Recovering and Reconstructing Leftist Shakespeares
by Jeffrey Butcher
B.A. in English, June 2007, The Ohio State University M.A. in English, June 2009, Eastern Michigan University
A Dissertation submitted to
The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
May 18, 2014
Dissertation directed by
Ayanna Thompson Professor of English
The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Jeffrey Michael Butcher has passed the Final Examination for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy as of March 25th, 2014. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.
Recovering and Reconstructing Leftist Shakespeares
Jeffrey Butcher
Dissertation Research Committee:
Ayanna Thompson, Professor of English, Dissertation Director
Alexa Huang, Professor of English, of East Asian Language and Literature, and of Theatre and Dance, Committee Member
Robert McRuer, Professor of English, Committee Member
ii
©Copyright 2014 by Jeffrey Butcher All rights reserved
iii
Dedication
The author wishes to dedicate
“Recovering and Reconstructing Leftist Shakespeares”
to
Mom
iv
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to give special thanks to
Dad,
Ayanna Thompson, Alexa Huang, Daniel Gilfillan,
Michael Noschka, Karen Lehman, Geoff Way, Patrick Blackburn, Mehreen Arif
and
Comrade Sandie (Kitty)
v
Abstract of Dissertation
Recovering and Reconstructing Leftist Shakespeares
Even though the name Karl Marx has survived in Shakespeare studies, more than two decades removed from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, Marxist
Shakespeare scholars tend to shy away from deep political polemics. Marxism, in general, has lost its political charge in academia as it has become canonized as a cultural and intellectual tradition. In “Recovering and Reconstructing Leftist Shakespeares,” I aim to recover a neglected Marxist history and reconstruct a Leftist political discourse in
Shakespeare studies by retrieving the politics of Vladimir Lenin. To accomplish this, I turn to Shakespeare’s history in the American proletarian movement of the 1920s and
1930s—a Leftist movement characterized by its support of Marxism-Leninism.
By examining American proletarian literary theory, appropriations and adaptations of Shakespeare, and creative writing, I exhume this buried tradition and provide a corrective history of Shakespeare’s cultural authority. I examine the relationships between art and propaganda and between proletarian culture and popular culture, and I advocate an active Leftist partisan approach to Shakespeare studies. A
Leftist approach will take the intellectual Marxist tradition and re-politicize it by focusing on economic and political class relations that will complement gender, race, religious, and materialist theories. I argue that class is a social dynamic that is not mutually exclusive from any form of discrimination, and a shift to class-specific relationships with
Shakespeare will ultimately complement progressive theoretical discourses.*
* All citations of William Shakespeare’s plays are based on the texts as they appear in William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, 2nd ed., eds. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 2008). vi
Table of Contents
Dedication ...... iv
Acknowledgments ...... v
Abstract of Dissertation ...... vi
Introduction: Re-Versing Political Shakespeares ...... 1
Part I: Recovery
Chapter 1: A Revived History: Shakespeare’s Proletarian Cultural Authority ...... 33
Chapter 2: Leftist Hamletism: The Exorcism of the Bourgeois Spirit ...... 69
Part II: Reconstruction
Chapter 3: Hamlet and Shylock; Revolutionists and Artists ...... 102
Chapter 4: The “Non-accommodated” Proletariat: A Leftist Shakespeare Narrative ..... 134
Conclusion: Go Left, Young Scholars! ...... 165
Bibliography ...... 186 Introduction: Re-Versing Political Shakespeares
Marxism Sanitized
An uncommitted Leftist political perspective currently plagues Shakespeare studies. Even though the name Karl Marx has survived in Shakespeare studies, more than two decades removed from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, Marxist
Shakespeare scholars tend to shy away from deep political class polemics. In the 1980s, cultural clashes between Western capitalism and communist ideologies of the East provided a political link to Marx that carried over to Shakespeare criticism. With the new historicism of Stephen Greenblatt and cultural materialism of Alan Sinfield and Jonathan
Dollimore, we saw the emergence of innovative ways to approach Shakespeare.1 But now, many liberal Shakespeare scholars retreat from the political controversy inherent in these theoretical discourses. It appears that Marxist methods applied to Shakespeare scholarship more often than not are concerned with subject-object theories, re- historicizing early modern material culture, and fetishizing commodity fetishism—rather than concerned with a return to Marx as a guide for political practice.
