De scène die ik deze maand van dichterbij wil gaan bekijken, is de eerste van het tweede bedrijf van The Tempest, het laatste stuk dat Shakespeare naar men aanneemt op zijn eentje heeft geschreven. In de First Folio, de eerste gedrukte verschijningsvorm die we van deze tekst hebben, staat het stuk helemaal vooraan, als opener van de afdeling komedies. Het einde van het stuk geeft meteen ook aan waarom de samenstellers van Shakespeares allereerste verzameld werk vonden dat het in deze categorie thuishoorde. Voor de belangrijkste personages loopt immers alles goed af: er is de aankondiging van een prinselijk huwelijk tussen twee jonge geliefden, en hun beider vaders, die eerder in het stuk nog lijnrecht tegenover elkaar stonden, verzoenen zich in deze scène. Eind goed al goed dus.
Hoewel, The Tempest is in tegenstelling tot Shakespeares vroegste oefeningen in het genre allerminst een gewone komedie. Zoals E.M.W. Tillyard in zijn scherpzinnige analyse van het stuk al aangaf, is The Tempest net als Cymbeline en The Winter’s Tale (de andere twee teksten waarover Tillyard het in Shakespeare’s Last Plays heeft) opgebouwd rond wat hij een ‘tragic pattern’ noemt, een narratief gegeven dat de mogelijkheid van een tragedie in zich draagt, ook als het die mogelijkheid niet realiseert. Met de basisgegevens van de plot van The Tempest had Shakespeare ook een wraaktragedie kunnen schrijven, stelt Tillyard. Ik vat die plot eerst kort samen zodat we straks de hier geselecteerde scène iets beter kunnen begrijpen. Prospero, hertog van Milaan, wordt door zijn broer Antonio onrechtmatig van zijn macht beroofd en samen met zijn jonge dochter (Miranda) in een gammel bootje de Middellandse Zee op gezet. De twee belanden op een zo goed als onbewoond eiland, waar Prospero zich verder bekwaamt in de magische kunsten die in zekere zin de aanleiding waren voor zijn verbanning. Zijn grote interesse in boeken had er immers voor gezorgd dat hij de staatszaken uit het oog verloor en niet inzag dat zijn broer hem de macht wou ontnemen. Met diezelfde toverkrachten slaagt Prospero er twaalf jaar later in om zijn broer op het eiland te krijgen waar de actie van The Tempest zich afspeelt. Samen met onder meer de koning van Napels, Alonso, en diens zoon Ferdinand is Antonio op weg naar Italië van Tunis, waar Alonso zijn dochter heeft uitgehuwelijkt. Bij het begin van The Tempest ontketent Prospero de storm waarnaar het stuk is genoemd: het koninklijke schip leidt schipbreuk en de opvarenden worden in verschillende partijen over het eiland verspreid.
[Het vervolg van deze bijdrage komt later online. In afwachting vindt de bezoeker hieronder een lezing in het Engels waarop deze aflevering zal teruggaan..]
Lezing Lille 10 March 2017
‘Travelling Comfort. William Shakespeare’s The Tempest’
Jürgen Pieters
Let me begin by thanking Fiona for today’s generous invitation and for her kindness to keep inviting me to Lille. It is always a pleasure to be here, among fine colleagues and friends. Let me immediately apologize for the fact that (as you will have gathered by now) I won’t be doing this in French; I hope this is not too much of a problem. If you have any questions afterwards, please feel free to ask those in French; I may even try to answer them in French – well, in my particular version of your language. If I am going too fast, or something isn’t entirely clear, please do not hesitate to point that out and interrupt me.
My title for today’s paper contains an implicit reference to a book by the Dutch literary and cultural theorist Mieke Bal, whose early work on narratology you may be more familiar with. The book, whose cover and author you can see on the screen, is entitled Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. A Rough Guide (2002), it’s a book that for me still has many lessons to teach, one of which being that concepts (which are indeed among the basic tools of humanities scholarship) are not stable things; they are not containers with a fixed and homogeneous content that we can apply with equal significance and functionality in any circumstance. Concepts are, as Bal writes in the introductory chapter of her book, ‘site[s] of debate, awareness of difference and tentative exchange’ (13); concepts are things that travel through space and time, and in the course of their multidirectional trajectories, they open up new meanings which in their capacity of concepts they make possible and visible. They open up new scenarios by means of which we can conceive of the world and of ourselves anew; they are places of conception, one could say, and conception, as we all know, never happens or occurs ex nihilo; the analysis of concepts, from that genetic and genealogical perspective, enables us to see how new possibilities spring from what is already there, from something that has been given, culturally. The analysis of concepts, in other words, shows us how traditions work and develop, provided that we see tradition not as the simple passing on of materials (a view that would presuppose that those materials remain untouched and unchanged), but as a process of continued renewal and change, of what Bal refers to as ‘debate’, ‘difference’ and ‘exchange’.
The concept whose travels I am currently interested in is that of ‘literary consolation’, the idea (very much in the air nowadays) that readers can derive consolation from reading literary texts, and that, inversely, these texts are indeed often meant to provide comfort. Obviously, I don’t have the time today to take you on a full tour through the book that (admittedly) I am still in the very first stages of writing, but I want to take some of my time, first (before we move on to Shakespeare, that is), to provide you with the basic outline (the grand narrative) of the trajectory of the topos as I see it now.
