Tetralogy thinking

In its Summer 2000 programme, the Royal Shakespeare Company announced the staging of Shakespeare's two tetralogies as a cycle called This England. The programme made a distinctive break with the past by conceding that the plays were 'originally conceived by Shakespeare at different times and written in non-chronological order', but, in order to preserve the integrity of the history play cycle, the programme went on to argue that the separate plays together 'form a collage of one man's insight into England's history'. No one authorial vision, or even one directorial vision, would dominate this cycle, and the plays were to be staged in all the different theatre spaces of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. As a self-styled 'national' theatre, the RSC was swimming with the currents of the time, matching national devolution with a form of artistic devolution in which its various, disparate spaces were reconstellated as an architectural metaphor of the United Kingdom, with unity is sustained only through the acknowledgement of difference. In this way, the This England cycle both accepted that the plays are not a unified, complete work and presented an authorial, legitimate way of seeing the plays as a set of works on a shared theme.

John Heminges and Henry Condell, Shakespeare’s fellow actors and the compilers of the first collection of his plays in the First Folio (1623), would have been surprised at critical reaction to their organisation of the volume. Gathering plays about England under the rubric of History and plays about Rome under the rubric of Tragedy, they could have intended no serious generic distinction. In the parlance of the time the terms overlapped and interpenetrated. Both histories and tragedies related stories of past ‘contentions’ as well as the lives and deaths of famous figures. The 1594 Quarto of 2 Henry VI featured the ‘Contention’ between the houses of York and Lancaster as well as the ‘tragical end of the proud Cardinal of Winchester’; similarly, the Quartos of Richard II (1597) and Richard III (1597) both offered ‘Tragedy’ to their readers on the title-pages. Titus Andronicus appeared in the Stationers’ Register, the official record book of the London company of Stationers (booksellers and printers), as ‘a Noble Roman History’; the 1594 Quarto, however, advertised the play as The Most Lamentable Roman Tragedy of Titus Andronicus.

John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722), is alleged to have said that he knew no English history but what he had learned from Shakespeare. The irony of Marlborough's claim was that Shakespeare's ten history plays, covering a century and a half between them, could eclipse the infinitely broader, complex narrative of the English nation. A similar type of irony may be discerned in the modern reception of the Shakespearean history play. Here, the experience of many readers and theatre-goers with the Shakespeare histories tends to be inversely proportional to their familiarity with the genesis and history of the history play as a literary genre in an early modern European context, in England and abroad. The same individual who might now visit Blenheim Palace at Woodstock under the assumption that the Duke of Marlborough was a wealthy tobacconist, is likely also to live under the delusion that Shakespeare invented the history play. But as G. K. Hunter has rightly noted, 'Shakespeare could not, any more than God, invent ex nihilo.' Shakespeare had predecessors but also contemporaries who practised the history play, and although it seems beyond doubt, as Richard Helgerson has argued, that 'Shakespeare did make a larger contribution to that genre than anyone else', these contemporaries provide an indispensable framework within which the unique achievement of Shakespeare may be appreciated. One of the aims of this essay is to bring into focus Shakespeare's accomplishment within the immediate English contexts of the new genre. In addition, this essay seeks to position Shakespeare and the early modern project of historical drama in its no less relevant, though frequently neglected, European framework.

At times Fitzgerald and his contemporaries gained enough perspective on their sense of feeling dispossessed to recognize it as an old story – as we see, for example, in Glenway Wescott’s Goodbye, Wisconsin (1928), where displaced Midwesterners become “a sort of vagrant chosen race like the Jews.” But for the most part they left such ties unexplored. Rather than reach out to recent immigrants, women, or African Americans, they remained almost as jealous of their status and control as Tom Buchanan is of his. Cowley notes, for example, that “the admired writers of the generation were men in the great majority” and adds that they were also “white, middle-class, mostly Protestant by upbringing, and mostly English and Scottish by descent,” without stopping to wonder whether such a configuration was more created than given and, if created, by whom and in whose interests and, further, why, once created, it gained such easy acceptance in the United States during Coolidge’s presidency. In the process, he ignores issues that now leap out at us.

