Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing a great, very surprising lecture by Eli Siegel: A French Critic Looks at Shakespeare, 1860. In his teaching of Aesthetic Realism, Mr. Siegel wrote and spoke richly about Shakespeare, always comprehendingly and vividly. And in this 1973 talk, he says that one means of seeing who Shakespeare is, is to see how good critics writing in languages other than English see and feel him. The critic he quotes here is Alfred Mézières (1826-1915).

Mr. Siegel does this remarkable thing: he explains that Mézières’ French translations of Shakespeare, while not as beautiful and mighty as Shakespeare’s originals, bring a quality to the plays that has us feel Shakespeare’s meaning in a new, important way. Further: for persons not fluent in French, Mr. Siegel sight-translates Mézières’ French translations back into a purposely unpolished literal English that has one hear their French quality. So there is a dance of language, enabling us to know more truly Shakespeare and the human self.

We’ve reached Mézières’ comments on the Shakespeare history plays. And in the present section of the lecture, we find two kings: Richard II and Richard III. Each has a Shakespeare play named for him.

Evil & Its Opponent

King Richard III is one of the most evil characters in world literature. In our current time, as in other times, there is a feeling that much evil—injustice, dishonesty, viciousness—is around, including as to the possible governance of nations. There’s fear of it; but also, people don’t know what evil comes from. So I’m going to use Richard III to illustrate 1) what is the source of all injustice, and 2) why the way of seeing in true poetry is the great opponent of evil. Eli Siegel is the person who explained both these tremendous matters. They are not the immediate subject of the talk we’re now serializing, so I’ll be quoting from other works of his.

Contempt: Everyday & Ferocious

Richard III, who, before his kingship, was called Gloucester, wanted intensely to be king of England—and he lied, tricked, and murdered in order to be. What impelled him was what Aesthetic Realism shows to be the source of every injustice, from snobbishness to fascism: contempt. Contempt is the desire “to get a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.” It is, Mr. Siegel explained, everyone’s “greatest danger or temptation.”

So here is Gloucester, determined to become the most powerful person in England. This is from a soliloquy of his in the play that precedes Richard III. Gloucester has just said he will “account this world but hell” until the “glorious crown” of England is on his head:

In a 1970 lecture Mr. Siegel explained what drove Richard III. It is contempt, with a certain determination:

Richard has what everyone has—the feeling the world exists so that you can have your way with it. [He] represents the ego without bars,…ego that is aggressive, interested in nothing but itself.

The play Richard III was popular very early. And Mr. Siegel explained that a large reason was: people felt Richard III stood for something—a contempt—that they had more mutedly. They felt, “How wonderful to have one’s own way without any interference, and if there is interference, you do away with it!”

But There Is the Poetry

Shakespeare’s Richard III, then, was determined to be in a position to do what he pleased with a whole nation. And others in the history of politics have had that determination. However, in the lines Shakespeare gives him, there is poetry that’s real. Humanity needs to understand the following, which Aesthetic Realism explains: all true poetry, all true art, is the great opponent of injustice. That’s so even when poetry is used (as in the soliloquy I quoted from) to express injustice. The reason is in this principle, stated by Eli Siegel: “Poetry, like Art, is the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual.”

Let’s take one of the lines, famous and chilling, uttered by Richard: “Why, I can smile, and murder while I smile.” With that tall I sound present six times, we feel self-love. He’s showing off, to himself, how easily he can fool people and make their lives meaningless and over. Yet through that line runs the structure in sound which is the iambic pentameter: an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable, five times, “Why, Í can smíle and múr der whíle I smíle.” So we experience, in that line, two big things. One is the ego saying what it can do, with a sneer of conceit. But simultaneously we experience that rhythm—which, with its unaccented-then-accented syllables, is reality saying: humility and the thrust of self must be one!

Those are opposites that contempt separates and plays off against each other. They’re opposites that every instance of true art in some fashion makes one.

Then, among the lines quoted earlier, are these: “And I, like one lost in a thorny wood, / That rends the thorns and is rent with the thorns.” Simply as poetry, they are beautiful. They have the sound of a person mutedly fighting with reality (through those thorns). The self feeling held up, yet impelled to go on, is in the music of these words. Intensity and quiet are in these lines. And though Richard has those opposites in an ugly way, the lines as music bring us reality’s intensity and quietude as one.

The good news—the magnificent news—about art versus evil is this: Justice, which art embodies, is stronger than evil, because art shows that whenever anything is seen truly—deeply enough, widely enough—the result is beauty. Art is always justice: to an immediate thing dealt with, and to the world itself. The world is a oneness of rest and motion, depth and surface, sameness and difference, the expected and the surprising, order and freedom, definiteness and nuance. The artist has found that structure of reality’s opposites in what he or she is dealing with, and in doing so has gotten to beauty.

Shakespeare stands for this fact mightily. So does Eli Siegel, who understood and explained beauty, good and evil, Shakespeare, and the self of everyone.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Shakespeare & Two Richards

By Eli Siegel

There’s a dealing, by Mézières, with the play Richard II. Richard II finds, as many people have, that one’s desires aren’t everything: that even though he’s a king, divinity doesn’t take care of him: the angels have left him. Mézières describes this somewhat powerfully. I translate:

Richard recognizes soon that he has been deceived, that the angels do not watch over him and, despite his sacred character, he is at the mercy of Bolingbroke.

So we have wretchedness. Richard II is feeling very bad, and looking for something that will make him feel better. He says (in a translation of Mézières’ French translation of Shakespeare):

I am ready to exchange my jewels for a rosary…and my vast kingdom for a narrow tomb!

