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The History of Literature
671 Shakespeare's Tragic Art (with Rhodri Lewis) | My Last Book with Joel Warner
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- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. What's the best time of day to get a deal? All day with Jack in the Box's all day Big deal meal. You get to choose from four entrees like the supreme croissant and five tasty sides, plus a drink starting at $5. So hurry in or take your time. You've got all day at Jack. Every bite's a big deal.
- [00:35]
Rodri Lewis
This episode is brought to you by Amazon. Sometimes the most painful part of getting sick is the getting better part. Waiting on hold for an appointment, sitting in crowded waiting rooms, standing in line at the pharmacy. That's painful. Amazon One Medical and Amazon Pharmacy remove those painful parts of getting better with things like 247 virtual visits and prescriptions delivered to your door.
- [00:55]
Jack Wilson
Thanks to Amazon Pharmacy and Amazon One Medical. Amazon Healthcare just got less painful. Hello, it's easy to take tragedy for granted. We accept tragedy as a high form of art, one of the highest up there with oil paintings and symphonies. And yet it's not necessarily an intuitive approach to entertainment, as we can see from looking at Hollywood with its addiction to happy endings. The ancient Greeks performed tragedies, and Shakespeare made them prominent once again in Western civilization. But if we probe the tragic form, as we do on occasion, we might find ourselves exploring the question of why. What does tragedy do for us? Why do theatergoers put themselves in this position? Why pay money to see something unhappy? Those are good questions, and we've explored them from time to time here on the podcast. But there's another line of inquiry we haven't explored as often, and that is the question of what or how. Shakespeare was an artist. He had predecessors in the Greek tragedians who were a couple of thousand years old. How closely did he follow those models? In what ways did he break from their conventions? A new book by Rodri Lewis looks at exactly that. And here's Emma Smith from Hertford College at the University of Oxford, one of our favorite guests here on the History of Literature podcast to tell us about the book. Lewis's unflinching, learned 21st century account of Shakespearean tragedy has a clear eye for the play's comfortlessness, even as his analyses make them sing. Move aside, A.C. bradley. End quote. Rodri Lewis joins us to discuss Shakespeare's tragic art today on the History of Literature. Okay, hello everyone. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson. We start today with a letter from a listener who shall remain anonymous. He wrote, after listening to my conversation with Elyse Graham about the librarians and scholars who became World War II era spies. Our listener, it turns out, had a personal connection to that era. Dear Jack, I want to tell you that I donated he gives a sum of money which was very generous to your fine podcast the other day, something I've been planning to do for many months. Thank you. I just listened to your latest about books and daggers, which sent me onto my dusty shelves to pull out R. Harris Smith's book book the Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency. My pregnant mother was one of those recruits. She began her 40 year career with the federal government while I was still in the oven in 1942. My older late brother spoke 13 languages. He was in Havana when Castro came down out of the mountains, but he never revealed to me if he was in the family business. Happy New Year, Jack. Wow. Wow. Thank you listener. Isn't that fascinating? Isn't that fascinating? A mother who was in the early OSS and then perhaps her son speaking 13 languages followed her into the family business. But they left our listener out. What kind of secrets did those two have and what did they not share with him? It's a very interesting idea. It could be a screenplay, I think. That's such a D.C. experience. The brother who speaks 13 languages and happened to be in Havana. Well, in D.C. we live among spies. They are our neighbors and colleagues. We stand behind them in lines at the grocery store. We sit shoulder to shoulder with them at ball games and Bond movies while the rest of us are chuckling at the excesses. In those Bond movies, our spy friends merely stare at the screen looking for tips. When my family and I first moved to this area, we lived in Arlington, Virginia, and my oldest son, then in preschool, went to a school that happened to be near the entrance to the CIA. My wife used to complain about the timing of the drop off. If she was late in the queue, she'd get stuck behind the traffic of the cars coming out of CIA headquarters and heading home to the suburbs. It's all the spies, she would say as she got home late. I think their shift must end at 4. I was stuck behind them a few times too, and I wondered about the neighbor across the street whom I followed all the way from Langley into the cul de sac of the house we were renting. Presumably he was not undercover or not under deep cover. Anyway, I figured him out. Or maybe he was undercover and I was put on a list of people to watch because I had dangerous knowledge. I had tailed him all the way home and knew his true identity. In any case, many thanks for the generous donation and for the email. It sounds like a fascinating life, living among deceivers and being there in utero for the development of the American intelligence effort. Moving on, we have a great show today, a conversation with Rodri Lewis about Shakespeare's tragic art. Let's do that first and then we'll hear from Joel Warner, our expert in the Marquis de Sade and his scandalous work, 120 Days of Sodom. Joel will join us to discuss his choice for the last book he will ever read. Will it be 120 days of Sodom, one wonders. Well, you won't need to wonder for too long. First, Rodri Lewis. Okay. Joining me now is Rodri Lewis, who teaches English at Princeton University. His previous books include Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness and Language, Mind and Artificial Languages in England, From Bacon to Locke. He's here today to discuss his new book, Shakespeare's Tragic Art. Rodri Lewis, welcome to the history of literature.
- [08:00]
Rodri Lewis
Jack, thank you so much for that kind introduction. It's great to be here and I am very grateful for the invitation to come and chat with you.
- [08:08]
Jack Wilson
Okay, so what drew Shakespeare toward tragic drama?
- [08:14]
Rodri Lewis
What drew Shakespeare towards tragic drama?
