Tolkien versus Shakespeare: Are you Serious?
[NOTICE: Jan. 2018: Soon I will be trying to make it through two books on Shakespeare and his work as Catholic and I will be writing a post trying to give that perspective and the idea that there are positives in Shakespeare a fair shake and see what I think the balance or net effect is between that and the fact that I still think the same as stated below on the major issues stated there, in this post. But I have to make it through those two books first ... but I have made it through about fifty pages of the first and can tell you that, while I have found serious data given there to contemplate, the post is still going to be named "Baked on Shake" because of a certain Anglo-triumphalism that bleeds through this literary biographer's work pretty strongly at points and a certain heavy handed, actually really bombastic at points, arrogant judgmentalism against the standard post-modern bogey men that really mainly sells books to a certain popular-level conservative niche demographic using a tired "us and them" rhetoric to which that crowd has been addicted for a long time ... tedious read, to be honest, but I think useful for some information it provides that makes me have to set what I say in this present post in a larger context of considering good in the bard too. And I mean good other than wetting myself at feeling sophisticated talking about him because that is what the sophisticati (of both "conservative" and "liberal" stripes) declare that one should. END NOTICE]
So, this may be a "sorry to inform you" post for some. But ... Tolkien was not a huge fan of Shakespeare. In fact, at least in some of the bard's work, Tolkien thought he was a bit of a tosser. Official (and very credible) biographers like Tom Shippey usually admit that Tolkien had a beef with the bard but downplay it. What I hope comes out of the below is a clearer perception that the content of the beef is actually substantial.
Tolkien's own statement was that he "cordially disagreed" with Shakespeare. Shippey and others take it as light. I think Tolkien himself probably meant it to seem light, and maybe meant it to convince even himself of that. At the very least he would probably not want to overstate his dislike of the bard unless he wanted to make it a hill to die on ... because the idolization of the bard is such that, if you make any criticism (other than maybe that made in slamming the whole of the Euro-centric tradition), "academic" and "novice literary person" alike will either burn you at the stake or put you in a rubber room with a dribble cup (I do so love hyperbole :) ). And so, in order to minimalize that unless you want to die on this particular hill, a person finds it easier to convince themselves of the minimality so as to more easily convince others of it and, so, avoid those unpleasant alternatives (stakes and padded cells). But, at the end of the day, I think the differences between Shakespeare's and Tolkien's ways of thinking and literary projects are large and that Tolkien is in the right. That's my basic position whether or not Tolkien admitted the extent of it to others or even to himself.
A second thing that I have to add is that, for as much respect and awe as I have for Tolkien, the simple fact that he disagrees with something is not the final word on that thing. He also, from what I have heard, thought very little of the work of Dorothy Sayers, whose Lord Peter Wimsey material I think is amazing, particularly the four novels that concern his marrying Harriet Vain. But in the case of the beef with the bard, I think he is dead on. I don't necessarily share all of his critique of dramatic realism, but I do agree with him in criticizing (as I read him) what I would call "realism for realism's sake," which is where I think a large portion of modern drama, which began with Shakepeare, has gone.
Of course, I have to admit that some of my own desire to knock the bard down a few notches has to do with a college prof I thought was a bit of a tosser (although a good man; I'm actually very unkind to criticize his starry-eyed-ness when it enabled me to cut some corners, so I want it understood that I think he's probably a better human being than me ... but still a tosser on this) who was also sort of Mr Shakespeare (the last theater production in his retirement year was the Tempest with himself as Prospero ... and he held onto that department chair way too long ... I know a woman in that department who retired the same year as he did and so she never held the chair, but she had more right to, IMHO). He also taught the fantasy lit course and thought of himself as Mr Tolkien. I think he was right about being Mr Shakespeare but not on being Mr Tolkien, and that it would be far better to be Mr Tolkien than Mr Shakespeare.