The absence of a firm left-wing political role for Shakespeare in Marxist contexts is apparently still due in large part to the specter of Stalinism. In the introduction to
Marxist Shakespeares, Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow maintain that Marxism did not die with the collapse of the Soviet Union, yet understandably they feel the need to make a distinction between Marxism and Stalinism:
1 See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) and Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds., Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, 2nd ed., (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). 1
Marxism was used by repressive regimes; and there is no dodging that part
of its complex history. But the sclerotic form of state socialism developed
by the Soviet Union is not equivalent to the varied body of Marxist
thought, an intellectual tradition that not only provides the most trenchant
analysis of the operation of capital that we have, but also a highly
developed body of work on issues such as the operation of ideology, the
constitution of class societies, nationalism, historical periodization, and
the historicity of literary forms and genres.2
I take away two crucial points from this passage. The first point is that Marxism does have a complex history. Howard and Shershow rightfully respond to critics that the
Soviet Union is not a universal signifier for Marxism. The next point I want to make, which becomes somewhat problematic, is that they endorse a Marxism that has been reduced to an “intellectual tradition.” Howard and Shershow state, “The collapse of authoritarian communist regimes offers a perfect opportunity for a fresh examination of
Marxist writings on a host of often neglected topics.”3 These topics, to name a few, include chapters on historicizing the early modern moment, discovering more about mercantilism and geography in Renaissance England, rewriting Marx into a textual representation of Hamlet, and illustrating women’s roles in material production during the early modern period. All of these are compelling analyses and are extremely useful to
Shakespeare and early modern studies, and they do well to complement the intellectual tradition of Marxism. With an addition of a framework that includes class politics, these analyses could really flourish.
2 Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow, “Introduction: Marxism Now; Shakespeare Now,” Marxist Shakespeares, eds. Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow (London: Routledge, 2001) 5. 3 Ibid. 2
When I say class politics, I am referring to social stratification based on how the economic mode of production affects economic consumption. In other words, I do not mean universal classifications, but rather class organized by economic conditions.
Because economic advantages and disadvantages impact collective liberties at large, I use the term class to make distinctions between overrepresented and underrepresented groups that respectively share social privilege or social inequality. Vladimir Lenin claimed that the working masses must “learn to apply in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist estimate of all aspects of the life and activity of all classes, strata, and groups of the population.”4 Keeping this in mind, we can comprehend that factors such as race, gender, disabilities, and religion are not mutually exclusive from economic class stratification. In most cases, they are mutually determining. Shakespeare scholars have touched on this determining relationship. I believe that a Leftist approach to early modern studies will make it even clearer than it already is.
In her book, Class, Critics, and Shakespeare: Bottom Lines on the Culture Wars,
Sharon O’Dair claims, “Speaking practically or empirically, this is to say that in the thirty years since the Left has pursued the politics of race and gender, the admirable and important gains made there have been accompanied by serious losses in the politics of class.”5 O’Dair is referring to the New Left, or the cultural Left. O’Dair makes a strong case by asserting that the New Left struggles to bring class into discussions about race, gender, sexuality, and religion. This is not to say that we should neglect other issues by focusing only on class politics, but the Old Left may prove to be valuable.
4 Vladimir Lenin, What is to be Done?: Burning Questions of Our Movement, The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1975) 42. 5 Sharon O’Dair, Class, Critics, and Shakespeare: Bottom Lines on the Culture Wars (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000) 118. 3
O’Dair’s book was published over a decade ago, and we still have yet to see scholarly trends that emphasize politics of class by turning to the Old Left. Sinfield, one of the editors of the groundbreaking Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural
Materialism, agrees that recent materialist approaches to Shakespeare have value, but
“eventually the political edge is blunted.”6 While making a valid point, even Sinfield does not propose a definitive direction for the unfinished business of cultural materialism to take in regards to the future of politics in literary theory in his cultural materialism revival project. I suggest that the key is to take the intellectual Marxist tradition and politicize it by privileging socioeconomic class.
