Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part 2 of the lecture by Eli Siegel that we have begun to serialize: A French Critic Looks at Shakespeare, 1860. The lecture, of 1973, while eminently learned, is also eminently human (as Mr. Siegel’s scholarship always was). Our lives right now are in it.

This amazing talk has two big subjects, or elements, and I’ll comment in a while on the relation between them.

One is the meaning of something the world needs so much at this time, sanity, and what Shakespeare has to do with it. At the beginning of his talk, Mr. Siegel said he regarded the work of Shakespeare, in its entirety, “as the greatest therapeutic guide in the field of mind, chiefly because the world is seen so variously and seen with some wholeness.”

Then there’s the second element of the lecture. Throughout, Mr. Siegel looks at writing about Shakespeare by a French critic whom he respects: Alfred Mézières (1826-1915). Mézières comments on Shakespeare, in French, and also quotes passages of Shakespeare, which he has translated into French. And Mr. Siegel explains something big and new: that there is a quality in the French versions that can have one feel in another way, an important way, the value of Shakespeare—and value in the world. While the French translations may not be as great as Shakespeare’s English original, they bring to it qualities, effects, that are good for Shakespeare, for beauty, and for us.

The Grandeur of Sameness & Difference

What does this have to do with our own day-to-day lives? And what is the relation of those two elements: 1) the sanity of Shakespeare, and 2) seeing him in terms of another language? The answer is in this central principle of Aesthetic Realism: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” “All beauty” includes the beauty that is art; the beauty that is justice; and the beauty that is mental wholeness, or sanity. Among the opposites that beauty in any field puts together, are those largest of all opposites, sameness and difference.

So let us take Shakespeare and mental wholeness. In the work of Shakespeare there is so much difference, so much diversity. His characters, for instance, are vastly different. There are Bottom and Portia; Richard III and Hamlet; Caliban and Juliet; Miranda and Lady Macbeth. Yet they all came from the same mind, and have Shakespeare’s (and reality’s) depth in them. And the multitudinous and so-different characters of Shakespeare don’t submerge each other or put each other agitatedly aside, the way a troubled mind can go nervously, unclearly, from one thought to another. The wholeness, which Mr. Siegel says sanity is and Shakespeare has, is difference and sameness as one: it’s welcoming the world as multitudinous, diverse—and feeling a relation in it all.

Language versus Cruelty

Then there’s that second element in this lecture: the matter of language. We have a lively French critic, who translates into French many passages of Shakespeare. And, as you’ll see, Mr. Siegel then translates Mézières into English—but in such a way that we feel the French in Mr. Siegel’s English-translated phrases. This is a tremendous drama of sameness and difference, a looking-at-each-other and embrace between sameness and difference—for two languages are different, but they are alike too; and they can, as happens here, bring out the best in each other.

Now, I say: not only is that fact charming, and stirring, but the answer to humanity’s injustice is in it. This includes the answer to the cruelty which is racism. The fact that a language such as French can add to a language like English—add even to the English used by a great writer, Shakespeare—this fact is a means of seeing truly, respectfully, gratefully, the sameness and difference among people too. The deep friendliness of different languages is a means of seeing that people different from us are of us too, are related to us, can bring out good in us, can help bring out who we are.

Aesthetic Realism has identified the thing in the human self that wants to make sameness and difference fight. It is contempt, an ongoing desire to “lessen…what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it.” This contempt is utterly against the basis of art, the basis of justice. And seeing and feeling in terms of I’m much because I can look down on what’s not me is also that which weakens one’s own mind. Shakespeare in his plays presented contempt in many forms. But as writer he magnificently did not have it!

A Note on Shakespeare’s Women

Earlier in this lecture, Mr. Siegel spoke about some of the women in Shakespeare’s plays to whom Shakespeare gave large, lively, keen, kind minds. These include two whom Mézières writes of: Rosalind in As You Like It and Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing. Mr. Siegel related Shakespeare’s seeing of women to that of his contemporaries, and said: “There’s a certain difference in Shakespeare. There is something impelling Shakespeare to say that women have mind.”