Too Much Drama
In order to get Tolkien's beef with the bard, one has to understand his thinking on drama as a genre. But first let me just provide one quote to demonstrate how undeniable it is that, at least in certain instances, Tolkien at the very least did not have a very high opinion of him. Macbeth is a particular problem for Tolkien:To be dissolved, or to be degraded, is the likely fate of fantasy when a dramatist tries to use it, even such a dramatist as Shakespeare. Macbeth is indeed a work by a playwright who ought, at least on this occasion, to have written a story, if he had the skill or patience for that art. (Fairies Stories, p, 141)
Tolkien statements on Drama run something like:
A drama could be made about the suffering of a victim of research in radiology, but hardly about radium itself. But it is possible to be primarily interested in radium (not radiologists) - or primarily interested in Faerie, not tortured mortals. One interest will produce a scientific book, the other a fairy-story. Drama cannot well cope with either. (Fairie Stories, p. 160)This quote shifts a little bit in a way that I think shows some of the ambiguity that exists for Tolkien on drama: He speaks at first of a possible drama (victims of radiology) in terms that seem to make it a possibly legit thing, but then he seems by the end to be more critical of drama as being able to fulfill any possible function with the particular material. I think that there is a shifting going on between a concept of drama in and of itself and drama absolutized as the base model for all narrative. As far as "in and of itself," I think his reaction to it is probably the same as his reaction to allegory: it has it's valid uses, but they are limited (he's known for being critical, but he does note that Tom Bombadil is a fully allegorical character, symbolizing pre-fallen nature, unimpacted by the evil of the ring and always speaking in verse, as poetry is prior to prosaic, scientific language). As far as absolutization, it is when that form is taken to be the root form, the exemplar, the standard. This is what I mean by "too much drama": drama is all right in its natural, limited place, but Shakespeare's work has only drama and has come to be viewed as the exemplar of "literary art as such" ... and that is drama going beyond its natural, limited place.
Directly on Shakespeare in this regard, Tolkien writes: "And criticism in a country that has produced so great a Drama, and possesses the works of William Shakespeare, tends to be far too dramatic. But Drama is naturally hostile to Fantasy." (Fairie Stories, 140).
Tolkien uses a formula that I think is important: "recognition of fact, but not slavery it" (p. 144). I think that, for Tolkien (and myself), drama in and of itself, in its natural place, is the recognition of fact (in drama, the reality of human psychology), but modern drama in the wake of Shakespeare is "slavery to it."
Drama Skewed
The previous section was called "too much drama," and the point was that, to Tolkien, even if drama is fine and good on its own, it has been over-rated and supplanted actual narrative art. My claim here may require some finessing of Tolkien's own statements (particularly as regards "objectification" and psychology), but I think it holds. That claim is that modern drama, which is at least heavily influenced by Shakespeare, has become predominantly ruled by the "slavery to fact" mentioned at the end of the last section (Fairie Stories, p. 144).
The "fact" in question here is the "human person." Tolkien speaks of drama as that in which "human character's hold the stage and upon them attention is concentrate. ... Drama is anthropocentric. Fairy-story and fantasy need not be." (Faerie Stories, pp. 159-160). He also writes:
Thus, if you prefer Drama to Literature (as man literary critics plainly do), or form your critical theories primarily from dramatic critics, or even from Drama, you are apt to misunderstand pure story-telling, and ... to prefer characters, even the basest and dullest, to things." (Fairie Stories, p. 142)Harold Bloom has famously said that "Shakespeare invented the human person" (he even titled the whole book that, Shakespeare: Invention of the Human). I think Tolkien would have replied (to keep with the image of slavery), "no, he just imprisoned him in quotation marks," and what I mean by this is that he would see drama as an improper objectification of "human personhood." I would actually connect it with the radical objectification done when taking the scientific model of knowledge as the standard for all knowledge, rather than itself being one narrowing of a deeper and broader base model of "knowing."
Psychology is in the fore here, although not necessarily named. I don't think that Tolkien saw no value whatsoever in psychology, but I think his mode of thought would see it as being put in the wrong place. Here I have to appeal to another system of thought for which I have not done research into Tolkien's comment on it, but I think it best encapsulates what I am trying to say. Aristotle presented the idea of "katharsis" (in his Poetics) as the role of drama: we watch, and the danger etc on stage elicits our own psychological reactions, thus releasing them so that, when we leave (or maybe after a period of rest) we are unencumbered by those excesses of emotion and can go about the business of thinking about how to live rightly and so on without being hindered by them. The point of all that for this discussion is that the psychology that happens in proper drama, under that understanding, happens between the stage and the audience, but for modern drama, it all happens on the stage and the audience only observes it in a quasi-"scientific" way.
With modern psychology (with which I do not disagree in and of itself, and actually find it quite useful as long as it does not turn man into "merely and animal" ... see the quote below from "Fairie Stories," p. 160), we are properly within the realm of science as applied to the human person, and I believe that "drama skewed," drama in the modern sense as exemplified by Shakespeare, is a reduction to the merely psychological; there is none of what Tolkien calls "the strong moral element" and "inherent morality" of stories that "lie near the borders of Fairie" (Fairie Stories, pp. 117-118).