- [08:17]
Jack Wilson
Well, actually, and let me put this in a little more context. I mean, we're so used to the idea that Hollywood loves happy endings and we assume that Hollywood assumes that the movie going audience is going to love them too. And I'm just curious if that was the same thing. In Shakespeare's world, did he grow up imbibing tragedies when he went to the theater? Or was he kind of a forerunner in saying, you know what, there's a different way. I have a different view. I could look back to the ancient Greeks and we could bring tragedy to the Elizabethan stage.
- [09:00]
Rodri Lewis
Well, I suppose. I mean, we know so little about, you know, what Shakespeare did outside his schoolroom, as it were, as a kid growing up, but it seems reasonable to assume that he was familiar with, you know, large swathes of 16th century tragedy. And most of that can be put under two brackets, one of which is sort of moralistic. What's called the decasibus tradition of tragedy where, you know, a great king or a great person, you know, is shown to be proud and, or some other, some other sort of vice and mistakes their sort of station in life for some kind of divine pseudo, divine elevation and then gets brought low. And so, you know, the morality story is, you know, if you're a king, you know, you too are a humble, are a humble Nobody before God. So everyone should remember that. And that's all fine. And Shakespeare certainly has parts of that, knows the deep grammar of that tradition. The other kind is a sort of more bloody revenge kind, which looks back to the Seneca tragedies of ancient Rome, which were a big deal in the humanist world of the 16th centuries. And Shakespeare sort of definitively has a hand in both of those when he starts to write his own tragedies. But he comes at tragedy, I think it's probably fairer to say, through two of the better English exponents of the 1580s, that's Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kidd. They haven't got time to do that now, but they do all kinds of very interesting and important and innovative, if I may say so, very cool things with ancient tragedy. And Shakespeare thinks. We think his first tragedy is Titus Andronicus, which is written some point between 1589 and 1591. So quite early, maybe even the first play he writes. I can try this, too. Titus is a play with all kinds of cool things going on that should interest us. But he also, I think, comes up against the realization that doing tragedy is really hard. Doing it well is really hard, and he doesn't quite know what he's doing yet. But tragedy, for various reasons, which I guess go back to the ancient Greeks, is seen as being the most dignified, the most sort of grand of all the dramatic genres. And I think, you know, Shakespeare, who, whatever his other virtues might have been, was not a humble man. He knew he was good. He knew he wanted to do his talent justice. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. And then I had another go sort of five years later in Romeo and Juliet, which is a lot closer to temporally and artistically to the. To the sorts of plays we usually talk about when we think about Shakespeare and tragedy. And then he has another little break of four or five years and this great stretch from Hamlet through to Coriolanus, you know, more or less eight years, is. Is underway. And he's then worked out what he does. But. So, yeah, part of it, I think, is I want to take on the grandest of all the tragic, all the dramatic for I. E. Tragedy. But then, you know, once he gets into that, we can perhaps circle back to, you know, why he does that. In a moment. He then sort of takes what was there before and makes it very much his own. The one thing I did want to say. You were asking about box office death.
- [12:16]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
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Rodri Lewis
I mean, it's probably the case that Shakespeare's tragedies are about a quarter of the plays he wrote. And they're probably less than a quarter of the plays. We don't know exactly, but probably less than, significantly less than a quarter of the plays that were on in the, were put on in the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. I mean, then as now, you know, comedy, comedy is an easier sell. And comedy and history, in Shakespeare's case, you could, you could count on them to fill out the theater. So, you know, when we are trying to think about Shakespeare and tragedy and you know, why he bothered, one of the answers we can't really turn to is box office gold.
- [12:54]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [12:55]
Rodri Lewis
He's doing this for some other reason, whatever that might be, than simply wanting to put bottoms on seats and perhaps to sell printed books after the bottoms on seats have gone away. You know, wanting to reconsider what they've been spectating. So. So yeah, it's not box office death, but certainly, you know, if you were a hard headed business manager of an Elizabethan or Jacobean theater, you wouldn't want to have too much of your list made up of tragedy. Yeah, you're gonna get bust quite soon.
- [13:26]
Jack Wilson
Well, it also makes me wonder, as you were talking, I was thinking about something you had said about that he found that doing tragedy was really hard. And I'm thinking that if you're doing a comedy, you can just stuff it with a lot of jokes and if the plot kind of meanders that you can get away with some flaws as long as people are laughing. And with history, you can probably get away with some flaws as long as you're delivering just something to keep the audience's attention. But with tragedy, things could go wrong where the audience isn't getting the kind of effect that you want them to get. They could start giggling, for example, or they could just be bored, or they could not care about your character. So what are you seeing in the text that makes you think that Shakespeare wrestled with getting this right?
