THE CONTEMPORARY REVOLUTION IN HERMENEUTICS

The twentieth century's hermeneutic revolution marks the third great turning point in the development of hermeneutics in Western culture. Its founders were the theologian Karl Barth and the philosopher Martin Heidegger. In his fundamental book, Truth and Method, Gadamer acknowledges that Martin Heidegger is the fons et origo of this great turning point in hermeneutics.

The first turning point came after the establishment of the canon of Sacred Scripture and the dogmatic creeds of the great ecumenical councils, with Augustine of Hippo’s De Doctrina Christiana. This work on biblical interpretation shaped the world of Christian learning, including medieval and early Reformation theology. Its hermeneutics was rooted in liturgical practice, especially baptism and eucharist, and in the Christian praxis of love. It took creeds and a dogmatic theological context for granted. It was a hermeneutics of consent.

In many respects the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer has led an unremarkable life. Born into a well-to-do middle class, academic, German family, he enjoyed a Gymnasium (a secondary school preparatory to the university) and a university education that led to a career as a philosophy professor. He retired from the university at age 68 and continues to lecture and write. What distinguishes Gadamer's life is his work. With the publication of Truth and Method in 1960, he helped inaugurate, in philosophy and human studies, an interpretive turn with a worldwide impact. We also note that Gadamer has led a very long life. Born in 1900, his life spans the entire twentieth century. It goes without saying, that Gadamer has led a German life - a German life in a century that might well have been a German century on the world stage but instead was an unmitigated disaster for Germany and for the world. Gadamer's life is closely bound to Germany and its intellectual life, though in his retirement he lectured around the world and spent extensive time teaching and lecturing in North America. A look at his life can illuminate Germany's century as well as the context for his philosophical work. The work, however, is not to be understood merely within this context, for, as Gadamer himself has often argued, a philosophical or literary work always surpasses what the author understands. In addition, this German philosopher found himself with audiences and a readership worldwide.

“Art lies in its fulfillment” - “Die Kunst ist im Vollzug.” This laconic statement from the late essay “Wort und Bild - 'so wahr, so seiend'” (GW 8, 391) summarizes a facet of the hermeneutic experience that receives special emphasis in the final phase of Gadamer's thought. As my provisional translation suggests, the statement, in its concise German form, defies translation. The fulfillment Gadamer has in mind is not the act by which an artist completes a work of art but rather that fulfillment, in the sense of a carrying out, or realization, that occurs every time a work is understandingly read, heard, or seen. In this essay I shall probe the hermeneutic scope of what Gadamer calls this fulfillment, or carrying out, of the work of art. Taking a cue from Gadamer himself, I shall use lyric poetry as the paradigm for such fulfillment, although the conclusions reached will obtain for Gadamer's understanding of aesthetic experience in general. My essay begins, then, with the cardinal features of the hermeneutic experience as a linguistic phenomenon and then moves on to an in-depth look at the properly speculative dimension of poetic speech.

No one would disagree that the consideration of language stands at the center of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. Truth and Method makes this obvious. Whoever follows the discussions and descriptions in the first two parts of the book can only affirm the logical development that leads to the consideration of language. As the work develops, we find again and again the principal theme to be the understanding: “the phenomena of understanding and of the correct interpretation of what has been understood” (TM 1). The historically effective consciousness, for which the “historicity of the understanding” is to be shown as a hermeneutical principle, is above all the history of transmitted texts. The relationship of the text and the interpreter is always a “conversation”; the logic of which is the “logic of question and answer.” All these concepts, central to Gadamer's hermeneutics, point to forms of language, which can only be satisfactorily clarified in a treatment of its linguisticality.

For Hans-Georg Gadamer, ancient philosophy consists, first and foremost, of the writings of Plato and Aristotle. As he points out in the lectures he gave on The Beginning of Philosophy, they left us the first complete texts. What we know of the “presocratics” is derived from fragments, many taken (out of context) from the texts of Plato and Aristotle. The meaning of these fragments can be determined, Gadamer argues, only by looking at them in their context, both textual and historical. To discover the “beginning of philosophy,” Gadamer thus insists that we must proceed through a study of the writings of Plato and Aristotle. Because Aristotle was a student of Plato who, despite his criticisms of his teacher, perpetuated the Platonic method of investigating things through logos, we must begin, indeed, primarily with Plato.

