Knights and Hawkes: inside Shakespeare's dream

Was Cordelia real?

In May 1994, an undergraduate called Pamela Bunn posted a comment in the online community known as Shaksper, asking about Cordelia’s "character development." Bunn was wondering how to best convey on stage all the large emotions Cordelia would be feeling in the opening of King Lear. Terence Hawkes, one of the academics who brought the ideas of Derrida, Foucault and other post modernists to Britain, responded like this:

Cordelia is not a real, live flesh and blood human being. In consequence, she has no ‘character’, and it does not ‘develop’. To suppose otherwise, as your teachers have apparently encouraged you to do, is to impose the modes of 19th and 20th century art on that of an earlier period which knew nothing of them. It is, in short, to turn an astonishing and disturbing piece of 17th century dramatic art, whose mode is emblematic, into a third rate Victorian novel, whose mode is realistic. Cordelia has no private motives, or emotions, other than those clearly presented in the play as part of its thematic structure. The play uses her to raise matters of large public concern such as duty, deference, the nature of kingship, the right to speak, the function of silence, the roles available to women in a male-dominated world, and so on. These are not the newly-minted slogans of wild-eyed Cultural Materialist revolutionaries, but the fundamental principles on which informed and entirely respectable analysis of the plays has proceeded for fifty years and more. Read the fine and justly famous essay by L.C.Knights, "How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?". It was first published in 1933.

Another way of putting this is to say that the whole play (and only the words of the play) is what matters, not what Knights calls the abstractions of the plot and characters. To talk about Cordelia’s motivations and thoughts is to talk about something not written, and is thus bad criticism. On this view, the characters of the play are not persons, but are "symbols of a poetic vision."

The historical argument for this perspective is that drama before the age of Shakespeare was largely that of the morality play, in which archetypes were used to make moral points. The most obvious descendant of that sort of drama are the characters in Ben Jonson who represent certain "humours"—these are not individuals, but types, comparable with the work of the Roman playwright Terence. To the contemporary audience, Shakespeare was more like this, part of a culture of sermons and speeches.

Here is how Knights expressed the argument:

A Shakespeare play is a dramatic poem. It used action, gesture, formal grouping and symbols, and it relies upon the general conventions governing Elizabethan plays… its end is to communicate a rich and controlled experience by means of words—words used in a way which, without some training, we are no longer accustomed to respond… To stress in the conventional way character or plot or any of the other abstractions that can be made, is to impoverish the total response.

He then quotes two other critics, first M.C. Bradbrook,

It is in the total situation rather than in the wrigglings of individual emotion that the tragedy lies.

And then G. Wilson Knight,

We should not look for perfect verisimilitude to life, but rather see each play as an expanded metaphor… The persons, ultimately, are not human at all, but purely symbols of a poetic vision.

But impressive as Knights’ essay is (and Hawkes was summarising Knights), what does it amount to? As a commenter on Shaksper said, "We are all deeply indebted to Terence Hawkes for alerting us to the remarkable discovery that fictional characters aren’t real people."

Seeing the text as a whole doesn’t negate the idea that character matters. The argument is really to declaim a single vision of drama for the period, and then to assume Shakespeare fits that vision rather than alters it.

Indeed, Knights’ basic argument—that we cannot infer anything about a character that is not stated in the text—is flat wrong.

The rest of this essay is for paid subscribers. Below the paywall, you can find out why L.C. Knights was wrong. (But also a little bit right...) And you’ll learn the difference between "opaque" and "transparent" criticism, one of the most useful models for how we talk about literature.

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