- [14:17]
Rodri Lewis
Well, I mean, say one of the things that makes tragedy different from comedy. And here I'm borrowing a distinction from, from Aristotle's Poetics, which, you know, as a parenthesis, I don't think Shakespeare read, but nor did I think he needed to. But it's a useful distinction here, which is, say, you know, in comedy and tragedy, one thing, the thing that is God is the plot, right? I mean, you have to have a well orchestrated plot. What makes tragedy different, or at least good tragedy different, is that within that plot you don't just need characters, you know, which is to say, people to speak the lines. You need characters with what Aristotle calls ethos, depths of characterization. Or to put it in money terms, we might understand, you need characters we care about. And that. That is not a problem, particularly in comedy. Because as you say, as long as there are jokes, because comedy is a surface, you know, phenomenon in all sorts of ways. I mean, yes, it can go deeper, but basically, as long as the plot rollicks along quite nicely and we have some good jokes, then everything sort of works. And we know there's going to be a kind of harmonic ending in tragedy. Plot and characterization have to go together. You know, we have to really care that, you know, the protagonist or protagonists have done what they've done, even though they know it's wrong. We have to sort of care about them going into a position of suffering towards the end. And that is hard. And say in something like Titus Andronicus, which is great and interesting play that Shakespeare co wrote actually with a guy called George Peel very early in his career, you know, we've got all the tragic gore, we've got all the excellent tragic plotting. Everything is very well worked out, although you don't always realize that when you see it on stage. But you know, ultimately everyone is horrid. Even Titus himself is a bit of a. Bit of a sort of chauvinistic pig. And poor old Lavinia, his daughter, is a bit of a cardboard cutout as well. Cardboard cut out of virtue in this case, rather than anything vicious. And we don't really. We don't really care. And I think, you know, jumping forwards, I mean, it's Juliet. And the way he writes Juliet in Romeo and Juliet is where he first begins. He, Shakespeare, that is, first begins to work out that sort of. We often talk about Shakespeare as the dramatist of interiority and anxious selfhood and all that kind of stuff. And it's right, and it's in Juliet that he gets that sort of, you know, mind talking to itself, the mind arguing with itself, the mind trying to. Trying to feel its way towards something we can come along with. And that he's not in 1594-95 when he writes Romeo and Juliet. I don't think he's quite worked out what to do with that yet.
- [16:59]
Jack Wilson
But that maybe, maybe seeing that in action is what makes us identify with the characters and start to root for them in a way that makes their tragic ending so moving.
- [17:10]
Rodri Lewis
Yeah, the end of Romeo and Juliet would not be half as painful as it is, but were it not for that extraordinary Soliloquy that Juliet has when she's in her family mausoleum chamber thing and with all the bones, and she's thinking, shall I do this? Shouldn't I do this? What if, what if, what if? Oh, well, okay, damn it, I'll do it right now. And we're inside the mind in real time there, as it were. And the kinds of ways in which we do, I think, talk to ourselves. And that obviously becomes one of Shakespeare's stocks in trade. But he's not one of the things that makes Shakespearean tragedy tick. But going back to the initial question, he'd not really figured that out when he was writing Tatis Andronicus early in his career. And I mean, he very much will later.
- [17:56]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. So what does he start to try? You've described his plays as a series of experiments. What do you see him trying to do differently? And what exactly makes his plays distinctive from the ones that have come before?
- [18:13]
Rodri Lewis
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, Shakespeare's great theme to say something bold and provocative, which I think I largely agree with, is our ability to. Our ability as intelligent animals, human beings, to remake the world in ways that we find congenial or manageable to ourselves. There's a great line from Julius Caesar, you know, it is from early on where there's a sort of fictionalized version of Cicero saying, you know, it's a strange disposed time we live in. I'm maybe misquoting him, but I'm more or less right that men construe things after their fashion, cleaned from the purposes of the things themselves. There's another recasting of that in. In Hamlet where he says that, you know, the unnamed gentleman saying, you know, we botch the words up fit to our own thoughts. So, you know, call that delusion, if you like, or our capacity for delusion. And that's funny in comedy. Right. You know, we all know that people who are in love, for example, talk nonsense about themselves and about their beloved, but we forgive that in all sorts of ways. One of the things, I think, that animates the tragedies is seeing that delusion not as a sort of forgivable aberration from because we're in love or whatever. But, you know, part of the. As it were, the deep DNA of the way we operate as human beings and his challenge, I think, and the thing he experiments with is to try to find a way of representing or of imitating, if you like, that kind of reality and the fact that we are, as human beings, we are entities that constantly strive for meaning, for order, for patterns, for stories, or for the word I use over and over again in the book. Fictions that we can turn to to help us navigate or cope with day to day reality. Like, how can he represent that without falling into the vice of creating sort of fictions of order of his own? If you see what I mean.
- [20:14]
Jack Wilson
I think I see, but I think I need more help seeing. So what you're saying is, I guess in Aristotle's time, for example, as he's analyzing tragedies, he's kind of saying, well, here's you need a tragic flaw and you need a character who's believable and audiences will care about and so on. And Shakespeare is saying, that's all well and good, we can do tragedies that way. But somehow we need to add the component of what Shakespeare viewed as essential to humanity, which was that humans are also kind of writing their own narratives and shaping their own realities and fitting their own lives into a kind of. Almost like a, a kind of plot or understanding. They're understanding their own lives by thinking about themselves within these narratives.