That is what Gadamer himself did. His first book, entitled Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, was primarily a study of the Philebus. From the very beginning, Gadamer announced, he was interested in Plato’s philosophy as it speaks to us today (PDE 7). Writing directly under the influence of his teacher, Martin Heidegger, Gadamer thought that he was able to recapture the original experience of philosophy by reading the dialogues – the equivalent as it were, in Edmund Husserl’s terms, of returning to the things themselves. As a result, even though Gadamer’s understanding of some important aspects of Plato’s philosophy changed (particularly with regard to Plato’s relation to Aristotle), Gadamer continued to find the first and perhaps purest expression of the character and grounds of his own work in Plato.

The great challenge of the coming century, both for politics and for social science, is that of understanding the other. The days are long gone when Europeans and other “Westerners” could consider their experience and culture as the norm toward which the whole of humanity was headed, so that the other could be understood as an earlier stage on the same road that we had trodden. Now we sense the full presumption involved in the idea that we already possess the key to understanding other cultures and times.

But the recovery of the necessary modesty here seems always to threaten to veer into relativism, or a questioning of the very ideal of truth in human affairs. The very ideas of objectivity, which underpinned our social science, seemed hard to combine with that of fundamental conceptual differences between cultures, so that real cultural openness seemed to threaten the very norms of validity on which social science rested. What often does not occur to those working in these fields is the thought that their whole model of science is wrong and inappropriate. It is here where Gadamer has made a tremendous contribution to twentieth century thought, for he has proposed a new and different model, which is much more fruitful, and shows promise of carrying us beyond the dilemma of ethnocentrism and relativism.

Comedy is notoriously resistant to theorization. There is, after all, something inescapably comic and self-defeating about the scholar, oblivious to comedy's charms, searching out its origins or trying to account for its effects. In Cicero's De Oratore, one of the interlocutors in the discussion of the comic notes that everyone “who tried to teach anything like a theory or art of this matter proved themselves so conspicuously silly that their very silliness is the only laughable thing about them.” Small wonder then, that at the conclusion of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose the sole manuscript of Aristotle's treatise on comedy, the counterpart to his discussion of tragedy in The Poetics, should perish and a fire destroy the monastery library in which the corpus of classical learning has been preserved. But the situation is, of course, more complicated than Eco's fable suggests, both because of widely known alternate accounts of comedy in the classical tradition and of the presence of the outlines of a theory of the genre in The Poetics itself. Any discussion of theories of comedy in the Renaissance will inevitably emphasize the importance of these resources in sixteenth-century discussions of the issue.

This approach runs certain risks: there were, after all, sometimes divergent conceptions of comedy in the period. Moreover, Shakespeare’s comedies in particular resist theoretical and generic pigeonholing.

Shakespeare's “romances,” the four plays written toward the close of his theatrical career, can be seen as his most experimental and, in some respects, his most daring theatrical ventures. They elude easy definition as comedy, tragedy, or history. Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest constitute in modern critical discourse a grouping of plays set off from the rest of his dramatic works. But what they share generically, and indeed what they are, may not be entirely self-evident. The first folio of 1623, which printed all of them but Pericles (added in the third folio of 1664), is no help. It placed The Tempest and The Winter's Tale among the comedies and Cymbeline among the tragedies. Clearly all are comedies in the formal sense in that they end not in death but in the happiness of reunions and/or promised marriages. Another generic term for them is “tragicomedy,” but this does not so much define them as simply describe the mixture of threatened tragedy and comic conclusion each contains. While historically the individual plays have been appreciated and performed – The Tempest in particular because of its apparent self-referentiality in seeming to relate Shakespeare's own art to Prospero's magic – earlier readers and audiences often found them, in terms of Shakespeare's career, an apparent falling off from the intensity and gravity of the great tragedies. It is, in fact, an accomplishment of twentieth-century criticism to have rediscovered the sophistication and seriousness of the four plays and to find fascination in their interrelatedness.