It is not literary scholars alone who are culpable for the de-politicization of
Marxism. Marxism in general has lost its political punch. While Marx once stood as a legitimate threat to capitalism, he has now been reified into multiple signifiers that assist in bolstering capitalist hegemony through his inclusion in cultural studies, classical literature, and even business blueprints. As Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and
Slavoj Žižek argue, current manifestations of Marx include a “Marx of the postmodern sophists” or “the ‘classical’ author to whom a (marginal) place can be accorded in the academy” deny “politics proper.”7 It is Vladimir Lenin, according to Jean-Jacques
Lecercle, who is “the embodiment of Marxism unrecycled.”8 Lenin is Marx politicized; he is the link to revive a political Marx. This is why I agree with Budgen, Kouvelakis, and Žižek that “the name ‘Lenin’ is of urgent necessity for us precisely now, at a time
6 Alan Sinfield, Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality: Unfinished Business in Cultural Materialism (London: Routledge, 2006) 4. 7 Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek, “Introduction: Repeating Lenin,” Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth, eds. Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007) 2. 8 Jean-Jacques Lecercle, “Lenin the Just, or Marxism Unrecycled,” Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth, eds. Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007) 269. 4 when very few people seriously consider possible alternatives to capitalism any longer,” in a time when “it has…become easier to imagine the end of the world than a far more modest change in the mode of production.”9
In “Recovering and Reconstructing Leftist Shakespeares,” I make a case for a recharged political intervention into Shakespeare studies. I accomplish this by retrieving a Leftist—a Leninist—tradition in art and literature: Shakespeare and the American proletarian tradition of the 1920s and 1930s. This project is timely for several reasons.
In addition to the need to reform political representations in literary studies, in the last decade several studies and collections have been published revealing that art and literature in Eastern Communist countries, past and present, centered on the authority of
Shakespeare.10 These studies do not investigate Western Leftism, but they afford the opportunity to engage in Shakespeare and communist ideologies in the West. Whereas
Marxist Shakespeares was published less than a decade after the fall of communism and perhaps needed to tread lightly, we are distanced enough to consider bringing Leninism back to Marxist literary theory in Shakespeare studies.
Very recently, Bruce E. Altschuler and Michael A. Genovese co-edited a collection titled Shakespeare and Politics: What a Sixteenth-Century Playwright Can Tell
Us about Twenty-First-Century Politics. The essays in this collection do well to discuss
9 Budgen, Kouvelakis, and Žižek, “Repeating Lenin” 1. 10 Three major texts from the last decade that explicitly assess Shakespeare as a part of Communist literary politics include the following: Irena R. Makaryk and Joseph G. Price, eds., Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006); Irena R. Makaryk, Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn: Les Kurbas, Ukrainian Modernism, and Early Soviet Cultural Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); and Alexander Shurbanov and Boika Sokolova, Painting Shakespeare Red: An East-European Appropriation (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001). For more scholarship about Shakespeare and Communism, see Alexander Parfenov and Joseph G. Price, eds., Russian Essays on Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998); Roman Samarin and Alexander Nikolyukin, eds., Shakespeare in the Soviet Union: A Collection of Articles, trans. Averil Pyman (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966); and George Gibian, “Shakespeare in Soviet Russia,” Russian Review 11.1 (Jan. 1952): 24-34. 5 the so-called “universality” of political themes in Shakespeare’s plays. They discuss political corruption, globalization, and liberty. While most of the essays appear to be a bit bold in their discussions pertaining to Shakespeare’s universality, those by Sarah A.
Shea, Coyle Neal, and Marlene K. Sokolon demonstrate useful connections between
Shakespeare and twentieth-first-century mass cultural politics.11 While these scholars do not provide Marxist methods in their analyses to challenge Western capitalism, they do ask productive questions and invite answers—answers that I intend to provide by examining Shakespeare and the American Left.
