Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism

The problem is brought into being by the new status of romantic love. The Renaissance is the historical moment when love begins to be understood as the ground of marriage based on consent. Now that the ideal of marriage is once again open to question, the crisis which occurred in the Renaissance is more readily visible to us. In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde passionate love does not necessarily lead to marriage: indeed, the question does not even arise, though we might think that it would have solved the problem of lovers separated by war. Elsewhere in Chaucer, perhaps because of the influence of the Italian Renaissance on his work, it is possible to trace a much more modern view. But even in Antony and Cleopatra, two centuries later, as in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, romantic love is dangerous, a distraction, ‘dotage’. In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, desire is moralized and spiritualized, domesticated to become the basis of the nuclear family.

The problems of modern theorizing about how to approach Shakespeare are at their clearest with deconstruction. Its firm opposition to hierarchical structures which maintain settled value-systems makes its advocates fundamentally hostile to the concept of a ‘sacred Shakespeare’, with a holy ‘canon’, and all the minutely detailed editorial labours on the text which go with that concept. This position the deconstructionists share with all the post-structuralists who focus on the responses of the modern reader rather than the original compositions themselves. It seems a little ironical that Shakespeare himself should show himself to be a perfect deconstructionist in at least one of his great plays, Troilus and Cressida. It is a play notable above all for the way it takes the oldest and most famous of all literary stories, Homer’s Iliad, and undermines everything it has traditionally been taken to stand for. The play questions all the traditional value-systems by giving them a broad context which subverts what they seem to uphold.

This way of reading the plays as poems was consistent with the Russian Formalist approach and the New Criticism which flourished especially in the USA in the years following the Second World War. Both these approaches were broadly structuralist. They existed at least in part as a reaction against political readings and critical postures. The New Criticism devoted itself to close reading of the text alone, free from any moral, political or social postures. It saw paradox or significant ambiguity as the finest kind of poetry, a form of expression which embodied the inherent complexity of any meaningful statement. Poetry, as W.H. Auden put it in one of his characteristically throwaway remarks, is the exact expression of mixed feelings. The New Criticism became a popular way of reading texts for several reasons. One was that at the height of the Cold War literature was thought to be really accessible only if the reader was politically and socially neutral. Another was that the moralistic values which literature was expected to teach (and of which F.R. Leavis was the increasingly influential exponent) were matters of sensitivity and sensibility for which paradox and ambiguity were the best form of expression. Thus Shakespeare’s plays had to be approached as poems expressing the paradoxes inherent in their ruling image-patterns.