- [21:10]
Rodri Lewis
Yeah, that's basically right. I mean, it takes it back to Aristotle, which I think is probably the right thing to do. I mean, one way of reframing that will be to say is the reason human beings are storytelling creatures, creatures who need stories about who and what we are is that we don't actually understand much about where we come from or where we're going or of what the universe means or of, you know, any of these sorts of things. Another way of putting that is to say that life as we inhabit it is largely inscrutable. Now, for Aristotle, that's just sloppy laziness. He thinks that the universe is comprehensible to human reason. It's just that it's not fully comprehensible yet. You know, keep, keep working at it along the lines of. Along the lines that I, Aristotle, master philosopher, outline. And we will get to a position where we understand the world. And his tragedy fits very much within that sort of mold. Which is why he says that a tragic plot, for example, must be organized according to the principles of probability and necessity. Which is to say it's not like history, life as we actually experience it, which is just one thing after another. Aristotelian tragic plot is one in which something happens and everything else follows in a chain of necessity. Yeah, you know, that's tragic inevitability for Aristotle. Shakespeare says that's essentially a fiction because that's, you know, life does not happen like that, why should tragic happen like that? And so his task is to try to find a way of representing that, if you like, that contingency the condition of being stuck in a world or in a series of events or experiences that we don't understand, but that we try to explain to ourselves how to capture that without flattening it out, without losing the texture. And that, I think, is what he feels a lot of classically theorized tragedy based on Aristotle's poetics, does. And he tries to change that. He wants to find a way of, you know, sure, we're going to have an ordered plot, which is, if you like, aesthetically ordered, but it's not going to have some deep rational or philosophical order underpinning or theological order underpinning it, because that's cheating. Because tragedy is about the human experience of living in a world that it can't really explain. And so if we try to say that there is, in fact, a deep theory lurking behind all of this, that only we could move beyond our passions or lusts or whatever we'd be able to experience, I think for Shakespeare, that's a shortcut and a willful blindfolding almost on a poet's part. And, you know. And that, of course, is one of the reasons why Shakespeare becomes so difficult to later neoclassical critics in England and in France, because people like John Dryden say. Who say, you know, the man's a genius, obviously, but he's so indisciplined. His plots are full of accidents. You know, Romeo and Juliet, you know, it all goes wrong because a letter goes astray. That's not supposed to happen. It's supposed to be a string of necessities, not, you know, random things going wrong. In a plague lockdown, the letter's gone astray. But Shakespeare said no, actually, the sufferings in life are animated by accidents and by bad luck and by bad timing and that sort of thing. And tragedy should not try to pretend otherwise. So, yeah, the experiments are to try to find a way of doing that which still kind of in a way that enables him to retain a kind of aesthetic dramatic order in the way he writes his characters, the way he writes his plots and the way in which he has his characters speak, right?
- [24:41]
Jack Wilson
Because there is something about the tragic model where it is the protagonist's flaw that leads to the tragic outcome that is more satisfying than, for example, if it feels like it's the product of random chance or happenstance. But Shakespeare has enough of that in there that he obviously knew that he knew he couldn't Just nobody would be moved if the tragic hero was struck by a bolt of lightning in the final act.
- [25:10]
Rodri Lewis
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. No, I think that's right. He definitely knows that. And, you know, he wants us to. And succeeds, I think, triumphantly, even with an obvious baddie, as it were, like Macbeth, you know, who's, let's face it, not a nice guy. We still sort of care. What I think is interesting, though, is that, you know, he maintains. There are many things I think are interesting, but what I think is interesting here is that he maintains, if you like, the superficial structure of, say, a tragic flaw or error leading to things coming out and then eventually following on from that, the recognition or the reversal where the error becomes apparent and the recognition of what that error has meant, he retains that sort of structural shape while simultaneously kind of undermining it, if that makes sense. So that we see it perhaps as being a little bit of a superficial convention. And. Yeah, I mean, I could say more about that, but I don't want to turn it into me reciting various parts of the book. But, yeah, no, he knows well what his audiences expect a tragedy to be doing and gives them enough of that, I think, to have kept them interested, but simultaneously wants us to see some of those conventions as being perhaps some of those fictions of order, some of those stories we tell ourselves in the attempt to make things cohere when we are, in fact, a little bit unsure that they do.
- [26:40]
Jack Wilson
When you look at his span of work, do you see it as a progression where he's gradually figuring things out and a problem in the third or fourth one is solved by the seventh or eighth one and he's getting better and better and honing his skills? Or do you see it more as he seems dissatisfied and then he tries to solve a different problem. He sets out a different challenge for himself in the next one, and sort of it's less of a progression and more of an artist who is tackling different aspects of the tragic form.
- [27:15]
Rodri Lewis
I think sort of more of the latter, which is to say, I don't think there is a sort of line you can draw in progression from. I mean, I suppose there is from Titus Andronicus through to, you know, save Julius Caesar.
- [27:31]
Jack Wilson
You can see him generally getting better.
- [27:33]
Rodri Lewis
Yeah, but, you know, when we get to Julius Caesar and then to Hamlet quite quickly afterwards. So, you know, we're around 1600 here and, you know, we're at the beginning of the, you know, the big eight years of Shakespeare as a writer of tragedies. I see him really as. And I don't know the answer because, you know, you have to sit down with the guy. Why is he suddenly. Why is he drawn to this? You know, what's gone wrong? Who hurt you? Poor Will. But something somewhere is compelling him. You know, midlife crisis. Who knows to write about the kinds of indeterminacy and ambiguity and the kinds of lengths we go to to avoid confronting our inability to sort of understand the cosmos into which we're thrown. And yeah, I think I can say more or less confidently that in a play like Timon of Athens, which he co writes with Thomas Middleton or Coriolanus, which is himself alone, he's finding himself in a position where, for him as a playwright, tragedy has become exhausted. In a sense, the darkness of the material threatens to overwhelm the resources of his art, if that. Not too grand a way of putting it. And that if he's going to carry on writing, he needs to do so in a rather different mode. But, you know, as we look through from, from, as I say, from Hamlet to, I don't know, Anthony, Cleopatra and Coriolanus, 1607, 1608, through King Lear and Macbeth, through Othello, through Taurus and Cressida, measure for measure, they're certainly more marginal tragedies. He's just been drawn back to a cluster of questions which he goes at with extraordinary audacity and skill and no little bravery. But I. Maybe I'm just a failure as an exponent of Shakespeare. I don't see a line that I feel confident tracing there. I mean, yes, he gets more confident with the strokes through which he can depict interior life. But beyond that sort of thing, I don't think we can say there's a sort of, you know, a high point. I mean, you know, we can argue, people do argue, whether Hamlet or Lear is the greatest Shakespearean tragedy. And others have other candidates as well. And I think, you know, the fact that no one agrees that it's a play written in 1606 or 1607 speaks against the idea of a sort of linear progression of his skills as a tragedy.