In the present section of the talk, with Mézières writing on Shakespeare’s history plays, Mr. Siegel comments some on a woman in Shakespeare whose fiercely contemptuous way of seeing is so different from that authentic, bright, depth of mind of Rosalind, Beatrice, and others. Margaret d’Anjou is an instance of Shakespeare’s ability to present a contemptuous mind vividly, subtly. Yet it cannot be said that he understood contempt. I think he would have loved Eli Siegel for understanding contempt, poetry, language, history, people, beauty—and for understanding him, William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, England.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

A Drama of Two Languages

By Eli Siegel

We come to a critical statement of Mézières about Shakespeare. In a contemporary of Mézières, the critic Hippolyte Taine, we have an anticipation of the later writer Frank Harris. Harris felt that every trouble Shakespeare deals with he must have had himself: that if there’s trouble about love in a play it must have been because Shakespeare had trouble about love. Mézières doesn’t see Shakespeare that way, but he does say that Shakespeare presents his own feelings in his plays. Mézières writes:

Impelled by inspiration, he puts forth the sentiments with which his heart is full, without distinguishing carefully what belongs to the subject from that which he is experiencing at the moment that he is writing.

That is: Mézières says Shakespeare could get in his emotions as a living being while he was dealing with other people.

A Woman Is Told Of

Now we get to Shakespeare’s undoubted power of presenting women who are not liked and whom you shouldn’t want to meet but who belong to history anyway. One of those women is the very busy wife of Henry VI, Margaret d’Anjou. She may be worth meeting, but it’s risky. Mézières writes of her in words that tell some of what happens in Henry VI, though the first two phrases are rather abstract:

She has misused her prosperity, betrayed her duties, crowed over her conquered enemies, stabbed young Rutland, and presented to the Duke of York a handkerchief soaked in the blood of his son.

Margaret d’Anjou belongs to the family of Lancaster, and the most famous family fight in history is still York and Lancaster. There are other families that have fought, along with the Hatfields and McCoys. Margaret d’Anjou was not born a Lancaster, but since she married Henry VI, who is Lancaster, she fights on the side of Lancaster. And Mézières, in the sentence I translated, tells swiftly of what happens in one of the parts of Henry VI.

However, Margaret suffers and Henry VI is killed. Edward IV becomes king. The Duchess of York, his mother, also has suffered. There are three women whose sufferings are dealt with by Mézières as Shakespeare has presented them, including in Richard III. There’s the Duchess of York, there’s Margaret of Anjou—wife, widow now, of Henry VI—and there is Elizabeth, who was the wife of Edward IV.

The Effects of Two Languages

As Mézières speaks about Shakespeare, he translates many passages of the plays into French. One of the reasons I’m reading these French translations and then in turn translating them into English is, I hope that as well as possible the effects of two languages can be related. It is important. It’s very subtle. So whenever I can I’ll read the translation of Mézières and then likewise the lines as Shakespeare wrote them. But before I read Shakespeare’s lines in their original English I’ll translate quite literally Mézières’ French version, so that the difference can be felt.

For instance, there’s a certain effect that comes from one of the most famous speeches in drama, when Juliet tells Romeo he doesn’t have to leave—that what he hears is not the lark, it’s the nightingale. It’s exceedingly sweet, and one wants to throw a kiss to the world when one hears it. There’s nothing sweeter in world literature. Yet there’s an effect that comes in the French translation that’s not in the English but is something else. Not that the English isn’t very good. It is very good, or as they say, très bon.

But here, Mézières translates into French the Duchess of York saying to Queen Margaret, You have no right to think you’re the only sad person—I have suffered too, and what’s more, I’ve thought of your suffering. Mézières presents it this way:

Épouse de Henri, répond avec dignité la vieille duchesse d’York, ne triomphe pas de nos malheurs! Dieu m’est témoin que mes larmes ont coulé pour les tiens.