The idea that literary texts provide solace is a basic tenet of the blossoming field of bibliotherapy, a label that is invoked nowadays, in a double meaning, as you can see on the slide, to refer to both a serious medical (psycho-medical) practice that involves the use of literary texts to help patients come to terms with specific aspects of their medical condition, and to a more self-ironic critical practice that involves the prescription of reading materials in a more informal context of self-help and self-improvement. I’m not going to say more about the sub-discipline of bibliotherapy, which is the subject of a number of interesting books that I refer to on the next slide. The point that is of interest here today is that in each of these books the therapeutic value of literary texts is identified specifically with these texts’ consolatory powers, in both of the biliotherapeutic practices at hand. Literature heals to the extent that it brings comfort and consolation. This is also the case in Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin’s The Novel Cure. An A-Z of Literary Remedies, a bestselling self-help book that epitomizes the amazing success of bibliotherapy (in the second of the two versions that I singled out) worldwide; originally published in English in 2013, it now has editions in several major languages: I have found references to French, Italian, Spanish, German, Turkish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese and Dutch editions, most of which are more than simply translations of the English original, but also contain new ‘literary prescriptions’ based on novels in the respective editions’ target-languages. (Here you can see some of the covers of these international editions.) What Berthoud and Elderkin do in The Novel Cure is offer reading-suggestions of novels for readers complaining about this or that mental discomfort – the death of a loved one, one or other form of identity crisis, the fear for new technologies, insomnia, depression after a miscarriage, the list is quite long.
In the brief foreword to their book, Berthoud and Elderkin refer to the specific consolatory power of good novels: ‘Whatever your ailment’, they assure us, adopting the tone of actual doctors, ‘our prescriptions are simple: a novel (or two), to be read at regular intervals. Some treatments will lead to a complete cure. Others will simply offer solace, showing you that you are not alone. All will offer the temporary relief of your symptoms due to the power of literature to distract and transport.’ Their point should be clear: the fact that literary writings ‘simply offer solace’ and the specific type of consolation that is involved, are related to the power of novels ‘to distract and transport’ the reader, not to confront the reader (let alone reconcile him or her) with an absolutely threatening and painful reality that, for emotional reasons, he or she would rather not confront. Those of you who are familiar with the consolatory writings that have come down to us from Antiquity (letters and treatises by (among others) Cicero, Seneca and Plutarch) will be aware of the fact that to bring comfort in the logic of those writings involved a sharp and rational confrontation with the events in the real that caused distress and grief. Starting from that (ancient) definition of consolation, literary texts could be involved in a therapeutic program that would highlight their power to confront, but judging from the first fifty literary prescriptions in their book, that is clearly not what Berthoud and Elderkin have in mind. For them, comfort is the result of a form of ‘diversion’, a term that I am using here with specific reference to an essay by Montaigne in which consolation is the theme and to which I will return towards the end of this talk, with specific reference to The Tempest; but let me first take you on a brief tour of the joint history of the concepts of literature and consolation so that we can begin to see where these ideas come from.
The grand narrative of the topos of ‘literary comfort’ is marked by the interplay between two extreme positions, which are opposed to each other, but which in the occurrences of the topos that I want to focus on in my book are co-present, whether explicitly or implicitly, in shifting constellations and with different accents: the one position holds that texts that are literary are meant to give comfort and that they are successful in doing so; in the other (the former’s shadow, as it were) these texts are being derided because they cannot really provide real consolation. The latter seems to be the case in the opening scene of Boethius’ famous sixth century treatise De Consolatione Philosophiae, where the poetic muses are being shooed away, as you can see on the slide, by Lady Philosophy, because the comfort that they provide is false on account of its being non-philosophical. Poetic comfort, the point of the scene is, will never turn out to be effective, because it’s self-deceptive – as opposed to philosophy proper, poetry is not real medicine, so it cannot really drive away pain; on the contrary, because the muses of poetry both target and feed on the emotions, our attachment to them is bound to keep us sick, Boethius seems to be suggesting in the famous opening scene of his treatise.
In its entirety, though, Boethius’ text offers a much more complex reflection on the comfort of literature than I have the time or space to make clear here, if only because in his initial critique of poetry and in his later apology of philosophy he makes use of so many literary tropes and techniques, inserting numerous references to literary writings, that it becomes impossible to take the critique of poetry that we are given in the opening scene at face value The problem at hand, to sum things up rather too bluntly, is similar to the one that we have in Plato’s critique of the poets in his great dialogue on The Republic; the least one could say is that it is a critique of literature couched in literary form, in this specific case that of a prosimetric text (the artful combination of prose and poetry) interwoven with numerous literary references and quotations; I would go further and say that the critique of poetry in Boethius’ text gradually develops into an apology for a specific type of poetry, a species of literature that belongs to the domain of moral philosophy, provided that it is being read properly.