Based on the current state in Shakespeare studies, I would argue that re- politicizing, or re-polemicizing, Shakespeare requires alternative examinations to which we no longer seem accustomed. There is a three volume set on a topic that has been called “alternative Shakespeares.”12 In the introduction to Alternative Shakespeares 3,
Diana E. Henderson discusses how radical theoretical interventions into Shakespeare have become hegemonic practices, but that there are still “truly new dimensions and potential for progressive, engaged forms of analysis in Shakespeare studies.”13 “Leftist
Shakespeares” provides a new dimension to and a progressive analysis of Shakespeare.
Henderson explains that the third volume of Alternative Shakespeares aims to “keep sociopolitical progress within our vision without spending too much time polemicizing
11 Bruce E. Altschuler and Michael A. Genovese, eds., Shakespeare and Politics: What a Sixteenth-Century Playwright can Tell Us about Twenty-First-Century Politics (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2014). Shea discusses Hamlet, contemplation, and political participation (“A Dionysian Hamlet” 47-64); Neal looks at American conceptions of evil and corruption through a reading of Iago (“Why Iago is Evil: Othello and the American Desire to Understand Corruption” 97-104); and Sokolon compares modern CEO’s to tyrannical representations in Richard III (“Richard III, Tyranny, and the Modern Financial Elite” 105-116). 12 These volumes include John Drakakis, ed., Alternative Shakespeares, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2002), first published in 1985; Terence Hawkes, ed., Alternative Shakespeares, vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 2013), first published in 2002; and Diana E. Henderson, ed., Alternative Shakespeares, vol. 3 (London: Routledge, 2008). 13 Diana E. Henderson, “Introduction,” Alternative Shakespeares, vol. 3, ed. Diana E. Henderson (London: Routledge, 2008) 5. 6 differences of method within the field—that is, without engaging in the kind of internecine squabbling and ‘us versus them’ rhetoric.”14 In an ideal world, it would be great to not have to engage in such polemical rhetoric. The truth of the matter is that as long as the capitalist institution continues to contain the masses and sustain the social hierarchy through its ideological apparatuses including the education system, there are surely counterhegemonic methodologies to expand on in Shakespeare studies.
Unfortunately, this means there is going to be us versus them rhetoric. In politics, it is rarely the case that there is not. However, I believe that a Leftist angle can change the nature of the antagonistic rhetoric by its advocacy for a communal effort to challenge the oppressive capitalist apparatuses.
In our current day of global politics, Shakespeare and the American Left can illustrate ways that global relations work through art and literature. Global communist movements of the 1920s and 1930s, including the American Leftist movement, sought to work through many questions that we still debate today and ones that will be answered in my dissertation. These include discussions about the function and nature of literature and its social role. How do art and literature relate to politics? Are art and propaganda mutually exclusive? What sorts of texts fit under the label of literature? And as long as there is social inequality, literary studies have a place in political movements, and there is definitely room for Leftist intervention.
Politics, Leninism, and Proletarian Culture
To remove Lenin from the Stalin’s shadow, I want to clarify that it was not
Stalin’s portrait appearing in American Communist Party pamphlets. It was Lenin’s.
14 Ibid. 7
Articles appearing in American communist-affiliated media were not those written by
Stalin, but those written by Lenin. The fact is that the American Left in the 1920s and
1930s followed what it saw to be a revolutionary Leninist political philosophy. For the most part, the American Communist Party was oblivious to the horrors of Stalinism until the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact in 1939, which catalyzed the dissipation of the
American Communist Party. As such, my historical analysis will not extend past the year
1939.
Like the Žižek camp, I do not mean to propose that we should nostalgically idolize Lenin, the name generally associated with “old dogmatic certainty,” nor do I propose that we should “adjust the old [Communist] program to ‘new conditions.’”
Rather, I agree that “Lenin’s wager—today, in our era of postmodern relativism, more actual than ever—is that truth and partisanship, the gesture of taking sides, are not only not mutually exclusive but condition each other.” “Truth is one-sided” and reflective of an accurate understanding of class consciousness.15 The dialectical nature of truth and partisanship implies that ideopolitical consciousness and political commitment are aligned. The term political, for me, thus refers to the organization of ideological truth and the active practice of that truth. Raising issues pertaining to class politics, I specifically use the term political to discuss ideological consciousness and partisan practices that are motivated by imbalanced economic and civil freedoms.