- [30:02]
Jack Wilson
Okay, let's take a quick break and then come back with more from Rodri Lewis. My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career Day and said he was a big roas man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend. My friends still laugh at me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B, but with LinkedIn.
- [30:41]
Rodri Lewis
You'Ll be able to reach people who do get $100 credit on your next ad campaign.
- [30:45]
Jack Wilson
Go to LinkedIn.com results to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com results. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn the place to be to be. You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy. Just use Indeed. Stop struggling to get your job posts seen on other job sites with Indeed sponsored jobs. Your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have 45% more applications than non sponsored jobs. Don't wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility@ Indeed.com Arts. Just go to Indeed.com Arts right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. Okay, we're back. So Rodri, let's back up for a moment. Usually I start out with this, but this time I wanted to launch right into our discussion of Shakespeare's tragic art. But let's talk about your own relationship with Shakespeare. Do you remember where you were in life when you discovered Shakespeare's place?
- [32:19]
Rodri Lewis
Yeah, I mean, I suppose they were, as is true of many people, they were thrust upon me as a slightly unwilling, slightly unwilling 14 year old at school and they in this case was the Merchant of Venice and Midsummer Night's Dream. And I knew they were supposed to be very impressive and that my teachers were all, you know, terribly excited about this. But I've got to say I didn't really get them. It was too complicated. I mean, I learned my talking points when I did good attentive student and you know, was given pats on the back for my ability to repeat back at my teachers what they told me with a little bit of interest were.
- [32:51]
Jack Wilson
These performances or you were given the text to read and we were given the text.
- [32:55]
Rodri Lewis
Actually performance becomes interesting because then fast forward three more years to I suppose I'm in American terms, I'm a rising senior and we're doing King Lear. And I've got slightly more of King Lear because I read lots of romantic poetry and I know the Romantics are really into Lear, so I have a line on that. But then we're taken to the Royal Shakespeare Company and Robert Stevens was performing Lear. And Stevens, actually I didn't know this then, but I knew it subsequently was very ill and old and dying himself at this point and it was, and it was an extraordinary and still the best Lear I've seen. Extraordinary, moving, immersive, really discombobulating experience. I didn't quite know what to do with that. So I went back to repeating back what my teachers had said to me. I'm then go through. I did partially did English at college and did some more Shakespeare there. And I was again, you learn the expectations of academic language to, you know, get your A's and move on. And I sort of, you know, deeply conscious of the fact this Shakespeare about whom I was writing and you know, writing relatively well I suppose was not necessarily the Shakespeare that I experienced then or had experienced subsequently in the theater or in the reading. And so keep on going fast forward here. I, you know, ended up going into sort of academic career and taught Shakespeare a fair amount and still grappled with the, this, this feeling. And I guess around 2010, 11, I was wondering, I'd written there's a couple of books then, you know, what should I do? And I was in fact talking to my then girlfriend, give her a little wave and she was saying, you should do some work on Shakespeare. You have things to say. And I go, oh come on, really? And I thought, well actually no. Yes I do. I want to find a way of bridging the gap between the Shakespeare who kicks me in the guts and makes my head spin when I'm in the theater or reading it and the Shakespeare about whom I teach and read academically.
- [34:55]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [34:55]
Rodri Lewis
And so I tried to do a little bit of that in quite a lot of that with respect to Hamlet in the Hamlet book seven or eight years ago now. And I guess I wanted to try and close that circle, at least to my own satisfaction by writing about the tragedies as a whole. So yeah, that is essentially what I try to do. Write an academic book that. Not just an academic book, but an academic book that hopefully will be read by non academics. But that does capture some of the excitement on the one hand of the kinds of things we talk about in the academy with Shakespeare, but also tries to account and I may even succeed, I don't know. Others will tell me to account for the gut wrenching mind spinning, immersive emotions, mind everything else experience of Shakespearean tragedy when really well done in the theater.
- [35:47]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, right.
- [35:48]
Rodri Lewis
Or when you're thinking about it yourself. So yeah, it does sort of. I mean it's always a big glib. I always distrust these stories and say there was a moment when I was a teenager and I've been living with it. Ever since.
- [35:57]
Jack Wilson
Well, I want to ask you about that because I think it's valid to have a response where you know, you can fall in love with Shakespeare but not really as a. Like you can fall in love with the audience and the costumes and the acting and the stage and, and kind of the whole experience of it and the language and all of those things without kind of being moved by the tragedy. And it sounds like when you were 17 or so and you saw Lear, you had an experience that was a lot more like what Shakespeare was aiming for, which is not so much. Here we are on a field trip to go see a really interesting play by a famous person. But. But here is the story of this king who's going mad and who gives away his kingdom and the heart wrenching aspects of it and the tragic aspects of it. So what do you think it was? Do you think it just hit you at the right time or what was it about the tragedy that appealed to you?