Having introduced this category of the "scientific," I need to clarify on it, because Tolkien does actually make positive comment on science fiction stories like H.G. Wells' The Time Machine and others, or at least he finds them closer to fantasy than is drama. My point about his conflict with the scientific as a base model (in the form of psychology in drama) comes in with drama's claim to accurately represent "real" life. In the following quote, Tolkien is defending fairy stories against the charge that they blur the lines around "real" life and conflate it with the world of Fairie, and it makes sense that among those making that charge are those who defend drama as accurately representing "real" life, particularly the psychological aspect:
Fantasy does not blur the sharp outlines of the real world; for it depends on them. As far as our western, European, world is concerned, this 'sense of separtion' [of the "real" from the fantastic] has in fact been attacked and weakened in modern times not by fantasy but by scientific theory ... by the hypotheses (or dogmatic guesses) of scientific writers who classed Man not only as 'and animal' -- that correct classification is ancient -- but as 'only an animal.' (Fairie Stories, p. 160).
This is, as far as I can tell, the core definition on which modern drama, beginning in a big way with Shakespeare, operates: a "realistic" depiction of psychological phenomena. And this is "drama skewed" when it is taken as the most fundamental examination of the human situation and the height of literary art, as it is in the idolization of Shakespeare.
Incarnational Narrative
I'll make only a few brief comments here regarding what I think is at the core for what I have referred to in another essay on Tolkien as his "Incarnational imagination," meaning the strong influence that I think his belief in the Incarnation had on his imagination. My point can be summarized in fairly short order. I think that what needs to be incarnated in a character is more than simply the human psychology, as does modern drama.
I'll also give an example here of actual incarnation in Tolkien's own work as an analogy for incarnational narrative. Sauron and Gandalf were originally Maiar, spirit beings who are beyond the races of Middle Earth, "angels," if you will, who incarnate in Middle Earth (see the "of the Maiar"
section of chapter 2 of the Silmarillion: Gandalf's original name was Olorin). The problem with Sauron is that he over-incarnated, bound too much of his angelic power to what could be done with it in Middler Earth, or at least this is how I take "poured all of his power into the ring." Gandalf also incarnates into a body, but most of his original power goes into being able to counsel the races (again, the morality factor) for their own benefit rather than into ruling them for his own.
The main point is that they both were originally beyond the races of Middle Earth, not symbols of aspects of those races, who, for the most part each represent some aspect of humanity, or at least that is how I read the races (although, for what purpose an author incarnate even the beyond-human is important, for it can be done for evil as well as for good purposes ... but that gets too far afield into the morality in the act of making a story, rather than, say, merely the morality within the story itself). Again, to be clear, I am analogizing what Gandalf and Sauron are in and of themselves (incarnations from beyond) with what story does, or at least should do, I am arguing, according to Tolkien. The latter is to incarnate things beyond mere human psychology (morals, virtues, and the like) and then have them interact with humans (Gandalf counsels and symbolizes the virtue of helping others with counsel; Sauron dominates and symbolizes the arch-vice of domination thinking).
As one further piece of information, a model for this might be the pre-Shakespeare plays known as "everyman plays," which had an upper stage on which were characters somehow above common contemporary humans (God, biblical characters, etc) and on which was acted out biblical stories or dramatizations of relations within the Godhead and the like, and a lower stage with an everyman character and members of a chorus that represent classes in contemporary society (the one that I have personally read was one done by a modern author imitating the medieval models, "The Just Vengeance" written by Dorothy Sayers)
Psychological Drama Disguised as Fairy Story:
Midsummer Night's Dream
Tolkien is well noted for saying he regretted using the term "elves" because he thought Shakepseare had cheapened it (see the interesting piece called "JRR Tolkien on the 'folly of reading Shakespeare'" at www.bardfilm.blogspot.com, which cites his famous quote in Letter 151, to Hugh Brogan in 1954: "I now deeply regret having used Elves ... the disastrous debasement of this word, in which Shakespeare played an unforgiveable part, has really overloaded it with regrettable tones, which are too much to overcome" [p. 185 in the Carpenter edition of Tolkien's letters] ... see also other commentary like the essays in Tolkien and Shakespeare: Essays on Shared Themes and Language, edited by Janet Brennan Croft. The authors of the essays in this edited volume rely heavily on the sourcework in Tom Shippey's JRR Tolkien: Author of the Century and The Road to Middle Earth: How JRR Tolkien Created a New Mythology). The best place to look for this is in what is possibly the bard's most famous use of the fay: Midsummer Night's Dream (Shippey relates an interesting fact about this play: It and The Tempest are "the" two fairy plays [I take it he means the only two in the bard's body of plays] and the two plays "whose plots were not borrowed but made up by Shakesspeare"; see The Road to Middle Earth, p. 184 [and see below on Macbeth for the centrality of plot for "narrative art"]... as regards an actual place Tolkien admits liking something from Shakespeare, contra Midsummer and Macbeth, in Letter 76, to his son Christopher in 1944, he comments positively on a performance of Hamlet he attended [Carpenter's edition, p. 88, in which letter can also be found his phrase "the folly of reading Shakespeare]).