Cowley’s “admired writers” thought of themselves as rejecting the prejudices and provincialisms of their day. They bemoaned the Senate’s acts in the aftermath of the war; denounced the KKK, the Red Scare, and the persecution of Sacco and Vanzetti; and condemned the vulgar materialism and ruthless profiteering of businessmen. Such pronouncements fit their sense of themselves as an oppressed minority of cultural loyalists. Yet many writers, including some Cowley admired, harbored and even expressed versions of the ambitions and prejudices they thought of themselves as rebelling against, a fact that may help to explain why their society rewarded them in ways that it did not reward black writers of Harlem, Jewish writers of New York’s East Side, or women writers anywhere, from New Orleans to Chicago to New York to Paris, many of whom it pushed into the marginalized tasks of running bookstores, editing small journals, and writing diaries.

When the Crash of October 1929 ended the biggest speculative binge in the nation’s history, it brought the Roaring Twenties to a close. Scary economic indicators had been gathering for years. Farm income and industrial wages remained low throughout the twenties, and by 1929, with 35 percent of all personal income going into the pockets of 5 percent of the population, even the middle class was showing signs of stress. Residential construction, consumer spending, industrial production, commodity prices, and employment were going down while business inventories were going up. Looking back on the late twenties from the vantage point of the early thirties, F. Scott Fitzgerald located signs of anxiety in everything from the “nervous beating of feet” and the sudden “popularity of cross-word puzzles” to the remembered faces of Princeton classmates who had disappeared “into the dark maw of violence” before the Crash, including one who had jumped from a skyscraper and another who had “crawled home” to die at the high-toned Princeton Club after being beaten in a Manhattan speakeasy. But it took a crash to counter what Zelda Fitzgerald called “the infinite promises of American advertising.” Borrow to spend was one message, borrow to invest, another. Bankers, brokers, and political leaders directed the campaign; newspapers, magazines, and radios reinforced it. McNeel’s of Boston was one of countless “financial service” operations that specialized in persuading people they could get rich on borrowed money – a message many politicians in Washington endorsed. On December 4, 1928, in his last address to Congress, President Coolidge assured the nation that it could “regard the present with satisfaction and anticipate the future with optimism.”

Ethnic literature of the first half of the twentieth century developed a repertoire of ethnic themes. In addition to class mobility and assimilation, generational tensions appear often (at times in ethnic trilogies), as does the conflict between arranged marriage and romantic love. Rifts between children and parents are prominent, and the often complex mother–son and father–daughter relations receive particular emphasis. Encounters with ethnic hatred or hypocrisy are frequently represented, as are friendly and amorous relations across ethnic boundaries. The attenuation of older religious beliefs and ethical standards finds manifold expression in these works. Since a central persona is often correlated to the figure of the aspiring author, difficult negotiations between the world of work and the realm of artistic creation are common. Education tends to be central, both as a school setting and as a possible symbolic area of resolution of the various tensions. Protagonists tend to be relatively young so that the general process of socialization can be described in the context of cultural conflicts and the pressures of American assimilation. Getting lost in a foreign-language cityscape or feeling lost in the vast-seeming countryside are common experiences. The tensions of poor ethnic families in working-class polyethnic neighborhoods in an often mythic-seeming America are omnipresent and at times decisive for the plot. Shame and pride may alternate in characters’ responses to their ethnicity. There are scenes in which the contrast between the ethnic group and America is dramatized and others in which it is bridged. Ethnic foodways are mentioned favorably, at times with the appropriate non-English name, and sometimes the details that are given amount to a recipe.

Novelists as different as Henry James and Theodore Dreiser began the twentieth century as they ended the nineteenth, torn by conflicting allegiances. On one side, their openness to what Henry James called the “strange irregular rhythm of life,” and thought of as the “strenuous force” that kept fiction on its feet, drew them toward history and a shared story of conquest, the taming of a continent and the making of a new nation and a new people, as we see in a range of titles, including James’s The American (1877), William Dean Howells’s A Modern Instance (1882), Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! (1913), Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (1925), Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925), John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. (1938), and Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940). On another, they were drawn toward what James called the “romantic” and described as the “beautiful circuit and subterfuge of our thought and our desire” – things, he added, that “we never can directly know.” Like Flaubert, James wanted to tidy up the loose, baggy traditions of the novel. Even more than Flaubert, he associated the novel’s looseness with history. Simply by placing human thought and desire under the aspect of the “beautiful,” defined in terms of order and subtle indirection (“circuit and subterfuge”), James evoked the lyrical tradition of the nineteenth century, in which self-examination became a prelude to self-transcendence and the journey toward the self’s interior became a covert preparation for a journey up and out of time itself, for the solitary reader as well as the solitary singer.