As I said, I won’t go at once to Shakespeare, but first will translate those sentences:

“Wife of Henry,” responds with dignity the old Duchess of York, “do not triumph over our sorrows! God is witness that my tears have flowed for yours.”

Now I’ll read the Shakespeare, and some of what follows. One of the things the passage shows is that poetry can deal with anger. This is from Richard III, act 4, scene 4. First the Duchess of York speaks; then Queen Margaret shows how fierce she can be:

We have an intense poetic way of saying things. Why Margaret’s impartations are still poetic is an important question.

In the meantime, it has been said that history has been studied in Shakespeare’s plays. But one thing Shakespeare does—as we see all the families and the relation of one family to another—is give a certain social work course in history, a study in what went on within and between families. For instance, the character of Hotspur, or Percy, also the enmity of Northumberland to Lancaster, in Henry IV, is valuable as poetry and drama but also in terms of family comprehension.

There’s the Being Impelled

Then, there’s passion. Hotspur has feelings and he just wants to show them. Mézières says (and I’m translating):

In the battle he’s engaged in against royalty, he doesn’t think of putting on his side numbers, nor favorable occasions, nor prudence, nor political judgment. Like a furious bull, he throws himself, head lowered, on the enemy, without thinking of the obstacles and without knowing whether he is followed by his companions.

Hotspur has been seen as representing a certain kind of passion as, in a different way, Romeo and Juliet represent their passion.

In his dealing with Romeo and Juliet, which I hope to come to, Mézières describes very much the invincibility of passion that is believed in. There’s a feeling Romeo and Juliet have to do as they do. What does it mean for a person to be impelled by something, having to do what he or she is doing? Some of that, to be sure, is in Lady Macbeth’s walking the floor.

A Speech Notable in Pathos

We come to Henry VIII. Mézières is good on describing how, in it, Wolsey becomes a changed person. And Mézières talks of something present in people:

There is, in the folds of the mind that is most corrupted by fortune, a part that hasn’t yet been hurt by exterior things, and where perhaps have found shelter the delicacies of sensibility. It is this which the poet makes us see.

Soon we’ll have Mézières’ translation in French prose of the haughty Wolsey talking so sadly—one of the most pathetic speeches in the world. But first I’ll read more of Mézières’ comment. And I may say that you don’t find in Greek tragedy anything as elaborate and simple as that speech. In Sophocles’ Oedipus, for example, there is a good deal of pathos, but the pathos does not continue: Oedipus says something very pathetic and then he goes on to something else. —Mézières says this concerning Wolsey, and the psychological matter is told of very brightly:

Then the true man—whose intimate sentiments have until now been pushed back by ambition, by a habit of political calculation and by dissimulation, which is second nature in the courtier—reappears finally and throws far from itself the mask that has concealed its features.

That is important.

The next passage I’ll read is Mézières’ French translation of the famous sad speech of Wolsey. I shall translate that translation to have one feel a certain effect in the French that is not in the original English. So we have—arising from Mézières’ French—Wolsey saying this:

It is not as good as Shakespeare, but there are certain effects that should be known. Now I shall read the Shakespeare passage, one of the highpoints of English poetry, and making Henry VIII something of an important play, which otherwise it isn’t very much:

I notice that Mézières failed to translate some words.* But what was Shakespeare intending in that speech?

His Kings

Shakespeare’s kings have been variously studied, and they’re different. Henry VI is so different from Richard III. And Shakespeare says that in the evils that a king can welcome there are opposites. Mézières writes:

Il y a pour un roi plusieurs manières de mal gouverner; il peut pécher par faiblesse ou par scélératesse.

That, in English, is:

There are for a king several ways of governing badly; he may sin through weakness or through wickedness.

In the French, those two opposites can be felt in a way they’re not felt in English: faiblesse and scélératesse.