- [37:02]
Rodri Lewis
Yeah, I've so much airbrushed from my history the realities of my 17 year old life that I can't really answer that question. But no, I can remember. What I can remember is that it was just the, you know, as a sort of 17 year old I was painfully into sort of Dostoevsky and Russian fiction and Jean Paul Sartre and Aberc? Amus and existentialist this and that and the other. And so I was, you know, attuned to questions of the void and fear and all the rest of it, but in a sort of slightly pretentious teenage way, as you'd expect. And yeah, Lear just. I suppose all that. Leah just flattened me. I was, you know, the class bore as it were, who could go on about this, that and the other. And you know, I was, I was silenced. I mean the, the. I suppose again the spectacle there, the spectacle of Lear becoming pathetically unhinged. Yeah. Then that sort of, you know, okay, it's all going to be okay. Well, obviously I know what happens, you know, but you get the feeling of, you know, he and Cordelia reunite. It's all going to be fine. You know, there's another little thing. And they've got this agonizing 10 minutes while Edgar and Albany prose self righteously on. Oh yes, great thing of us forgot. What about what. And then in comes Lear.
- [38:20]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [38:21]
Rodri Lewis
Cradling the, the body of the, the one person who could forgive him or understand him or help to make it right. And it's wrenching, it's supposed to be, but yeah, no, that it got me In a way that banging on about Shakespeare and the Jacobean union of the kingdoms, which is obviously an important context. So I'm not saying it isn't. Did not.
- [38:45]
Jack Wilson
Right. Well, it also appeals to kind of a different side of us. I mean, it's not just the intellectual exercise and the kind of appeal of learning more and seeing how deft Shakespeare could be with his vocabulary and the way he conveys things and that kind of thing, and learning about the history and the facts. Everything but feeling something deep within us that has a kind of power. Is that why Shakespeare's tragedies are still important for us today? I mean, it seems like kind of the obvious answer is that we are still humans, after all.
- [39:22]
Rodri Lewis
And, yeah, I mean, you know, one of the reasons, I guess, you know, going back to that thing I was saying at the beginning about, and this is not my thought particularly, but, you know, human beings are storytelling creatures, is that although we like to think of our intellects, our powers of reason as being sort of disembodied and analytical and all the rest of it, they're in fact, profoundly emotional in the sense that the data, the data we process in our minds all comes to us from the world through our senses, through reading, through language, through pictures, through things we've experienced. And the fact that they're emotional means that they can often lead us astray because our emotions are not, you know, an accurate, a reliable mirror through which to view things. And so I think one of the things that keeps Shakespeare current is his emphasis on the ineradicably emotional ways in which we think, in which we talk to ourselves, in which we write, in which we attempt to make sense of the world. And, you know, in a sense, that's something that ancient Athenian tragedy does very well, particularly someone like Euripides, that sort of intrinsically emotional aspect of the. Of human cognition. But I think Shakespeare takes it to, at least within English and arguably within any modern language, a new height. The exploration of the ways in which that intrinsic emotionality of the human experience can get in the way of the kinds of stories, enables the kinds of stories we want to tell ourselves about ourselves, but also prevents them from being true, if that makes sense.
- [41:05]
Jack Wilson
How exactly does the intrinsic emotionality make it harder for us to accept the truth?
- [41:14]
Rodri Lewis
Well, because in a sense, I mean, put it this way, we are subjects. We are subjective beings in the world who have the ability to give meaning to the things we understand, give names, give meanings, give all this, give me. So when we turn that on ourselves, what that says is that we want to turn ourselves into objects, you know, so we can talk about the soul or the human or something fixed in time or the essential.
- [41:39]
Jack Wilson
Me, I have an example of this from a woman I knew who used to say, someone, like, if someone were to propose marriage to her, she would say, I'm not sure I want to be the kind of person who gets married at age 23. Instead of just thinking, you know, and the person who's proposing says, why don't you just decide if you want to marry me or not? You know, why do you have to fit yourself into this narrative of you being the kind of person who would do X?
- [42:10]
Rodri Lewis
Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. I mean, it's a way of thinking through types. You know, you. You basically, you look around for, you know, the most, the best fit, and you. And you stick yourself into it and you say, well, I'm not that one. I'm that one. Or something. But I think what's interesting is, you know, for Shakespeare, let's say you're trying to turn yourself into an object. The thing you're trying to turn into an object is intrinsically subjective, right? Which is to say that, you know, in the very act of trying to say, I am essentially this not the kind of person who gets married at 23 or something else, you have changed yourself. And so, you know, your identification is always a little bit belated. And it's always just running just beyond your grasp. And you have someone like Hamlet desperately trying to talk his way into who he thinks he really is. It's always just outside his grace grasp and painful to watch because, you know, even someone who is as gifted at talking and at thinking and at putting things into a kind of shape or a kind of order as him can't quite do it. And, you know, at the end of the play, he's reduced to saying, well, actually, start this. I'm God's agent, I'm Providence. It all makes sense. I can't tell you how, but it all makes sense. And that I think we're supposed to see, probably, although this is a somewhat controversial point. We're supposed to see that as another fiction, another desperate attempt for Hamlet to make things cohere. But we needn't go there right now. But, yeah, so there's always that belatedness in their attempt to fix ourselves. And so, you know, as we conjure up a story, because we only have a partial vision, you know, we don't know what happens to us when we die. We don't know why things exist. Rather than not exist. And I remember listening to Richard Dawkins on the radio about 25 years ago saying that why is not a question we should be worried about. It's a grammatical curiosity of some languages. And I think, well, you know, that's quite a cute answer. But, you know, fundamentally, you know, language is actually how we process ourselves in the world. And why is a very good question. We don't know the answer to it. Like, we don't know many, many, many other answers. And so we are. We are driven to create, fill in the gaps through analysis or through fiction or through whatever. But in the act of. When it comes to ourselves, in the act of trying to pin ourselves down, we change ourselves. And so we have to start again. And it becomes the kind of one of those sort of Greek thought experiments. How do you trust a guy who says he's a liar to be telling you the truth? It's a sort of paradox. We're always just outside.