Some of the writers and artists who sailed for France or joined enclaves back home had read enough of Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème to think of themselves as bohemian artists. Others, inspired by the example of Flaubert, longed to make the “quaint mania of passing one’s life wearing oneself out over words” their own. Joseph Hergesheimer, to take one example, became so enamored of Flaubert’s admonitions that he wrote, Edmund Wilson remarked, nearly as badly in a studied way “as Dreiser did in a crude one.” Others drifted from place to place, experimenting, or like Babbitt, moved in and out of bohemian enclaves as troubled or merely curious visitors. Lacking political edge, their discontent sometimes seems shallow. Even among those who shunned possessions and traveled light, serious commitment to reform politics remained rare. Cultural critics like Brooks, Cowley, and Wilson thought of themselves as “men of letters,” not academic critics. During the twenties, they remained for the most part present-minded, caught up in the literary scenes they wrote about. When they turned toward the past, they looked for writers who spoke to the stranded condition of their generation. By a “useable past,” they meant one useful to writers who wanted to continue culture. What held them together, beyond the abandonment of old restraints and a glamorization of new indulgences involving sex and alcohol as well as lavish parties, was a sense of shared predicament and common endeavor: their feeling that, paradoxically, they had been left alone together to experiment “in a void.”

London wrote during a period of rapid, uneven economic recovery. Between 1900 and 1910, the nation’s population jumped from 67 million to 92 million, with much of the gain coming in cities, where the rate of growth was three times faster than that in rural areas. Both average per capita wealth and average personal income increased, as did the unevenness of their distribution: in a period of strong economic expansion, the average real income of laborers fell. Investors, even those with modest capital to invest, were the winners, as both expansion and consolidation of industries pushed profits up – especially in railways, iron and steel, copper, meat-packing, milling, tobacco, and petroleum. By 1910, the men in charge of the nation’s largest business firms possessed enormous political as well as economic power. “We have no word to express government by moneyed corporations,” Charles Francis Adams, Jr., noted in 1869. Forty years later, the nation was still looking for words to describe its new political economy, which was dominated, Henry James observed, by the “new remorseless monopolies.” Meanwhile, the poor were becoming poorer and more hopeless – “oxlike, limp, and lead-eyed,” as the poet Vachel Lindsay put it. Some skilled laborers prospered, but others suffered, especially the new immigrants from Asia and Southern and Eastern Europe. In the North and the South, black Americans continued to be victimized by inferior schools, poor housing, and segregation that was vigilantly enforced in schools, churches, unions, and workplaces, as well as society at large.

To grasp the full authority of Isabel Archer’s story, we must see behind it the force of history as felt in the interplay of two contrastive lines of expansion. The first of these lines carried people from Europe to the New World and its frontiers; the second carried immigrants to its cities and the children of farmers and ranchers back from its frontiers to its cities, or even across the Atlantic to England and Europe. Between 1820 and 1930, more than 62 million people uprooted themselves and resettled in “foreign” lands dwarfing the great Volkerwanderung of the Teutonic tribes during the last centuries of the Roman Empire. Of these, roughly 42 million settled in the United States, Europe’s and then Asia’s main frontier, making it not only the most diverse country in the world but also, as Santayana saw, the home of descendants of the most restless peoples in the world. Interacting with this migration was another – from the soil of farms and footpaths of villages, in Europe as well as the United States, to the sidewalks and streets of cities. If novels like Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918) and O. E. Rölvaag’s Giants in the Earth (1924–25 in Norwegian; 1927 in English) trace the first of these lines of expansion, Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) traces the second, toward the cities of the upper Midwest and the East – a line that James extended back across the Atlantic to Europe in scores of stories, including Isabel Archer’s. Political and economic as well as cultural, these lines of expansion yielded hundreds of stories in life as well as art: William Dean Howells’s, Mark Twain’s, Hamlin Garland’s, and Edith Wharton’s; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, Jay Gatsby’s, and Nick Carraway’s; Willa Cather’s as well as Jim Burden’s; Theodore Dreiser’s as well as Carrie Meeber’s; Henry James’s as well as Isabel Archer’s and Adam Verver’s.