I admit that my reading of Boethius would have to be more fully substantiated to be truly convincing, and if we had but world enough and time, I would actually do that. Now, however, I want to move on and discuss (equally briefly) the work of Dante, with whom, I would argue, the joint history of literature and consolation (the history of literature as consolatory fiction) truly begins. In Dante, the position that I have just read into Boethius – a project in which good literature begins to function as a form of moral philosophy and hence as the procurer of valuable and true knowledge – becomes fully realized. With it the idea that literature brings true comfort is accordingly developed in the course of Dante’s oeuvre. The development begins with the early intuition in the Vita Nuova that the poet should be able to find, as he puts it in chapter 31, ‘solace in sorrowful words’, [words of others that he reads or, in this specific case, words that he himself writes after the death of Beatrice], and it moves on to an important reflection turns this intuition into a fully-fledged theoretical program in the second book of Dante’s Convivio, where Boethius’ example (together with that of Cicero) seems to inspire a form a writing that couples a ‘sweet’ rhetoric (dolcezza) to the production of true meaning under the guise of fiction, the sort of text, like Dante’s own canzones that are being interpreted in the Convivio, that can be read on at least two levels, a ‘literal’ one and an ‘allegorical’ one, whereby the allegorical reading rests upon and therefore needs as its support the literal reading. What is important to me, in this remarkable passage from the second book of the Convivio, is that its occasion is not only the rhetoric but also the phenomenon of consolation. As I see it, Dante discovers his own poetic program in reading consolatory texts and it is the discovery of this mystery, I will argue in the chapter on Dante in my book, that results in the poetic consolatory practice of the Commedia, in which several passages occur that stress the comforting task of the author – ‘il mio comforto’, Dante labels Virgil on at least two occasions. Reading Boethius and Cicero Dante discovers what consolation should be: it should not be confused with self-pity or self-love (this is the specific lesson that Cicero teaches him) and looking in hindsight, this is possibly how the author of the Convivio will have valued his own earlier poems of the Vita Nuova. (Obviously, I will elaborate on all of this in the book to come.)
Literature brings comfort in Dante, there is no doubt about that; moreover, to bring comfort becomes one of literature’s prime tasks and a qualification of what good literature is. If we take Dante (as I tend to do) as the beginning of our modern concept of literature, then things seem to have changed drastically by the time we reach the historical apex of modern literature, when six centuries after Dante, Flaubert defines good literature on the basis of the exact opposite conviction. As Flaubert puts it in a famous epistolary discussion that he had with his friend-novelist George Sand, in the weeks before Christmas 1875, the chief aim of true writing is not ‘consolation’ but ‘désolation’. Real writers, Flaubert argues, will not want to provide their readers with the sort of moral comfort that Sand still considers central to their task, they will instead confront their readers with reality as it is, desolate and cruel. While Sand sees it as her main task to make her readers happy and color over the world with the hue of comfort, Flaubert wants to open his readers’ eyes and show them how things really stand. The discussion between Flaubert and Sand not only revolves around the function of literature, it also brings into play the discussion of what consolation is meant to do: is it meant to show things how they really are and to confront the person in need of consolation with a state of affairs that is the cause of pain or sorrow, or to embellish this state of affairs and to show the person in need of comfort that things are not as bad as he or she thinks they are. The irony of Flaubert’s case is that his modern defense of the autonomy of literature (literature should not be defined on the basis of any external function) goes together with an ancient, traditional idea of consolation.
How and where does Shakespeare fit into this grand narrative of the intersections between a discourse of consolation on the one hand and the development of our modern ideas of literature and the values of fiction on the other? That’s another huge question, to which, so far, I can only offer the rough outlines of a possible answer. Let me start by saying something general about Shakespeare’s representation of the idea and the practice and the rhetoric of consolation. For the past year, I have been looking for what I would call ‘scenes of consolation’ in his plays and I have found several that allowed me to detect an important and obvious difference between the traditional discourse of consolation that Shakespeare will have known from his school training in Latin and his take on that discourse in plays like Hamlet, Richard II, Measure for Measure and The Tempest (to name those in which, so far, I have found these scenes).
In the traditional, classical thinking on consolation, and in the discourse that supports that thinking, there is hardly any room for the idea that the practice of consolation (and the rhetoric that embodies that practice) would or could fail. Of course, that should not necessarily be taken to mean that in Antiquity every word of consolation was in actual practice efficient and truly comforting; what it does mean is that in the numerous consolatory writings that have come down to us from that long period there is little or no attention to the possibility that words that were meant to console could actually result in no consolation at all. Also, and in line with this, the actual perspective of the person who needs to be consoled is hardly a matter of attention in those writings, and if it is, it is taken for granted that the perspective of the person in need of comfort will be fully in line with that of the person providing the comfort: in the end, both parties will see things in the very same comforting way. Consolatory writings that serve as form of self-consolation (in which the consoler and the consoled are one and the same person, such as in Cicero’s legendary Consolatio, a treatise that is now lost but which was written in self-comfort after the death of his beloved daughter Tullia in 45 b.C.), fully confirm this Ancient consolatory writings are, on average, monologues by comforters, monologues in which a series of arguments are being offered that are ultimately taken to be proofs of conviction. The monological nature of these writings (even though some of them are letters, or even, as in the case of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, are structured in the way of Socratic dialogue) goes to show that it is taken for granted in these texts that the perspective on offer will be adopted by the listener who is in need of comfort. When authors like Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch and later Boethius (De Consolatione Philosophiae) write about consolation, their view on the matter presupposes that there is no need at all to actually doubt the success of the logic of comfort. After all, in their view, to offer consolation entails an appeal to reason, and reason is always self-evidently correct – if reason fails, it is not reason itself that is failing, but the person who fails to adopt a rational perspective; the same goes for consolation, one could say: if one fails to be consoled, then the problem clearly lies with the one being consoled, or, as the case may be: the one not being consoled; the problem does not lie with the consoler or with the quality of the arguments being used (most of our own experiences with the failure of consolation, I would think, stress that the failure is that of the person trying to bring comfort and the arguments being used in the process – ‘do you really think that by saying this you are actually offering me consolation?’ (it’s the sort of response that is discursively impossible in ancient consolations).