When I use the term Leftist, I am referring to the Old Leftism, synonymous with the term Marxism-Leninism. Marxism-Leninism, while based on Marx’s economic and political philosophy, separates itself from Marxism in its advocacy for a vanguard party.
My Marxist-Leninist approach is based on Lenin’s concept of the vanguard party as
15 Budgen, Kouvelakis, and Žižek, “Repeating Lenin” 3. 8 outlined in his pamphlet What is to be Done?: Burning Questions of Our Movement. In this political treatise, Lenin argues that revolution must come from the rise of the working class, but only after the working class develops a proletarian political consciousness. According to Lenin, a “class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without” by a vanguard political party, historically that of the communist party.16 He appears to show a lack of confidence in the spontaneous rise of the proletarian. This, however, is not entirely true.
Lenin had confidence in the proletariats and commends their bravery. He acknowledged the greatness in spontaneous proletarian activism: protests and strikes carried out by the workers on their own. These actions, in Lenin’s mind, reflect class consciousness in embryonic form. “The history of all countries,” Lenin states, “shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only a trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc.”17 For a socialist consciousness to fully grow, though, a vanguard party consisting of bourgeois intelligentsia committed to the rise of the proletariat must become organized to provide leadership for the workers. Nonetheless, without initial proletarian backlash, there can be no revolution.
Referring to Marx and Engels as belonging to the “bourgeois intelligentsia,”
Lenin acknowledged that the founding fathers of socialist theory were “educated representatives of the propertied classes.”18 The emphasis on the necessity of a vanguard is the major separation from Marxism. It marks the separation between socialist
16 Lenin, What is to be Done? 24. The emphasis is not mine; it is that of the author and editor. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid 24-25. 9 economic theory and Lenin’s political theory. Marxism was not a proletariat creation; therefore, Lenin proposed that a vanguard needs to supplement proletarian backlash. For
Lenin, economic philosophy and political agitation are crucial to build a collective proletarian class consciousness:
In reality, it is possible to “raise the activity of the working masses” only
when this activity is not restricted to “political agitation on an economic
basis.” A basic condition for the necessary expansion of political agitation
is the organisation of comprehensive political exposure. In no way except
by means of such exposures can the masses be trained in political
consciousness and revolutionary activity.19
The politico-intellectual input that Marxism-Leninism demands implies that a true political consciousness by means of partisanship is put into practice—a unity of economic theory and political practice—in response to all cases of tyranny, oppression, and abuse, no matter what class or group is affected.
From Marxism-Leninism, we get the Communist Party and, consequently, proletarian culture. To this end, I implement Marxism-Leninism, Left, and proletarian as synonymous terms, although the word proletariat will refer to the worker. While views of proletarian culture have dramatically changed and now it is broadly associated with working class culture, proletarian culture materialized as a result of the Marxist-Leninist movement in the early-twentieth-century. This is true of the American proletarian movement. I am not alone in characterizing proletarian culture as a Marxist-Leninist and communist construction. In her book Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S.
Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941, Barbara Foley states that “U.S. proletarian fiction”
19 Ibid 42. 10 means “novels written in the ambience of the Communist-led cultural movement that arose and developed in the United States in the context of the Great Depression” that was written by “conscious participants in a literary movement that named itself
‘proletarian.’”20 Likewise, James F. Murphy, author of The Proletarian Moment: The
Controversy over Leftism in Literature, clarifies that writers who supported the creation of “a new socialist order under the revolutionary leadership of the Communist party…were associated in one way or another with a conscious movement to create
‘proletarian literature.’”21
In my dissertation, I tend to concentrate on class as a bond connecting a diverse population based on economic status. It is a topic that warrants close attention. This is not to say that I am carelessly ignoring the complex cultural issues within the American communist movement. In the United States, the proletarian tradition spread throughout the United States. It was not geographically isolated or representative of only one specific group of people. Prominent African American figures linked to the Harlem
Renaissance such as Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and Paul Robeson championed communism and contributed to the development of American proletarian literature.