Romans laughed at a rich variety of comic entertainments, some surviving today only in fragments: scurrilous Fescennine verse, coarse, improvisational farce (fabula Atellana), mime (fabula planipedia or riciniata), drama featuring Italian characters in Italian settings (fabula togata). They also enjoyed the fabula palliata (a play dressed in a Greek cloak), in other words, a play set in Greece featuring Greek characters in Greek costumes. Deriving from Menander (fourth century bc) and other Greek writers, this kind of play also became known as New Comedy, in contradistinction to Old Comedy, the satirical, political, fantastic, obscene, and profound romps of the earlier Aristophanes (fifth century bc). Both Greek and Roman New Comedy featured stock characters like the old man (senex), young girl (virgo), and clever slave (servus callidus); the action generally involved forbidden love affairs, misunderstandings, and confusions of identity.

The works of two playwrights – Plautus and Terence – largely constitute the extant corpus of Roman comedy. Inventive and exuberant, Plautus (c. 205–184 bc) emphasizes musical elements and verbal jokes. His twentyone surviving plays include a mythological travesty (Amphitruo), deceptions (Pseudolus, Epidicus), confusions of identity (Menaechmi, Casina), a revels (Stichus), and a moral fable (Captivi). The six surviving plays of Terence (c. 160 bc) thoughtfully adapt conventions to explore human relations.

Men and women meet, match, marry, and mate. This is the eternal story which Shakespeare's comedies retell again and again:

1. Jack shall have Jill;

2. Nought shall go ill:

The details may vary considerably – and all is not always well – but in every comedy this basic formula remains the same. Sometimes men chase after women. Sometimes women chase after men. Often men pursue women who pursue other men who pursue women, giving us the mad merry-go-rounds of love we find in plays like A Midsummer Night's Dream or The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Frequently women turn themselves into men for a while, like Julia, Viola, or Rosalind. Less often men get themselves turned into women, like Falstaff, or, like Bottom, into beasts. But even if their actual shape or sex remains unchanged, everyone is in some way altered by love, transmuted into something rich and strange, or “metamorphis'd” like Proteus and Valentine (Two Gentlemen of Verona, 1.1.66, 2.1.30). The experience of passion changes everything: one's view of the world, of the beloved, even – or above all – one's own sense of self. Characters who, out of youth, inexperience, or disinclination had hitherto remained untouched by love suddenly find themselves caught up in the maelstrom of desire where everything is thrown into moral and emotional chaos before falling into a new Gestalt of socialized couples which represents the final (and, with luck, stable) product of this mysterious process of human natural selection.

Shakespeare's comedies touch on “matters of state” in two ways: the workings of law or the exercise of authority may give them a threatening or problematic edge; and, despite their exotic settings and fantastic actions, some of the comedies also bear the impress of the political conditions and anxieties of early modern England. Four plays – The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, and The Tempest – turn dramatically on legal or political questions. In three of them, persons appear under guard or in chains, and death sentences impend; The Tempest employs the invisible or virtual chains of Prospero's magic, and death is a possible though unspoken penalty for his traitorous brother. All four plays climax in scenes of trial or judgment. In all, the principle of mercy or the bounty of fortune eventually overrides or skirts or deflects the rigors of law – at least on the face of it, and at least for some persons. Yet both justice and mercy prove questionable, through their arbitrariness, their incompleteness, or their very theatricality. The same four plays, like most Shakespearean comedies, are set in remote or fabulous realms – Ephesus, Venice, Vienna, and “an uninhabited island” somewhere between Tunis and Naples – where things are sometimes delightfully and sometimes disturbingly different. But these places would also have had a familiar aspect for Elizabethan and Jacobean playgoers. They are versions of London or England, or of their possible futures, and their dukes shadow England's rulers, or their menacing foes and rivals. No less than modern audiences and critics, Shakespeare's original audiences were alert to the political resonances of plays – their “application,” as it was called. These four comedies offer ample materials for the practice of “application.”