While there are different strands and schools in the art of consolation in Antiquity all share the idea that those who are in need of comfort need to be driven away from the temporary confusion in which the emotional turmoil that resulted from their distress has placed them. The way to success lies on the path of rationalization (considerations of consolation are exercises in rationalization) and the appeal to reason presupposes in Antiquity the existence of a sensus communis: rational thoughts are thoughts that are shared by everybody, provided that one succeeds in attaining the perspective of the wise. Put differently, if we manage to find the right way (the wise way) of looking at our distress and the things that cause it (the words of comfort are meant to direct us on that path) the art of consolation will always be successful.
What we see in Shakespeare’s work is that in the scenes of consolation that he stages in the plays to which I referred earlier, he makes use of the arguments and the commonplaces that we know from consolatory writings by Cicero, Seneca and Plutarch, but in contrast to those texts, his scenes show the failure of consolation rather than its self-evident success; the scenes that I have in mind display the failure of comforting arguments to convince truly and deeply – somehow, in Shakespeare, these arguments seem to have lost at least some of their rhetorical power and self-evidence. Why is that? Before we try to answer that question, let us first look at some of the scenes in Shakespeare that I am thinking of. The first one is one that you are likely to be familiar with: it’s the second scene of the first act of Hamlet, the scene in which Hamlet’s mother Gertrude and Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle, the new King who is now married to Gertrude, try to console Hamlet – that is, they urge and ultimately command him to stop mourning the loss of his father; they do so by trying to convince him that it is wise, more commonsensical and more fitting for a man to give up the sort of behavior that could still be tolerated from a grieving person in the immediate aftermath of the father’s decease but which now, after two months [(1.2.138, ‘not yet’ Hamlet adds], according to Gertrude and Claudius verges on the inappropriate. In consoling Hamlet (i.e. in trying to convince him to behave reasonably) Gertrude and Claudius make use of a series of arguments that Shakespeare could have found in any of the classical consolatory writings that I referred to before – he should take a rational perspective on the cause of his distress and come to understand that it lies in the natural course of things that fathers die. The arguments that together make up Claudius’ long exhortation (1.2. 92-106) seem to come straight out of Cicero’s discussion of comfort in book 3 of the Tusculanae Disputationes. The book has been named as one of the possible sources of the famous ‘to be or not to be’-monologue that comes later in the play, but I would argue that specific passages of it clearly underlie the failed consolation in the particular scene that we are looking at.
The big difference between Cicero’s treatise and this particular scene in Shakespeare’s tragedy is that in the former the text’s premise is that good practices of the art of consolation will always be effective, whereas in the latter the rhetoric of consolation doesn’t work at all: Hamlet is not convinced by Claudius’ Ciceronian arguments because he simply doesn’t want to be convinced. Maybe it’s safer to say that he doesn’t allow himself to be convinced, because there is something inside him that prevents him from following the logic that Claudius displays to him. Sure, one might say, as Cicero would, that it’s a matter of simple will, but there seems to be more at stake here: Hamlet doesn’t see the reason behind Claudius and Gertrude’s words, not because he is mad (Hamlet is a very rational human being, after all) but because he doesn’t share the common sense that they try to convince him with. In fact, he opposes it with another common sense of his own: ‘a beast that wants reason / Would have mourned longer’ he says about his mother (1.2. 150-1), who from Hamlet’s perspective immediately gave up all thoughts about her late husband, by rushing into a new marriage with that husband’s brother, ‘within a month, / Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears / Had left the flushing in her galled eyes’ (1.2. 153-55), as Hamlet puts it in the soliloquy that follows upon Claudius and Gertrude’s failed attempts at consoling him. Gertrude, like Niobe, expressed her grief abundantly, Hamlet suggests here, but were those tears genuine expressions of actual pain? He doubts sincerely that they were, playing upon the distinction that he had introduced earlier in the scene, when he explained to his mother that there was no telling that one’s outer expression of pain adheres fully to the feeling within. Even if I were to give up the external signs of my grieving, he told Gertrude, there would still be something inside me that remains inconsolably sad, ‘that within which passes show’, as he famously puts it, and it is that ‘within’ that fails to be addressed by what he experiences as the empty rhetoric of his mother’s and his stepfather’s meager attempts at consolation – ‘words, words, words’, as he will say in a later scene.
The inner self to which Hamlet is referring (that which denotes him truly, to borrow his own words) seems to be a new force of resistance against the self-evidence of classical ideas on consolation. The claim that the early-modern period saw the rise of new conceptions of human identity and individuality is a commonplace of cultural history, and I take it that it also impacted the development of our modern ideas of consolation – in ways, admittedly, that I still have to do further research on. In Richard II, Shakespeare labels this new force the ‘inward soul’. Interestingly, the phrase occurs in yet another scene of consolation. Again, we are confronted with a character that somehow does not manage to be consoled by the sort of arguments that used to serve as the foundation of the classical rhetoric of consolation. The character in question is Isabel, the Queen whose sadness is caused by the absence of her husband, King Richard, who suddenly had to leave on a military mission to Ireland. For some reason or other, Isabel is convinced that the unexpected separation is a premonition of greater distress to come and that she may never see her husband again. She is being consoled in this scene by one of the King’s courtiers, Bushy, who warns her about the obvious dangers of too great an amount of distress. His arguments against the possible threat of Isabel’s immeasurable sadness entails a plea of what in traditional consolations of the Peripatetic type is called ‘metriopatheia’, a plea for the moderation of one’s emotions, of counterbalancing one’s distress with a necessary degree of reason.