Additionally, many African American workers in the South united as members of the
American Communist Party.22 Key female writers including Genevieve Taggard, Tillie
20 Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005) vii. 21 James F. Murphy, The Proletarian Movement: The Controversy over Leftism in Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991) 1. 22 For information on the role that African Americans played in the American Leftist movement, see William J. Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) and James Edward Smethurst, The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 11
Olsen, and Muriel Rukeyser endorsed communism as well.23 And the Jewish immigrant population arguably played the most vital role in the rise of American communism during the 1920s and 1930s. While there were cultural clashes and variances in agendas, the
American Communist Party served as an assemblage that seriously attempted cast racial and gender differences aside for a common cause.
Lenin’s political philosophy is also based on internationalism. Lenin deliberately makes a distinction between “bourgeois nationalism and proletarian internationalism.”24
Literature served as a crucial tool for propagating politics as well as for creating an international proletarian culture. At the Soviet Writers’ Congress in 1934, Maxim Gorky stated, “The high standard demanded of literature, which is being rapidly remoulded by life itself and by the cultural revolutionary work of Lenin’s Party, is due to the high estimation in which the Party holds the importance of the literary art.”25 Lenin emphasized the importance of literature in regards to Party organization nearly thirty years earlier. In his 1905 article “The Party Organisation and Party Literature,” Lenin demands,
Literature must become part of the common cause of the proletariat, “a
cog and a screw” of one single great Social-Democratic mechanism set in
motion by the entire politically-conscious vanguard of the entire working
23 See Constance Coiner, Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) 92-93. 24 Vladimir Lenin, “Two Cultures in Every National Culture,” The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1975) 655. 25 Maxim Gorky, “Soviet Literature,” Soviet Writers’ Congress, 1934: The Debate of Socialist Realism and Modernism in the Soviet Union, ed. H.G. Scott (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977) 67. 12
class. Literature must become a component of organised, planned and
integrated Social-Democratic Party work.26
This article was published in the American-Communist-affiliated newspaper the New
Masses in the October 1929 issue, revealing American Communist Party Leninist sensibilities (not Stalinist ones).27 For Lenin, literature and politics are dialectically related. Literature “must by all means and necessarily become an element of Social-
Democratic Party work, inseparably bound up with the other elements.”28 Literature takes on pedagogical and political roles—maintaining ideological and practical implications.
Recovery: Blacklisting the American Left from Shakespeare Studies?
Despite his role in developing American culture, Shakespeare is rarely mentioned in relation to the American Left and its embrace of Marxism-Leninism. This is in part due to Western aversion to institutionalized communism and the homogenization of mass culture. In his book Shakespeare’s America; America’s Shakespeare, Michael D. Bristol explains the history of the institutionalization of Shakespeare in America. The main argument of Bristol’s book is that “the interpretation of Shakespeare and the interpretation of American political culture are mutually determining practices,” but he admits to being mostly concerned “with the complex links between Shakespeare as a cultural institution and the larger dispensation of bourgeois political economy.”29 By
26 Vladimir Lenin, “The Party Organisation and Party Literature,” The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1975) 149. 27 Vladimir Lenin, “Lenin on Working Class Literature,” trans. Anna Rochester, New Masses Oct. 1929: 7. 28 Lenin, “Party Literature” 149. 29 Michael D. Bristol, Shakespeare’s America; America’s Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1990) 3, 7. 13 claiming that Shakespeare is an institution, it is understandable that Bristol is concerned with hegemonic order and the production of Shakespeare in a capitalist system.
In the sixth chapter of his book, Bristol briefly steps away from bourgeois political economy and turns to Marxist-Leninist Anatoly Lunacharsky’s reception of
Shakespeare. In “Bacon and the Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays,” Lunacharsky shows his respect for Shakespeare and the Bard’s revolutionary use of reason and intellect.