As a dramatic form, comedy can exist without laughter, but most of the plays that we consider comedies are engines of laughter, and one of the great pleasures of comic theatre is the feeling of exhilaration and release that laughter provides. Despite much theorizing, the causes of laughter and its significance in human life remain a mystery. The impulse to laugh, for one thing, is deeply equivocal. At times, as when we laugh “with” someone, laughter may be a mechanism by which we identify with another human being, a means of psychological and social bonding. At other times, as when we laugh “at” someone, the same physical reaction may be a form of aggressive self-assertion. The former kind of laughter, in which human and societal divisions are dissolved in communal merriment, we might call, loosely following Bakhtin, carnivalesque. The latter, in which such divisions are perversely reinforced, we might call Hobbesian, after Thomas Hobbes, who defined laughter as an expression of superiority, a feeling of “sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others.” Both kinds of laughter, curiously, can strengthen certain kinds of social communion: the carnivalesque, by casting wide the net of community, implying that we are all, at some level, one; the Hobbesian, by affirming the superiority of one community in opposition to an individual or group outside it. Romantic and Saturnalian comedy tend towards carnivalesque laughter; satiric comedy, towards Hobbesian.

Desiring to equate “stage love” with “true love,” Viola, the heroine of Shakespeare in Love, alludes to the corporeal conundrum that weaves through Shakespeare's “transvestite” comedies – Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, and As You Like It – where boy actors playing women cross-dress as men in dazzling doubles acts that offer up a spectrum of flexible sex-gender identities, confounding the body's “truth.” Viola herself performs an equally provocative doubles act: fulfilling her wish to be “Valentine and Silvia too,” she breaks and remakes the gender conventions of the all-male Elizabethan stage, and does it twice. Disguised as “Thomas Kent,” she auditions for Shakespeare's company by reading Two Gentleman of Verona's Valentine (3.1.174-81), wins the part of Romeo and becomes Will Shakespeare's “true love” as well as his authorial muse; for their “real-life” story, in which Viola's romance with Will and the theatre momentarily postpones an arranged marriage with Lord Wessex, grounds Romeo and Juliet's fictional one. The film articulates the connection between the two by cross-cutting between bedroom and stage and, as pillow-talk transforms into theatrical poetry, by linguistic “cross-dressing”: Will's lines are revoiced by the “real” boy actor playing Juliet, Viola's by “Thomas Kent” as Romeo. When Will, in bed, slyly asks, “Will thou leave me so unsatisfied?” and Viola responds, “That's my line,” prompting Will's “It's my line, too,” textual mischief heightens their sexual pleasure, foreshadowing another transformation. For when the real boy actor's voice changes, Viola plays Juliet to Will's Romeo – a performative transgression protected by none other than a fairy-godmother-like Queen Elizabeth, who affirms Shakespeare as the poet of true love, enabling his commercial success. Finally, both stories of lost love again are transformed through the film's fantasy ending, which rhymes two images: Will, in his study, writing Viola's name and her first line in Twelfth Night (“What country, friends, is this?”) on a blank parchment page; and Viola herself, walking on an expansive sandy shore.

Both the linguistic detail and the cultural ramifications of Shakespeare's comic language are extremely complex. In order to elucidate them, what I propose to do is focus on four interrelated themes, illustrating each one by reference to one or two particular plays: rhetoric and society in Love's Labor's Lost; logic and laughter in As You Like It; gender and language in Measure for Measure and As You Like It; and context and quotation in Twelfth Night.

Rhetoric and society

A chief resource for the language of Shakespeare’s comedies and a source of the ideas about language debated in them is the art of rhetoric. Elizabethan rhetoric has often been associated almost exclusively with stylistic ornamentation and obscure names for figures of speech, but for the Elizabethans much more was at stake in their adaptation of this ancient art of persuasion to social and literary uses of the English tongue. An ideal of eloquence and its constitutive power for social organization was key.