- [44:38]
Jack Wilson
I suppose others can. I mean, I'm thinking of Iago, who is, in a way, you could say that he's interfering with Othello's narrative of himself. He's saying, no, you're not the. You're not the grand, heroic character who has a wonderful marriage. You're somebody who's a fool and you're being cuckolded and you're being manipulated. And that's the narrative that you're in. That's who you really are. That's the story that you should be using to define yourself.
- [45:09]
Rodri Lewis
And it kind of breaks him precisely what Iago does. But what's interesting about Iago, as I think maybe Claudius in Hamlet and Edmund in Lydia, is that these are kind of charismatic truth tellers, you know, at some level, and certainly in the case of Iago and Edmund, we quite warm to them at first glance because they're funny.
- [45:28]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [45:28]
Rodri Lewis
They're not obviously full of it. They're outsiders, this, that and the other. But we soon see more of that and we this, this idea that they see things as they really are and can manipulate the world. You know, little Machiavel figures, right, trying to do whatever they can to get some things done. But Shakespeare sort of shows the day actually in patting themselves on the back for being cold hearted. Machiavellians are telling themselves stories too, stories that will do for them just as surely as Othello's heroic self image will do for him and for Desdemona in the sense that Iago thinks he has it all worked out. Desdemona is dead. Othello is in a terrible state and, you know, about to lose face and all things that cause Othello pain. What Iago does not imagine, because his world has no space for love or for compassion or for kindness, is that his wife, because she was actually rather enthusdemona will tell the truth. And it's a funny sort of way. Just as Othello is brought low by Desdemona's. Well, not brought low, he's brought low. But Othello underestimates Desdemona and therefore misconstrues her. So he argues, completely underestimate Amelia and the fact, you know, people actually aren't just. Yes, they are a bunch of appetites and inscrutable desires and all the rest of it, but they're also capable of kindness and compassion and love. And his world picture does not have space for that. And because of that, he loses too. One might argue the same about Claudius. One might argue the same about Edmund in saying he's charismatic bad guy who seem to have it all worked out lose. And that's. That I think is intrinsic to Shakespeare's vision. He's not saying that because we don't understand who and what we are. Anything goes, survival of the fittest, dog eat dog, and, you know, all the rest of it. He's saying, actually, that's another imposition of order. What we really need to be doing is trying to get back to the most fundamental understanding of ourselves and trying to treat one another. Other with, you know, I don't know, I'm sounding like some dubious pastor here or something, you know, with kindness and gentleness and compassion. Even as we try to work out precisely because we're. We're. We're unable to work out who and what we are with sufficient certainty. We need to tread very gently with one another.
- [47:54]
Jack Wilson
And it does seem like the audience could be going through that as well, because when we were talking about Lear, it made me think how much of my experience in watching that play is kind of thinking, well, here's a guy who, at the start of the play, I would think if I got to that point in my life, I would be happy and feel successful and feel like I had done a good life's work and that everything was going to generally work out for me because I would think, I'm successful, I'm a ruler, I'm wealthy, I've got this state. And instead you realize none of that matters if you're deluded about the people who are closest to you. And in fact, all of those things that might have made you feel successful might make it harder for you to have the kind of relationship where you're not deluded and where people are not trying to just take what you have and so on. It might make it more difficult for you to have a happy ending because of that. And so we project ourselves into that. I know I'm not going to be a king, and I don't happen to have three daughters, but I can adapt my own kind of situation to that and think it through. And Shakespeare's teaching me how to value the things in life that matter the most.
- [49:13]
Rodri Lewis
Yeah. No, that, I think, is more or less right. I mean, we get there certainly at the end. I mean, Lear is so complicated. I mean, you know, in a sense, at the beginning of the play, he does have a problem. You know, he's 80, give or take. He doesn't have a son. He has this big kingdom. So he can't bequeath the kingdom to his son as a unified thing. He has to divide it. And he wants to divide it in a way that prevents bad stuff, civil war or whatever, from coming to pass because two of his daughters are married, the other one is not. And he wants to do that in a way that he can still have maybe some years to exert some soft power, as it were, behind the scenes. I mean, what's interesting is that he thinks that having been a king for all of his life. Life, he can now. And, you know, having had that power over his children, he can now say, well, I'm not king anymore. You are. Let's all talk as if we're innocent, uncomplicated people who can communicate directly and acknowledge one another's weaknesses and strengths and all that. So. And of course, it's a complete disaster. And various reasons we need to go into now, obviously, it's not just a disaster. It becomes a tragedy. And it's weird. I mean, what would it have felt like watching Lear for the first time? Because, you know, it's bad enough for us, right? I mean, we know what happens. You go to it, and you watch that opening scene, and sometimes the company gets it right. Sometimes you think they're too frivolous, Sometimes you think they're too weighty. But, you know, you. You're trying to make that cohere with what you know is coming, and then it's really difficult. And as you say, certainly towards the end, you know, you get Albany and Edgar and walking off, sort of mouthing platitudes about the ship of state and, you know, this, that, and the Other. And you know, your attention, your heart, your guts, your brain are still with the old guy on the other side of the stage, you know, dead, heartbroken, and there's none of this. And so, yeah, the platitudes of public life don't cut it as a way of finding consolation. And it's remarkable.