Lunacharsky says, “Reason as a weapon in the struggle for success—this is one aspect of
Shakespeare’s attitude to intellect, which had become such a great force in the world of his time.”30 Bristol acknowledges Lunacharsky’s partiality for Shakespeare while also noting his Bolshevist allegiance. Therefore, Bristol correctly explains, “Given the decidedly Bolshevist orientation of Lunacharsky himself, the radically individualist focus of Shakespearean drama and its articulation of the doctrine ‘all is permitted’ is viewed with considerable ambivalence.”31
From here, Bristol transitions to talking about Americans who were writing at the same time as Lunacharsky. He sees the 1930s as a point in time of historicist readings of
Shakespeare and compares these readings to the “progressive, individualistic, future- oriented Shakespeare described by Lunacharsky.”32 Maybe it is because Lunacharsky’s views of Shakespeare were significantly different from the majority of Marxist-Leninists, or maybe it is because the American Marxist-Leninists did not necessary submit to the
“institutionalized” Shakespeare, but Bristol does not discuss the American Communist
Party when discussing Shakespeare in the 1930s. Due to a lack of sufficient support, the
30 Anatoly Lunacharsky, “Bacon and the Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays,” On Art and Literature (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965) 275. The article was originally published in 1934, after the death of Lunacharsky in 1933. 31 Bristol, Shakespeare’s America 145. 32 Ibid. 14
American proletarian tradition was not a legitimate threat to the hegemony of the bourgeois political economy, but I still think that an interpretation of Shakespeare and the interpretation of American proletarian politics are mutually determining practices worth studying.
Shakespearean scholars Marjorie Garber and Douglas Lanier make similar claims about Shakespeare’s mutually determining relationship with culture. The first sentence in the introduction to Garber’s book Shakespeare and Modern Culture spells out a potent phrase: “Shakespeare makes modern culture and modern culture makes Shakespeare.”33
She confesses that she could put “Shakespeare” in quotations, but that Shakespeare and
“Shakespeare” are “perceptually and conceptually the same from the viewpoint of any modern observer.” Therefore, the phrase “Shakespeare makes modern culture and modern culture makes Shakespeare” is not just true of the current moment; it applies to the viewpoint of any modern observer at any given historical moment.
For Lanier, the “and” separating “Shakespeare and popular culture” signifies a link and a distinction between the two. It marks the divide between popular culture
(lowbrow) and high culture (highbrow). He explains that popular culture, created by the masses, is typically thought to be “aesthetically unsophisticated, disposable, immediately accessible and therefore shallow, concerned with immediate pleasures and effects, unprogressive in its politics, aimed at the lowest common denominator, mass-produced by corporations principally for financial gain”; whereas, high culture is characterized as the exact opposite: “aesthetically refined, timeless, complex and intellectually challenging…”34 Lanier himself does not hold these cynical, reductive views and offers
33 Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare and Modern Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008) xiii. 34 Douglas Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 3. 15 an in-depth study of Shakespop. His arguments are very similar to Garber’s in that
Shakespeare and culture are mutually determining.
I am of a similar opinion. I believe that Shakespeare makes proletarian culture and proletarian culture makes Shakespeare. The problem is that this relationship is not sufficiently described in American Shakespeare criticism. There are other reasons for this. First, let us build on Bristol’s account of the institutionalization of Shakespeare in
America. By the nineteenth-century, Shakespeare was no longer identified solely by his
English heritage. Kim C. Sturgess explains that during the nineteenth-century
Shakespeare had become a naturalized playwright in America: “There was a social context for the appropriation of Shakespeare beyond people’s personal values and tastes…It was in this that made it possible for a naturalised playwright to meet the needs of the still emerging nation of America.”35 In theory, Americans should have repudiated the “Englishness” of Shakespeare. But between 1800 and 1879, the years when England was the “public enemy” and the years that represent the “formation of American national symbols,” “Shakespeare popularised as an appropriated playwright of the USA.”36
Shakespeare became American. More significantly, he became the property of the masses in the United States.
This changed moving into the twentieth-century. In his book
Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, Lawrence W.