As in Hamlet, extreme distress is portrayed as a potential source of self-loss in Richard II. The threat that is involved in excessive mourning is ‘life-harming’ according to Bushy and that is why his attempts to console the Queen need to be directed at the aversion of that threat. The arguments that he makes use of will be familiar by now: in the remainder of the scene he continues to appeal to Isabel’s powers of reason. He wants her to get a rational grip on what causes her distress and to make a rational analysis of it. The only problem is that Isabel does not know why she is so sad. The indeterminacy of her sadness is the subject of her first reply to Bushy. She does not know how to interpret her own sadness, she only knows that it is there. Bushy’s response is predictable in the ancient logic of consolation: by means of a rational argument he will try to convince her that there is no real cause or for her sadness, that it is grounded in illusion, that she imagines something that it is not real, because she allows herself to be led by her emotions, which obviously cause her to see things that are not real. If you think you are sad on account of something else than your husband’s departure for Ireland, Bushy concludes, then you are simply seeing things wrongly, through what he calls ‘sorrow’s eye, glazed with blinding tears’. There is really nothing to be really distressed about, Bushy argues, making use of yet again a classical consolatory ‘topos’. Isabel immediately picks up on this, with an ironic reply that plays on the modern meaning of the nothingness (le néant) to which Bushy alludes. ‘[M]y inward soul with nothing trembles’, she says, and it is very clear that Bushy’s attempt at reassurance is simply backfiring.
Again, Bushy’s logic would fit perfectly in a classical text of consolation, founded on the undisputable distinction between the correct, rational perspective on things (the sensus communis that enables one to overcome one’s sadness) and the wrong, emotional one that presents that same sadness as something that can never be overcome. However, Bushy’s words are not part of an ancient consolatio, they are part of a play that dates from a different period in time, one which begins to develop the idea that different perspectives can produce different truths, the one no less real than the other. The passage in which Bushy talks about perspectives has often been related to Hans Holbein’s famous anamorphotic experiment of ‘the Ambassadors’, a painting that has been invoked more than once to capture the budding modernity of Shakespeare’s era. The painting has references to the early-modern wars of religion, the discovery of the New World and new cultures, the development of scientific rationalism, all resulting in an increasing awareness of the perspectival nature of truth and hence of the fundamental ambivalence of all practices of signification – even natural perspectives, as Shakespeare suggests in Twelfth Night (5.1. 209) can show something (or someone) simultaneously as it ‘is and is not’. Words of comfort can indeed continue to bring comfort, but the same words can result in comfort’s very opposite – while this insight is definitely not an early-modern invention, this central ambivalence of the rhetoric of consolation is striking in Shakespeare’s dealings with the phenomenon, which exchanges the monological view of consolation that we find in most consolatory writings from Antiquity (and in Dante) with a dialogical conception of it. Shakespeare’s dialogical construction of consolation stresses that there are two different, and not necessarily compatible perspectives to the phenomenon (that of the consoler and that of the consoled, and very rarely do the twain meet). In doing so, his scenes of failing comfort show the intractability and mutability of distress, the something that can be nothing but even in its nothingness cannot be denied.
Shakespeare’s philosophical guide in that respect (like in many others) may well have been Montaigne, whose work he could read both in the original French and in the English translation of Florio which appeared in 1603. Montaigne is the philosopher par excellence of what Shakespeare called ‘the inward soul’, of what in an essay on Shakespeare and Montaigne Robert Ellrodt has labeled ‘a simultaneous awareness of experience and the experiencing self’ (cited in Kirsch, 337). It is the possibility (and indeed the slipperiness) of the distinction between an experience and the self experiencing it that underlies Shakespeare’s skeptical treatment of consolatory practices in both Hamlet and Richard II. How can we know the pain of the other (a question that does not seem to be asked in classical consolations), especially if we begin to doubt, as Hamlet urges to do, the traditional premise that one’s outer expressions are mere mirrors of the soul? How can we even know this soul, our pain ourselves, if like Queen Isabel we grieve without apparent cause? How can we be consoled by people who clearly misunderstand what we ourselves have so much difficulty understanding?
As you will have gathered, The Tempest also contains a scene of failed consolation, a real parody of consolation one could even say in this case. The scene is the first one of the second act of the last play that Shakespeare wrote single-handedly. The words of comfort that start it off are spoken by the good-natured Gonzalo, ‘an honest old councilor’ as he is labeled in the play’s list of characters. Gonzalo’s words are addressed to the King of Naples, Alonso. Together with the other men present in the scene (there are several of them), Gonzalo and Alonso have been the victims of a shipwreck, the result of a sudden storm that washed them on the shores of the quasi-deserted island that is the scene of the play. The words of comfort that Gonzalo utters urge Alonso not to forget, despite his evident distress, how lucky he has been: other victims of similar natural disasters (daily events, if we are to believe Gonzalo) have been much worse off. Indeed, there is sufficient cause for sadness, the good councilor admits, but also for joy, since lives have been saved. Therefore, Gonzalo invites his master to ‘wisely, good sir, weigh / Our sorrow with our comfort’.