I think this gets complicated, but I also think it can be figure out. Where it gets complicated is where "things," most particularly the elves, while they initially seem to be above or beyond humans, really only stand in for humans or human qualities. In Tolkien's sense, elves are in and of themselves other than human, but it is not so in Midsummer Night's dream. This is an observation that struck me in reading the play in an undergrad course on Shakespeare (taught by my Mr Shakespeare I mentioned at the beginning) even before reading Tolkien's essay. I remember it occurring to me that the fairies, especially Puck and Oberon, are basically the Freudian unconscious, as is their dark murky, confusing and trickster-laden woods at night (Shippey draws similarities between this wood and Fangorn's forest, but I think that for Tolkien Fangorn is really a rebuttal to Oberon on the model I describe below under Macbeth, rather than a fond adaptation).
My main point is that the elves do not incarnate something beyond human psychology, even something in humanity that is not "merely animal" (for we share psychology with the animals; we share the basic principles with them even when we move into the properly human psychology of a psyche that is self-reflexive, that can protect the concepts of "I" and "me" in the same way an animal instinctively protects what it needs for survival). I think that, whether or not Tolkien made the connection consciously himself, his accusation of Shakespeare as "debasing" the elves is really the fact that they represent only human psychology.
An Example of Narrative Art: The Charmed Captain of Evil.
So, perhaps the best way to really show the difference between Tolkien and Shakespeare regarding "narrative art" is to detail what is probably the single most concise example, and one that has always been in the fore of my thoughts when pondering this issue. The conceptual background for this is what has gone on above, the difference that Tolkien sees between drama and what he himself does, which he calls "narrative art." He writes that "Drama is, even though it uses a similar material (words, verse, plot), is an art fundamentally different from narrative art," (Fairie Stories, p. 142), and as noted above, that "Drama is naturally hostile to Fantasy. Fantasy, even of the simplest kind, hardly ever succeeds in Drama." (ibid., p. 140)
I believe that the difference lies first in the characters, and particularly their function. For drama, the point is a scientifically accurate depiction of the psychology in play. For narrative art, on the other hand, the characters are emblematic, which is to say that they represent things larger than one individual instance.
So the best way to explicate this is to go directly to the example, which is the "Charmed Captain of Evil" trope. I first became aware of this in reading the introduction chapter of David Day's Tolkien's Ring (which has some truly awesome illustration work done by Alan Lee, who is famed for his Middle Earth drawing and painting work and was the lead conceptual artist for Peter Jackson's film trilogy).
(SIDE NOTE: I should warn the reader that Day's book is not primarily on Tolkien's actual work, but rather takes it as a jumping off point for presenting his own academic research on a related topic: ring legends in ancient cultures ... although he tosses in corollaries from Tolkien's text when he can get them ... this kind of "jumping off" happens often and is perfectly fine in and of itself: academics spend much time doing research that will not directly yield much monetary, supporting-daily-living, result; one writes a second peer-reviewed monograph in order to make full professor, and it sells some in the field, but not a major amount of the kind of capital you can give your landlord; so sometimes a popular topic comes along that is related to one's area of research, like Jackson generating interest in the Lord of the Rings by doing the movies, and one has a chance to pick up on some returns that are more directly applicable to the mortgage and braces for the kids ... and more power to him, I say; the bills never stop coming) .
Day's basic set up is: Tolkien's work was immensely popular; but he didn't come up with the idea of a ring of power on his own; he took the idea from a multitude of ring legends from many ancient cultures; and his project was, as the structure for his own work with his own themes, to build a "believable source story," an "exemplar" of sorts, for the many legends. And so, in his intro chapter, Day gives a couple more specific and limited-scope examples of such traditional narrative tropes and talks about Tolkien seeing his own version as a much better exemplar than some others, say those by Shakespeare. A minor example is Macbeth's march of the woods on Dunsinane Hill, which winds up being nothing more than a trick of the light and psychological terror-driven imagination. Tolkien famously said in a letter that he was always disappointed in this as a child because he wanted it to be the actual trees marching (which I think means that he wanted nature to actually be engaging in the fight), so he wrote the ents shepherding the trees/hoorns to Helm's Deep as a "rebuttal" of sorts.