Now in Shakespeare’s words, from act 3, scene 3. The lines Mézières translated are the first and seventh of this passage:

The littleness here is, of course, affecting.

Turbulence within a King

Mézières tells of Richard’s abdication, which is humiliating. Bolingbroke asks for it, and Richard has to do what Bolingbroke asks. I translate Mézières’ description:

Then the scene of the abdication begins,…where all the sentiments that unhappiness has awakened or developed in the mind of Richard—resignation, sadness, dignity, clear perception and the contempt of man—succeed each other and darken and light up turn by turn the king’s mobile face.

That is, I think, a vivid description of a psychological happening seen visually.

The lines of Richard II that Mézières presents, he translates well. There is this passage from his translation of Shakespeare, which I’ll translate as if it were a French text:

Richard II. My eyes are full of tears; I cannot see; and yet the tears do not blind them so much that they cannot see here a band of traitors. And if I turn my eyes on myself, I find myself as much a traitor as they are: for I have consented to have taken away from myself the pomp of a king, to debase glory, to make of sovereignty a slave, of proud majesty a subject, and of the throne a vile object.

Northumberland. My lord!

Richard II. I am not your lord, man insolent and haughty. I am not the lord of anyone. I don’t have a name any longer, no more a title, no, not even that name which was given to me at the baptismal font.

That is not Shakespeare, but it has an effect, and it’s a little like prose that has the aroma of poetry in it. So I’ll read the original Shakespeare lines, and I’ll say this: in Mézières’ translation there’s something that is not in the lines of Shakespeare, because expression can take many forms. This is from Richard II, act 4, scene 1:

Certainly, the Shakespeare is exceedingly good. Still, there is a something present in the translation that can be felt. So this is an inquiry.

Now: Richard III

We have come to Richard III, one of the great hypocrites of literature and of all time.

There are various kinds of hypocrites. There occasionally is a hypocrite who is fierce, as Richard III is. He’s different from Molière’s Tartuffe, because Tartuffe is ingratiating and uses religion, and Richard III doesn’t do anything of the kind. Then, another hypocrite: Pecksniff in Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit. He also uses religion, evangelical Protestantism, and he is creepy. You could say Richard III was stealthy but not creepy. However, he is one of the great hypocrites of literature and history.

We have Mézières’ description of him. And here again there is a certain effect. For instance, Mézières uses the phrase “voile épais sur ses pensées,” “a thick veil over his thoughts.” Again, there’s something in the French that’s not in the English. I translate literally Mézières’ description:

It is necessary that he throw a thick veil over his thoughts, that he conceal the subterranean march that he follows, that he deceive everyone, all those at least whose concern, whose duty, whose affection, and whose virtue make them his adversaries.

Mézières likes to list qualities, but he does it here quite sensibly. The psychological becomes tactual.

There’s a scene, a very famous scene, which actors had a wonderful time with—where Richard III (here called Gloucester) enters, and it seems he’s cheerful. He likes everybody. He smiles at everyone. Mézières describes what happens. I translate his French:

It must be, [Hastings] says, that His Highness is occupied with some thought which pleases him, for he wished us good day with so much cordiality. In my opinion, there’s no one in all Christendom who is less capable of disguising his affection or his hate. One can immediately read on his face what is in his heart. There is no ill will there against anyone in this assembly, for if there were, he would have let it be seen in his features. —Hardly has he finished saying this when Gloucester enters and demands his head. Here we have one of the contrasts that the poet loved and which makes a character come forth by the brusque relation there is between appearance and reality.

How Shakespeare uses contrast—how every artist has used it—is notable. I’ll read the beginning of Hastings’ statement in the Shakespearean language. We’re in Richard III, act 3, scene 4:

Conscience

There is a statement about conscience. Shakespeare is very much interested in conscience. And everyone should be interested. The way that Richard’s conscience can be quiet!

There are certain persons in Shakespeare’s plays who seem without conscience. There’s Aaron in Titus Andronicus. He is completely conscienceless, but he isn’t in one of the major plays. The two important persons who don’t have a conscience—both are shameless—are different. One is Richard III and the other is Falstaff. The way Falstaff lacks conscience is engaging. He’s an ideal to many people. But Richard III is somebody else.

And fear brings out conscience. That has been noticed a great deal. As soon as you touch fear in a villain, conscience gets a move on. Mézières says of Richard III (I’m translating):

For the first time, he experiences a feeling of fear which resembles repentance, and he feels the tortures of a conscience which up to then had been silent.

To say, as Mézières does, that conscience had been “silencieuse,” makes for an effect which conscience being undisturbed or quiet or even silent doesn’t have.

There’s talk about crimes. And of all people, it’s Richard who talks of crimes. Again—a translation of Mézières’ translation of Shakespeare:

Perjury, perjury of the greatest kind, murder, cruel murder, of the most ferocious sort, all crimes finally, all committed in all degrees, they show themselves at the bar of justice and cry: Guilty! guilty! There is nothing but despair for me. —There is not a creature who loves me, and, if I die, no one will have pity on me. —And why should they have, since I did not find any pity in me, not even pity for myself?

Now, this favorite of actors can be read in the Shakespearean words. This is in act 5, scene 3:

I would say that’s good stage work. It’s also poetry.

Soon This Happens

Richard, however, puts aside conscience. This is Richard on conscience as the Battle of Bosworth Field is imminent:

Richard III actually existed. In fact, he’s supposed to have been a patron of Caxton and printing.