Gonzalo’s plea, like that of Claudius, offers a variant of the argument that (pseudo-)Plutarch introduces in the opening paragraphs of the famous letter of condolence that he wrote to Apollonius sometime after the death of the latter’s son. The opening section of the letter unambiguously argues against ‘those who extol that harsh and callous indifference, which is both impossible and unprofitable’, the author claims. The negative reference must be understood as a criticism of the Stoic perspective of ‘apatheia’; it is followed by an endorsement of Crantor, the fourth-century author of what is sometimes seen as the arch-consolatio, ‘Peri penthous’ (‘On mourning’), composed on the death of the son of Hippocles, the friend to whom Crantor’s treatise (now lost) was addressed. Opposing the Stoic perspective, Crantor is here taken to support the idea that ‘moderate indulgence [in grief, jp] is not to be disapproved’. On the contrary even, it is taken as a sign of wisdom and hence to be commended: ‘Reason therefore requires that men of understanding should be neither indifferent in such calamities nor extravagantly affected; for the one course is unfeeling and brutal, the other lax and effeminate. Sensible is he who keeps within appropriate bounds and is able to bear judiciously both the agreeable and the grievous in his lot, and who has made up his mind beforehand to conform uncomplainingly and obediently to the dispensation of things.’ Such, it would seem, is also the advice of Gonzalo: Alonso needs to bear in mind that bad luck is part of life’s deal, but that there will always be people who are worse off. ‘[H]e who tries to console a person in grief’, it is written in the Consolatio ad Apollonium, ‘and demonstrates that the calamity is one which is common to many, and less than the calamities which have befallen others, changes the opinion of the one in grief and gives him a similar conviction — that his calamity is really less than he supposed it to be.’
In The Tempest, however, Gonzalo’s attempts at consolation are decidedly less successful than the previous quotation would have us believe. Alonso does not appear to respond at all positively to Gonzalo’s words. While at first he does not say anything at all, it is clear from the response of others that he is neither convinced nor enthused by the wisdom of the good councilor. ‘He receives comfort like cold porridge’, Sebastian, who is witness to the scene, comments to Antonio – the former is brother to Alonso, the latter brother and successor to Prospero, the banished Duke of Milan whose art of sorcery is responsible for much of the action of the play, including the storm that caused those present to be both shipwrecked and saved. Sebastian’s remark opens a series of mocking comments in which Gonzalo’s honest consolatory attempts are further being derided. His rhetoric is first compared to a series of mere witticisms (‘Look, he’s winding up the watch of his wit; / By and by it will strike’ (2.1. 14-15)), expounded by one who is more concerned to produce words than to actually bring comfort (‘What a spendthrift is he of his tongue!’ (2.1. 26)). Also, Sebastian and Antonio suggest that Gonzalo is more interested in his own performance as comforter than in the effects of his words. ‘He will be talking’ (2.1. 29), Sebastian says, implying that the necessity of this comforter’s talk is not defined by the distress of some or other person in need of consolation, but by the desire of the consoler to talk, talk, talk and produce words, words, words. Gonzalo’s messages of comfort, it is further suggested, are not statements of truth; they are, on the contrary, lies, occasions where what is blatantly and painfully real is transformed and embellished by mere rhetoric. ‘If but one of his pockets could speak, would it not say he lies?’, Antonio wonders out loud. (2, 1, 67)
The latter comment is meant to mock the second part of Gonzalo’s consolatory speech, in which the old councilor is trying to argue how fortunate the survivors of the shipwreck have been in having landed on this beautiful island. ‘Here is everything advantageous to life’, Gonzalo exclaims, ‘How lush and lusty the grass looks! How green! (2.1. 52-55)). What is really miraculous, he adds tautologically (‘But the rarity of it is, which is indeed almost beyond credit’ (2.1. 60-61), in an attempt to cheer up his master, is that the clothes of those who have been shipwrecked have not in the least been damaged. ‘[O]ur garments, being, as they were, drenched in the sea, hold notwithstanding their freshness and glosses, being rather new-dyed than stained with salt water’ (2.1. 63-66), he points out. Indeed, he concludes, their clothes look as freshly shining as they did on the occasion for which they were originally donned, the marriage of Alonso’s daughter Claribel to the King of Tunis. (It was on their way back to Naples, somewhere in the Mediterranean, that their ship was caught in the storm that threw them on the unidentified island where Caliban’s mother, the witch Sycorax, used to reign.)