- [51:10]
Jack Wilson
Right. Which is the part of the play that Dr. Johnson couldn't get to because he was so shocked by Cordelia's death that he couldn't read the last scenes of the play again until he had to do it as. Revise them. As an editor.
- [51:24]
Rodri Lewis
Well, no, I mean, Tate rewrites the play in 1680 where Cordelia and Edgar get married and Leo regains the throne. And this holds the stage, literally holds the stage until the beginning of the 19th century. But, you know, Dr. Johnson is right.
- [51:39]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [51:40]
Rodri Lewis
It is a series of absolutely brutal. It's a consolation for his own. And Dr. Johnson believes that the purpose of great literature is to teach morals. Shakespeare does not. The purpose of great literature is to make us see things more clearly, even though those things might be gross and disconcerting as the end of Lear certainly is.
- [52:03]
Jack Wilson
Right. Okay. Well, the book is called Shakespeare's Tragic Art. The author has been my guest. Rodri Lewis. Thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [52:13]
Rodri Lewis
Thank you so much, Jack. It's been terrific.
- [52:22]
Jack Wilson
Okay, that was Rodri Lewis. And finally today, Joel Warner. He wrote all about an incredible book with an incredible origin story. Would he choose the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom as the last book he will ever read? Let's find out. Okay. Joining me now is journalist and author Joel Warner, whose works include the Curse of the Marquis de Sade, A Notorious Scoundrel, A mythical manuscript, and the biggest scandal in literary history. Joel, this question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your last book book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written.
- [53:16]
Rodri Lewis
This is a really hard question because if I think I knew exactly what book I'd want to read, I'd go read it right now. I don't know if I could wait.
- [53:23]
Jack Wilson
Until I have the patience.
- [53:24]
Rodri Lewis
So I'm going to give a more kind of general cop out answer, which is that I would want the book.
- [53:28]
Jack Wilson
To be something that is transporting but takes me that. That kind of envelopes me in a world, in a people, in a place that is just immersive.
- [53:40]
Rodri Lewis
And it kind of takes me out of my kind of day to day life, whether that's fiction or nonfiction.
- [53:44]
Jack Wilson
That's what I look for in my books, like a real escape.
- [53:47]
Rodri Lewis
And so I think I would die a happy man if the final book I read kind of offered me one.
- [53:52]
Jack Wilson
Last escape before I shuffled off this mortal core. Now, some might say that 120 days of Sodom is quite an immersive experience, but I take it that that's not the kind of immersion that you're looking for.
- [54:05]
Rodri Lewis
No, I definitely do not want to read 120 Days of Sodom as the.
- [54:08]
Jack Wilson
Last thing I ever read or even the first thing I ever read or anything.
- [54:10]
Rodri Lewis
I don't really want to read that again if I ever have to.
- [54:13]
Jack Wilson
Right. Well, we can recommend to our listeners that instead of reading that book, they can read your book about that book, which is a much more pleasant journey to go on.
- [54:22]
Rodri Lewis
Thank you.
- [54:23]
Jack Wilson
Okay. Joel Warner, thank you so much for joining me on the History of Literature.
- [54:27]
Rodri Lewis
Thank you so much.
- [54:35]
Jack Wilson
Okay, that's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature. My thanks to Rodri Lewis and to Joel Warner for joining me today. You can find their books at bookstores everywhere. We've got some Sylvia Plath coming up soon, and we're going to be looking at the treatment of race in European fairy tales. And some deep, deep dives into Henry James and Emily Bronte are in the works. D.H. lawrence is also on the calendar and science fiction and a reimagining of the character Daisy from the Great Gatsby. Great Gatsby turns 100 this year. Also Emily Dickinson and Charles W. Chestnut. So stay tuned for all of those glorious episodes. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time. What role do books play in shaping who we are? Find out on the Five Books, the brand new podcast hosted by me, Tali Rosenblatt Cohen. Each week I sit down with acclaimed Jewish authors to discuss the top, top five books that have shaped them. Hear from notable guests like Booker Prize finalist Yael Van der Vowden and literary influencer Zibby Owens as we delve deep into what it means to live as a Jewish American today. Join me and listen to the Five Books wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Dan Cummins. If you're into the weird, the wild, and the downright bizarre, check out my podcast, Time Suck.
- [56:39]
Rodri Lewis
Each week I dive into shocking stories.
- [56:42]
Jack Wilson
Like the rise of the Nexium Coalition, the origins of conspiracies like QAnon, and the San Francisco witch killer murders with deep dives and dark humor, timesuck brings you the stories that'll fascinate you, make you laugh, and fill your head with lots of strange facts. New episodes drop every Monday. Join the Cult of the Curious. Follow timesuck wherever you get your podcasts.