Ten years after his first tour of the United States and six after his first tour of Europe, Buffalo Bill brought his Wild West Show to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in what turned out to be one of his last triumphant presentations. Once a small Indian village on the shores of Lake Michigan, Chicago pushed and promoted itself past older Eastern rivals who wanted to host the nation’s Columbian celebration by recounting its quintessential American rise from meager beginnings to a bustling center of trade, commerce, stockyards, and railways, and by insisting that it was the nation’s window to the future. Chicago might have no culture, one citizen remarked, but when it got some it would “make it hum.”

Persuaded, Congress gave Chicago exclusive rights to official commemoration of the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the Americas, and then passed a bill authorizing the World’s Columbian Exposition of “arts, industries, manufactures, and the products of the soil, mine, and sea,” which President Benjamin Harrison signed in the spring of 1890, the first year in which the value of the nation’s manufactured goods surpassed that of its agricultural commodities. A year later, six thousand workers were employed on projects sponsored by forty-four nations and twenty-six colonies and provinces. “Make no little plans,” instructed Daniel Burnham, the Chicago architect charged with coordinating the mammoth effort to transform seven hundred acres of Jackson Park into a wonderland of promenades, canals, lagoons, plazas, parks, streets, and avenues as well as four hundred buildings.

Near the End of The Rebel, Albert Camus speaks, first, of the “procedures of beauty,” which he defines as imaginative affirmations of “the value and the dignity common” to all human beings, and, then, of the “procedures of rebellion,” which he associates with all forms of resistance to injustice, as ways of contesting “reality while endowing it with unity.” Some of Camus’s key terms – “beauty” and “rebellion,” for example – may strike us as being too extreme. But his words place both aesthetic creation and political resistance within history and, then, implicitly define them as ways of contesting established relations. In addition, almost surreptitiously, his formulation reminds us that all of our contesting retains as one part of its motive the restoration if not the preservation of “unity.”

While celebrating itself as the land of the free, the United States has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to deal harshly, as though in an emergency, with those who violate the written and unwritten rules by which it seeks both to authorize and to limit resistance. It tells us a great deal about the varied means and the vigilance of our society in authorizing and policing freedom that novelists as different in background, social status, and disposition as Jack London, Edith Wharton, and William Faulkner have added protagonists as different as Martin Eden, Lily Bart, and Joe Christmas to its list of victims. Yet even when it has tilted toward the dream of perfect order – as it has in crucial moments throughout its history, including the 1920s and the 1950s, for example – the United States has continued to honor, however cautiously, the counterdream of personal freedom and civil liberty, as though mindful that no culture can survive by embracing one of these dreams and abandoning the other.

As a cultural center, Harlem arose after the early careers of two whose lives and work would become inextricably linked with their adopted home town. For many, W. E. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson personified Harlem’s intellectual wealth. Born three years apart, and within a decade of the Civil War’s end, each man was in his fifties during the 1920s, the era’s high-water mark. Du Bois’s active career, in fact, would continue decades beyond the relatively brief period of the Renaissance. Yet their creative contributions set the stage for the literary efflorescence of the 1920s and 1930s.

W. E. B. Du Bois was born in Massachusetts in 1868, making him the most senior of those connected with the Renaissance. He lived for nearly a century, his publications appearing over a span of years longer than most American lifetimes. Educated at Fisk, Harvard, and Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, Du Bois pushed his talents in many directions. The Souls of Black Folk, which he published in 1903, displays this protean thinker’s ability to mix uplift and social insight with lyricism and emotion. Drawn from Du Bois’s own experiences in the South as both student and teacher, Souls is rightly considered an African American – indeed, an American – classic. The Souls of Black Folk encompasses many genres: the essay, sociological study, musicology, fiction, autobiography, and philosophy. In this sense, Du Bois’s most widely read work is paradigmatically modernist in form; the hybridity of form of Souls may in fact account for its longevity and success in our contemporary estimations.