Up until this very moment, Alonso has kept quiet, but when he finally intervenes (over a hundred lines far in the scene), it is immediately clear that he is not receptive to Gonzalo’s well-meant arguments. The councilor’s words of consolation go against Alonso’s inner feelings. ‘You cram these words into mine ears against / The stomach of my sense’, he finally retorts (2.1. 107-108): what he hears in his head does not at all connect with what he feels in his gut. The two simply do not match: while Gonzalo is talking about the good fortune of having landed where they are, the only thing Alonso can think about, obviously, is that he lost both his children on this lethal journey. ‘Would I had never / Married my daughter there! for, coming thence, / My son is lost and, in my rate, she too, / Who is so far from Italy removed / I ne’er again shall see her. O thou mine heir / Of Naples and of Milan, what strange fish / Hath made his meal on thee?’ (2.1. 108-114)
Alonso’s outcry of despair is countered by what may well be the scene’s single unproblematic attempt at consolation. One of the lords attending, Francisco, tries to convince Alonso that his son could still be alive. Describing in detail how he saw Ferdinand fight the waves he concludes: ‘I not doubt / He came alive to land.’ At that point, however, Sebastian, who was until then merely poking fun at Gonzalo, resumes an earnest stance and rebukes his brother, in a gesture that is both cruel and politically pragmatic. There is no cause for Alonso to complain, he says. He has only himself to blame for the loss of his two children, since he went against the advice of so many (Sebastian no doubt included) not to marry his daughter outside of Europe: ‘Sir, you may thank yourself for this great loss, / That would not bless our Europe with your daughter, / But rather loose her to an African, / Where she at least is banish’d from your eye, / Who hath cause to wet the grief on’t.’ (2.1. 124-128) The only comfort that remains, in other words, is that Alonso cannot permanently see the cause of his distress and hence will not continuously be reminded of the absent daughter who apparently herself was very reluctant to marry the king of Tunis (‘You were kneel’d to and importuned otherwise / By all of us, and the fair soul herself / Weigh’d between loathness and obedience, at / Which end o’ the beam should bow.’ As to Ferdinand, Sebastian continues, with a clear eye on his own political profit: ‘We have lost your son, / I fear, for ever: Milan and Naples have / More widows in them of this business’ making / Than we bring men to comfort them: / The fault’s your own.’
The cynical undertone of these lines will not have been lost on Alonso, whose need for comfort is literally made subservient by Sebastian to the political outcome of the loss of this son who was seen by Alonso as the future king of the joint houses of Milan and Naples. Had he continued to live, Alonso would have married Ferdinand to the Queen of Milan, but with his presumed death Sebastian himself becomes heir to the Neapolitan house.
Gonzalo is understandably shocked by the frank brutality of Sebastian, but ever the perfect diplomat, he rejoins with kindness, a gesture which obviously fails to impress Alonso’s scheming brother: ‘My lord Sebastian’, Gonzalo says, ‘The truth you speak doth lack some gentleness / And time to speak it in: you rub the sore, / When you should bring the plaster.’ (2.1. 138-140) While there may be truth in what Sebstian says, Gonzalo feels that he is not only too direct but he certainly also lacks the good sense of timing that is of the utmost importance for a successful consolation. Again, the honest councilor seems to be taking to heart suggestions made in the Consolatio ad Apollonium. Comforters should not arrive on the scene too soon after a calamity has taken place, the author of that treatise writes. ‘For even the best of physicians do not at once apply the remedy of medicines against acute attacks of suppurating humours, but allow the painfulness of the inflammation, without the application of external medicaments, to attain some assuagement of itself.’ As Gail Kern Paster has shown, it is not unlikely that Shakespeare derived Gonzalo’s idea from one of the essays by Montaigne that he read in Florio’s translation as he was preparing the text of The Tempest. Critics have indicated that Montaigne’s essay ‘On Cannibals’ is a notable intertext for Shakespeare’s play, but Paster also pointed us in the direction of the essay ‘Of diverting or diversion’, in which Montaigne talks about consolation (not to mention shipwreck), stressing from the beginning that ‘a physician’s first entertainment of his patient should be gracious, cheerful, and pleasing’ (226).
Gonzalo’s medical analogy supports the consolatory approach that he has been taking from the beginning of the scene. As far as he is concerned, there is no use in confronting a person in distress directly with the painful reality from which he is suffering; words of comfort should be gentle and, like plasters, cover up a wound rather than expose it. Montaigne would seem to agree. In his essay ‘Of diverting or diversion’ , he presents his argument as a matter of personal experience, derived from the comfort he was once expected to bring to a woman in distress. ‘a truly afflicted lady’ (226). The essay contains an explicit refutation of each of the traditional approaches of the Ancient art of consolation – Montaignes alludes to the Stoic approach of Cleanthes, to the Peripatetics, to Chrysippus, to Epicurus and to Cicero (227) – and he proposes instead a new one of his own, the method of ‘diversion’, which, in his brief description of it seems simply to boil down to distracting the mind of the person suffering from the actual cause of distress. In Montaigne’s own words: ‘I unperceivably removed those doleful humours from her so that, as long as I was with her, so long I kept her in cheerful countenance and untroubled fashion.’ (227) The approach is one also favored by real doctors, Montaigne adds (229, with a reference to Tusculanae IV, 35, 74-75), and founded on the premise that very few people (Socrates being prime among them, if not the only one) can deal directly – and ‘with an undaunted ordinary visage’ – with the harshness of a harsh truth. While Montaigne readily admits that the approach does not manage to root out distress (227), he does believe that the method of ‘diversion’ has a remedial effect in the alleviation of one’s misery, in that it complies with both the given of human psychology (‘we ever think on somewhat else’ (231) and with the inconstancy of nature (233)
