural theory, performance practices, or whatever "history" we bring to bear. I find it more difficult to speak directly to students about their present, though I feel the need just now to do so—not to offer reassurance or (God bless us) jingoism, but rather the kind of complexity that, in our relations to the real, Shakespeare offers more fully than any other writer. But even Shakespeare doesn’t cover everything—which is why I was led to bring him into relation with Homer and Longley. Reading Troilus and Cressida beside "Ceasefire" beside the Iliad yields a complex picture of the waste and shattered hopes of war, where loss and yearning go briefly hand in hand, and the hope of reconciliation sits down beside the most outrageous cynicism. The Iliad ends with pyre and feast and remembrance; Shakespeare’s play ends famously with Pandarus’ poisoned rhyme: "Till then I’ll sweat and seek about for eases, / And at that time bequeath you my diseases." Longley’s final couplet adds a dimension that Shakespeare leaves out of Troilus but which does enter into the romances, nowhere more movingly than in the moving statue of Hermione (who has also lost a son). Priam is speaking about what he must do—a statement and a gesture haunted by memory but harking forward: "I get down on my knees and do what much be done / And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son."

How does literature speak to where we are at this moment? That’s the kind of query I usually don’t pose to myself, nor do I make a demand of my canonical author that he always speak to my students where they are. But it does seem to me that we occasionally, in extremis, have to think again of such questions. 

The Shakespeare Association of America
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
1000 Hilltop Circle
Baltimore, Maryland 21250 USA.
www.ShakespeareAssociation.org

Website Development Team, Malaspina U-C.  (March 04, 2002 )