The resemblances that might have fostered recognitions among writers of the twenties – white of black and male of female – worked more often to divide them. Cowley’s group of “admired writers” coveted the power that accompanied recognition, and once they had achieved it, they held tightly to it. But they also wanted to claim as their own the sense of being marginalized. “That was always my experience,” Fitzgerald observed in 1938: “a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy’s school; a poor boy in a rich man’s club at Princeton…. I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.” Ten years earlier, T. S. Eliot had written Herbert Read, giving his twist to the experience of being an outsider:

No event more fully captures the rebellion, the divisions, and the evasions of the Lyric Years than the Armory Show that opened in New York on the evening of February 17, 1913, shortly before the Woolworth Building, standing 792 feet high, became the tallest building in the world. In Movers and Shakers, the third part of her four-part autobiography, Intimate Memoirs (1933–37), Luhan discusses several “Revolutions in Art” – and also reprints her own piece, “Speculations, or Post-Impressions in Prose,” written on the occasion of the Armory Show, in which she asserts that “Gertrude Stein is doing with words what Picasso is doing with paint” – “impelling language to induce new states of consciousness.” Luhan thus reinforces her broader claim: that the spirit that inspired the era’s artists also imbued the planners of the Armory Show. Frederick James Gregg and Arthur Davies were co-conspirators with Stein and Picasso in a plot to open the eyes of “the great, blind, dumb New York Public” to art that is “really modern.” Planning the exhibition, they talked “with creepy feelings of terror and delight” about their plan to “dynamite America.” “Revolution – that was what they felt they were destined to provide for these States – and one saw them shuddering and giggling like high-spirited boys daring each other.” The show itself, Luhan concluded, was the most important event of its kind “that ever happened in America” precisely because it had touched the “unawakened consciousness” of people, allowing artists to set them free.

Rudolph Fisher surpassed the boundaries of the black middle class. Born in 1897 in Washington, DC, but raised in Providence, Rhode Island, Fisher graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University in biology and English. Subsequently first in his Howard Medical School class of 1924, Fisher took up a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University upon graduation. He went on to place articles in medical journals, start up his own radiology practice, work on a musical revue with Langston Hughes, and publish over a dozen short stories, magazine essays, and novels. Fisher’s innovative appropriation of the detective genre and humorous insight into the foibles of urban ways deconstruct life in the “City of Refuge,” the affectionately ironic name Fisher gave to his beloved Harlem.

Fisher’s satiric essay, “The Caucasian Storms Harlem,” portrays the black Mecca as in danger of becoming a tourist trap. Spots once limited to blacks out on the town became, by the middle of the 1920s, nightclubs catering to white folks. If James Weldon Johnson was eager to advertise black Harlem as a culturally rich space teeming with talented and brilliant inhabitants, Fisher had reservations about sharing that space, even as he comically addressed such concerns. Returning to Harlem after a long absence, Fisher relates how he went from club to club seeking a Negro ambience. Instead, he finds himself, again and again, the only black person present: “The best of Harlem’s black cabarets have changed their names and turned white.” Recalling life before the “invasion,” Fisher drops the names of such notables as Paul Robeson, football hero, law student, and international theater star; Bert Williams, vaudeville celebrity; and a young and self-possessed chanteuse named Ethel Waters.

The elitism that found expression in T. S. Eliot’s famous description of himself as a “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion” survived in the thirties. Worldly in its wit and reach, as it gathers fragments in different languages from different times and places, and world-weary in its tone, as it laments the loss of artistic tradition and religious faith, Eliot’s style largely defined literature for shapers of the New Criticism. Art should be cosmopolitan yet imperial in its claims (meaning that it should claim everything high-up and good) and aristocratic in its exclusions (meaning that it should condemn everything middle-class, mean, or vulgar). But the thirties witnessed the revival of three overlapping forms of populism that had flourished during the Lyric Years and then languished in the twenties. One of these, more or less Marxist in tendency, descended from writers like Upton Sinclair, Randolph Bourne, Floyd Dell, John Reed, and Jack London. A second came from some of the same writers, especially London, and was primitivistic in logic. And a third, more “realist” than “naturalist,” found expression in the heirs of William Dean Howells – writers like Willa Cather and Sherwood Anderson, who made fiction out of the manners and foibles, the aspirations and hypocrisies, the symbols and myths of the frequently maligned middle class. During the twenties, when the vocabulary of idealism fell into disrepute, the untested truce between populist and elitist tendencies fell apart. Mencken became almost typical in treating the “Middle Class” with contempt and all politics, including reform politics, as a farce.