Obviously, Gonzalo does not really succeed in distracting Alonso ‘unperceivably’, as Montaigne would have it (Sebastian and Antonio’s jokes attract too much attention to his stratagem of comfort), but the approach of ‘diversion’ does seem to be the one he continues to favor throughout the scene that we are looking at. Still, Gonzalo’s words beg a question that turns out to be important in the modern history of (literary) consolation. If, in the comparison, ‘rubbing the sore’ equals telling the truth (as Gonzalo’s use of the metaphor seems to suggest), does this mean that the opposite act of ‘bringing the plaster’ entails the opposite of truth? Are words of comfort actually lies of the sort to which Sebastian was referring earlier in the scene, creations of a pleasing illusion meant to distract our attention from a painful reality? That indeed seems to be the suggestion made by Antonio when he scathingly compares Gonzalo’s words of comfort to the practices of the legendary singer Amphion, who, accompanied by his harp, managed to raise the walls of Thebes: ‘His word is more than the miraculous harp’, Antonio exclaims. The ironical suggestion is clear: Gonzalo may think that his words have great effect, but to both Sebastian and Antonio, they are empty rhetoric. ‘What impossible matter will he make esay next?’, Antonio wonders out loud. ‘I think he will carry this island home in his pocket and give it his son for an apple’, Sebastian replies. (2.1. 89-92)
Antonio’s reference to Amphion is meant as further mockery of Gonzalo, but the musical analogy will remind readers or viewers of The Tempest of a previous moment in the play, when words sung actually do have a consolatory effect. Four fifths into the long second scene of the opening act, the shipwrecked Ferdinand (washed on a different shore of the island) is being sung to by Ariel, Prospero’s magical aid. Ferdinand is convinced that his father fell victim to the storm and the distress over the calamity causes him to continue weeping bitter tears. But the ‘sweet air’ of the music that he suddenly hears (and that he associates with ‘Some god o’ the island’ (1.2. 390)) somehow soothes both his soul and the waves of the sea
(…) Sitting on a bank, Weeping again the king my father’s wreck, This music crept by me upon the waters, Allaying both their fury and my passion With its sweet air: thence I have follow’d it, Or it hath drawn me rather. But ’tis gone. No, it begins again. (1.2.390-396)
Ariel’s music attracts and distracts, but the specific force of ‘diversion’ that it exerts illustrates nicely the paradox at the heart of Montaigne’s special consolatory strategy. Diversion does not simply mean looking away or ignoring the cause of one’s distress; contrary to what Dorothea Heitsch writes, it is not a ‘cannily naïve act of transference’ (102), nor the simple exchange of one affection (distress) for another (pleasure). After all, the words of Ariel’s song do confront Ferdinand with the painful reality of his father’s death (‘Full fathom five thy father lies; / Of his bones are coral made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes’ (1.2. 397-399). Alonso’s son clearly understands that the song refers to his father (‘The ditty does remember my drown’d father’, he says (1.2. 406)), but the potential painfulness of that experience seems to be somehow mitigated by the sweetness of the musical form in which the message is brought.
This is, in a nutshell, the diversion of artistic consolation and it seems to me the idea that lies behind the bibliotherapeutic program of The Novel Cure, the book to which I referred at the beginning of my talk. As you will remember (and I show you the slide once more) Berthoud and Elderkin suggest that the consolation brought by literary texts is related to those texts’ specific powers of ‘transport’ (a form of ‘diversion’, one could say). By reading a novel, the reader is temporarily taken away from his or her problem, to a fictional universe, but that detour through fiction involves a mechanism of indirect confrontation (‘By indirection find directions out’, Polonius says in Hamlet). By seeing our own pain, and the causes of that pain, through the eyes of another person, a fictional character at that, we are offered a new perspective on our own situation, and judging from actual responses by actual readers, that perspective appears to bring comfort in some cases – not in spite of the fictionality of the medicine at hand, but thanks to it.
To be clear, my suggestion throughout has not been that Shakespeare simply anticipates the critical commonplace that underlies the program of contemporary bibliotherapy. As always, his work is extremely sensitive to the ambiguities, ambivalences and limits of common sense-ideas and experiences that are thought to be generically human (he is a true follower of Montaigne in that respect). With respect to the ways in which the phenomenon of consolation is represented in both Hamlet and The Tempest, there is the distinct irony that the scenes of consolation turn out to be staged events. Claudius, as we find out later in the play, is merely acting out his role as consoler. He is not at all sincere in his efforts to comfort his nephew-turned-stepson, since he killed the father whose unexpected death Hamlet continues to mourn. In the last scene of consolation from The Tempest that we have been looking at, Ariel knows very well that Ferdinand’s father is not dead; that fact in itself throws a different light on the musical comfort that he supposedly brings – it would have been more comforting to say ‘hey, your father is still alive, don’t despair’. So here as well, somebody is playing at consoling, and this is also the case in a scene from Measure for Measure that I haven’t discussed with you today.
Shakespeare, we have seen, is quite skeptical about some of the premises that underlie classical theories of consolation, but that doesn’t mean that he gives up on the phenomenon. He is also skeptical about love, but he didn’t give up on that either. What the scenes that we have been looking at show is that consolation fails to go without saying – both literally and figuratively speaking. The scenes at hand have urged us to think more deeply about the rules and expectations that govern the practice of consolation, as well as about some of the felicity conditions of the speech-act that make it work. There is plenty more to be said about all of this, but no time left, I’m afraid. I hope that I will be able to continue thinking about the topic and I take comfort from the idea that maybe one day Fiona will ask me again to come to Lille and reflect further together with you.