“And where does the dog come in?,” the players in Shakespeare in Love keep asking. This is one of the film's running gags about setting supposed high art within the context of hard economic forces. Dogs pull the punters in, it is implied; so to be popular a play must have its dog and, by wider implication, its clown scenes. The joke is based on some truth. Several extant plays have scenes with dogs, and many more have their clowns. Some even incorporate bears. Mucedorus (1588-98), one of the most popular plays on the public stage, reprinted at least fifteen times over seventy years, has a scene early on in which Mouse, the clown, probably first played by the great Richard Tarlton, exits backwards tumbling over a bear, and Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale (1610) surely glances at this tradition in the famous stage direction that has Antigonus “Exit pursued by a bear” (3.3.58). Bears would not be difficult to get hold of, particularly as some playhouses did double duty as bear pits, but a bear part might sometimes be taken by a man in a bear suit. Mouse jokes about the probability that the bear rumored to be on the loose “cannot be a Beare, but some Divell in a Beares Doublet” (1.2.3-4). The joke could work either way, allowing for either a real bear or a man in a bear suit to collide with Mouse.

In the opening scene of The Two Gentlemen of Verona the title characters have an abstract, literary debate about love, introducing their ideas with the formula “writers say” (1.1.43, 46).1 The principal lovers at the beginning of the play are Proteus and Julia, who communicate by letter and whom we never see together until Act 2 scene 2, when they are forced to part. Love seems a matter of words, disembodied and unfulfilled, all theory and no practice. In Act 2 scene 5, however, Launce, the play's principal clown, gives a different view of it. When his colleague Speed asks about Proteus and Julia, “how stands the matter with them?” Launce replies, “Marry, thus: when it stands well with him, it stands well with her” (19-21). In our era, sex has been as relentlessly theorized as any human activity. For Shakespeare's clowns it is a simple, practical matter. There is nothing to debate, though there may be something to illustrate: elsewhere in the scene Launce uses his staff as a comic prop; he could use it here.

Launce’s name, a variant spelling of “lance,” makes this sort of comedy appropriate to him. Moreover, he is accompanied in his major scenes by his dog Crab. It is not just that sex brings out the animal in humanity, though Shakespeare uses that idea elsewhere: Falstaff appears for his final encounter with the wives of Windsor as a stag at rutting-time, and in Cymbeline Posthumus imagines that Jachimo in bed with Imogen “Like a full-acorned boar . . . / Cried ‘O!’ and mounted” (2.5.16–17).

Stephen Gosson might treble and intensify his famous antitheatrical malediction could he know what a cliché of theatre history one sentence of it has become:

It is time to take Gosson seriously, to identify Shakespeare as one of the ransackers and to treat his Italian stories as a chapter in the history of ransacking, which also entails treating ransacking itself as a first premise of Renaissance dramaturgy.

Ever since Chaucer’s Clerk and Franklin told tales from the Decameron, English literature has borne traces of Italian stories, though to call them “Italian” is to dismiss their remote origins, in many cases lost in the distance of antiquity and Indo-European folklore. It was the Renaissance versions, however, the “mery bookes of Italie” that delighted sixteenth-century English readers and, according to Roger Ascham, undermined their faith and morals. Playwrights in those times before copyright laws were under no pressure to invent original stories and instead valued new presentation of old material. Italy was the contemporary crucible of dramatic theory and Tasso, foremost among theorists, wrote that originality in dramatic composition should consist in form rather than in matter.

In Shakespeare's day, long after the Reformation, the calendar as established by the Church, with its series of days consecrated to saints and its fixed and movable feasts, still played a role of major importance. It constituted a matrix of time, the effect of which was to subordinate events of secular life to those of the sacred cycle of the year (the movable feasts of the Christian liturgy governed by the Easter cycle and ranging from Shrove Tuesday to Corpus Christi) and to commemorate a host of popular beliefs and folkloric traditions that had developed over centuries. The year was, by and large, divided into two halves: the winter or sacred half, ranging from Christmas to 24 June (which corresponded to Midsummer but also to the latest possible date for the feast of Corpus Christi); and the summer half, with its mainly agrarian feasts and host of local and occasional celebrations, which went from 25 June to Christmas.

Shakespeare, as a playwright, is unique in the place and importance he ascribes to popular festivity and holidays, thus giving what might have been regarded as “airy nothing” a “local habitation and a name” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.16–17). He indeed includes all and sundry, court and country, in his festive kaleidoscope firmly set on the fertile ground of the variegated traditions and customs of “Merry England,” and this without nostalgia or satire.