Today, Carolina Journal’s Mitch Kokai interviews Robert V. Young, professor of Renaissance literature and literary criticism at North Carolina State University. Young recently spoke on the topic “Decoding Shakespeare: The Bard as Poet or Politician” at a meeting of the John Locke Foundation’s Shaftesbury Society. The interview aired on Carolina Journal Radio. (Go to http://carolinajournal.com/cjradio/ to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Kokai: People who missed the presentation are not going to be able to get from this short interview all of the highlights of what you mentioned. But you made an interesting case about recent scholars trying to find within Shakespeare things that aren’t necessarily there. What is the issue that you are trying to convey?
Young: Well, I took up two books, which specifically argue that Shakespeare’s plays are an encoded account of his close association with the Catholic resistance to the realms of Queen Elizabeth and King James during his day. Now, my point is that Shakespeare may have been a Catholic, but his plays are broader than that, and they cannot be confined to a narrow political program. As would — should come out — I myself am a Catholic and, of course, as sympathetic to it as Shakespeare may have been. But what I see these books doing is just a different version of trying to make Shakespeare address the commentator’s own political agenda. And I don’t think this is the way we treat a great writer.
Kokai: You specifically looked at two different authors who treated the same material with very different interpretations, and full of tortured allusions and all kinds of other things that seem to point to the fact that you can read into Shakespeare whatever you want.
Young: That’s correct. One of the authors is a British cultural materialist, and his version of Shakespeare the Catholic is Shakespeare writing for an embattled, persecuted Catholic minority, which is being repressed by a Jacobean and Elizabethan regime, which looks very much like the way he sees the kind of world capitalist hegemony nowadays. Everything in Shakespeare is made to feed into his particular rather leftist views of how the world is going now. The other author, a very apparently devout Catholic, simply wants to make Shakespeare into a very traditional Catholic who is defending all of the program, so to speak, of reclaiming England for Catholicism when Elizabeth was reigning, and James. Whatever Shakespeare felt about these matters, I think you have to distort the plays, which really speak to the universal human condition, in order to come up with this kind of very narrow political program in them.
Kokai: What kinds of problems does this approach to Shakespeare create?
Young: Well, it creates problems with our understanding of Shakespeare. If we’re worrying about the minute details of Shakespeare’s political alliances, or for that matter, his intimate, personal life, we’re not looking at the plays as plays. We’re looking at them as some kind of biography and blank verse. The plays and the poems are important because they address experiences and trials and tribulations and joys and sorrows and aspirations that all human beings have, which finally transcend the narrow concerns of any particular religious or social or political party in a particular era. The second point is, it gets people in English departments — literary scholars — doing something they are not very well qualified to do, which is to try to find minute historical facts to try to come up with a political program, when they ought to be talking about the poems as poems.
Kokai: Have you found, in your work on Shakespeare, that this approach has become more common? Is this a recent phenomenon of the way that the Bard is being treated?
Young: Well, the specific interest in whether or not he was a Catholic, and the notion that his being part of a Catholic resistance party is really the main message of his works — this is very recent, within the last five to 10 years. Although, the notion that he has a Catholic background has been pretty well established for at least a century. But this part about making him into a sort of player in a Catholic political agenda at the end of the 16th, beginning of the 17th, century is really part of a larger tendency that has been going on for close to four decades now to politicize literature generally. To turn literary scholarship away from interpreting great works of poetry or drama or fiction as expressions of a poet’s imaginative vision of human nature and the human situation, into something that can serve as ammunition for the interpreter’s political interests.
Kokai: Some may be very familiar with Shakespeare, others may have read a play back in high school or in college and have not approached the Bard since then. If you had to give advice to someone who is interested in learning more about Shakespeare, would like to go back, reread some of the plays, the sonnets, how would you say is the best way for that person to approach it with fresh eyes and not with the ingrained biases of some of these authors and historians and historicists?
Young: What you want to do — I would recommend someone who isn’t making a really concentrated study to go find one volume editions of the plays, which have not that much in the way of an introduction, maybe just a brief historical introduction to the period, and gloss the difficult words and phrases. If you get that, you can read the play and understand what the really important things are. I would stay away from most of the literary criticism published by most university presses now.
Kokai: And if someone approached the Shakespearean plays that way, what kind of experience do you think they are going to get?
Young: I think they are going to see an image of human life that is more interesting because it has been imaginatively enhanced, idealized in some ways. The concerns of human beings have concentrated, but one that speaks to our sense of reality, all at the same time. Let me put it this way. A documentary film—there was a guy years ago who set up a camera in a welfare office and just let it run, and it was just as boring as it could be. What literature does is it takes reality and concentrates it. It takes the interesting points, the parts that are perennially important, and puts them all together so you can appreciate them at one time. And that is what Shakespeare does.