The more major example for me, the one that shows what he means by narrative art, is the one Day reveals as the "charmed captain of evil" trope.
This trope is a sub-plot, a plot device, in which there is a captain who is evil and who has some sort of protection from a quasi-supernatural source, some prophecy or enchantment, and then the captain is undone by something that the wording of the prophecy or charm failed to take into account. In Shakespeare's play, the charmed captain is Macbeth, who has a prophecy that says he cannot be killed by one of woman born, and so he is killed by Macduff, who was born c-section. To Tolkien, this is a hack's answer to the riddle on several fronts. For one (and here I embark on my own exposition beyond Day), as a philologist and immersed in the etymologies and histories of words, Tolkien would see it as a betrayal of the real and full meaning of "born of woman." The meaning of that phrase is not limited to the delivery method, as Shakespeare has it (I am not sure how much of this is Shakespeare versus how much is his source, the Holinshed Chronicles, and have not sifted the material in Shippey and others enough to discern, but one way or another, the bard was the one who either made the cheap version or championed it from the source ... either way, to Tolkien's mind, I think, he's a hack). "Born" comes from the word "bear," meaning, of course, to carry. Being "born of woman" really means to be carried by a woman in her body for nine months, regardless of whether one is delivered by the natural course or is "untimely from my mother ripped" (c-section).
But the deeper dissatisfaction comes from cutting off the possible "moral" of the story," which comes from the emblematic nature of the characters and their interaction in the actual plot. Macbeth's version provides no answer to a really meaningful riddle ... it's all a technical loophole. And so, in rebuttal (showing us how to do it right), Tolkien gives us the witch-king of Angmar, the leader of the nine nazgul, the ringwraiths. He has had a charm laid on him (as he was a sorcerer) by which he "cannot be hindered by a living man." And so, he is killed by a woman aided by a halfling. The importance, for a thinker like Tolkien, would lie in the theme of the riddle and its answer. The riddle of this particular narrative plot device, this trope, is arrogance: seeking to win by sorcery or relying on esoteric prophecies. It's not relying on your God-given wits and talents the same as any other person has to do, and it's not praying to a god and then going into battle with faith, as Tolkien and Lewis both liked to see their fellow foot soldiers of the First World War doing. It is, rather, trying to pin down the protection and make sure of it before ever taking action. It's not bravery: cowardice and arrogance go hand in hand. And so, because the riddle is arrogance, the answer must be humility: a woman (a symbol of diminutive stature in a patriarchal society) aided by a halfling (whose diminutive stature and its emblematic capacity for humility are plain enough even at first sight). Shakespeare's use of the plot device, the trope, has none of this capability to embody or to en-flesh the theme of arrogance and humility. And so it is not narrative art; it is a fraud.
It is important here to note (especially because I said above to note it here) that I have used the word "plot" several times, for that is the second major thing in what narrative art (as I am arguing Tolkien means the term): you start with emblematic characters and then you create your own plot (what he calls, in "Fairies Stories," "sub-creation") in which the way they interact, the result of their interaction, reveals your theme, the answer to the riddle (I have addressed the topic of plot in my post on narrative as a kairotic chronology).
On the contrary, supposedly (and here I am going to paraphrase what I think defenders of the bard would say) what the Macbeth version offers is a realistic portrayal of the psychological reality of a human being caught in this struggle. But I don't really see much more than "What?!?!? I didn't win? I got gypped on that prophecy thing! I want my money back!" I am, of course, lampooning that in my imagined internal dialogue, but I think the parody gets to the heart of what Tolkien meant by "the folly of reading Shakespeare."
Flotsam and Brettsam
(Raw "kitchen sink" ramblings)
It is the only instance I know of in WS in which the "non-human" is not malevolent (witches in MacBeth etc).
Stories that are actually concerned primarily with "fairies" ... (p. 113)
Harold Bloom on WS inventing the human person.
Tolkien on Drama versus "narrative art" in "On Fairy Stories." Maybe use magical 14 feet from graveyard in GoF as representative of narrative are: juxtaposition of placement of characters and plot event and so on (plot is the central one though). Drama is only about scientific exposition of psychological states. But also ask the question of whether drama might be like allegory, at least in a consistent application of the Tolkien model (whether or not he reacted more strongly against drama than too overuse of allegory).
The meeting place is the fairies in Midsummer's. In WS they are only psychology (the limitation particular to drama); in Tolkien they are something other (need to define what though).
Tolkien on fairy stories NOT being about the supernatural? This gets some into Pratchett too, especially Shepherd's Crown.Raising Steam had gone back to the roots of magic, natural philosophy, the four elements cosmology. (but this may be subject for another post).
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