Levine argues, “Nineteenth-century America swallowed Shakespeare, digested him and his plays, and made them part of the cultural body.” At this time, Shakespeare represented all classes, not just the elite: “Shakespeare was performed not merely
35 Kim C. Sturgess, Shakespeare and the American Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 100. 36 Ibid 30. 16 alongside popular entertainment as an elite supplement to it; Shakespeare was performed as an integral part of it.”37 However, this shifted: “By the turn of the century Shakespeare had been converted from a popular playwright whose dramas were the property of those who flocked to see them, into a sacred author who had to be protected from ignorant audiences and overbearing actors threatening the integrity of his creations.”38
Because Levine’s study is so widely accepted in American Shakespeare criticism, it is not surprising that the American proletarian experience with Shakespeare has been overlooked. Because today we often associate proletarian culture with popular culture,
Levine’s thesis means that Shakespeare was also removed from proletarian culture. But as I will highlight in the first chapter, proletarian culture and popular culture are two distinct cultures in their own right. For now, I will emphasize a general claim that describes how proletarian culture is different from popular culture: it conveys
“‘revolutionary élan’ and contribute to the overthrow of capitalism.”39 And just as
“Shakespearean allusions and quotations were a regular feature of nineteenth-century newspapers,”40 Shakespearean allusions and citations frequented Leftist writings in the early-twentieth-century.
In actuality, Shakespeare played a significant role in the American proletarian literary movement. Marx had utmost veneration for Shakespeare, and this respect is illustrated in his works. Although the relationship between Marx and Shakespeare has been well-documented, I find it useful to provide a brief description of the relationship.
Marx observes that because Shakespeare was writing during a period of transitioning
37 Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988) 24, 21. 38 Ibid 72. 39 Foley, Radical Representations 128. 40 Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow 37. 17 historical epochs—collapsing feudalism and emergent capitalism—Shakespeare developed into a key literary figure during a key historical moment. Peter Stallybrass provides a captivating account of how Shakespeare affected Marx’s home life.
Stallybrass explains that Marx and his wife Jenny memorized and could recite lines from entire scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. American Leftist Milton Howard notes, “The love of Shakespeare was a veritable cult in Marx’s household.”41 Cult status or not, Marx held play-readings at his house; the group called itself the Dogberry Club named after the comical constable in Much Ado about Nothing.42 Marx mentions Shakespeare by name in The Grundisse, though he does not follow up with an analysis; and he shows an unquestionable interest in Shakespeare’s ghosts in The Communist Manifesto and The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.43 Stallybrass recognizes the reworking of
Hamlet in The Eighteenth Brumaire. He picks apart the lines “Well said, old mole.
Canst work i’th’ earth so fast? / A worthy pioneer” (1.5.164-165) to come to a compelling conclusion: “Hamlet, the dead father, no longer king and royal Dane but mole and pioneer. In appropriating ‘old mole’ as a figure of revolution, Marx brilliantly illuminates, even as he transforms, the politics of the Renaissance play from which he appropriates.”44
Arguably, the most noteworthy Shakespeare moment in Marx’s work appears in
“The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society.” Marx praises Shakespeare for his excellent
41 Milton Howard, “Review and Comment: Smirnov’s ‘Shakespeare,’” New Masses 15 Sept. 1936: 23. 42 Peter Stallybrass, “‘Well grubbed, old mole’: Marx, Hamlet, and the (un)fixing of representation,” Marxist Shakespeares, eds. Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow (London: Routledge, 2001) 20. 43 See Stallybrass; and see Martin Harries, Scare Quotes from Shakespeare: Marx, Keynes, and the Language of Reenchantment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 44 Stallybrass, “Well grubbed” 25. 18 depiction of “the real nature of money” in Timon of Athens.45 Marx is referring to
Timon’s eminent diatribe against the properties of gold. While living as a recluse in the wilderness after naively giving away his fortune, Timon discovers gold while digging for roots, and he responds with a perceptively cynical view of wealth:
Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?
No, gods, I am no idle votarist.
Roots, you clear heavens! Thus much of this will make
Black white, foul fair, wrong right,
Base noble, old young, coward valiant.
Ha, you gods! Why this? What this, you gods? Why, this
Will lug your priests and servants from your sides,
Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads.
This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions, bless th’ accurst,
Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves
And give them title, knee, and approbation
With senators on the bench. This is it
That makes the wappen’d widow wed again;
She whom the spital house and ulcerous sore
Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices
To th’ April day again. Come, damned earth,
45 Karl Marx, “The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society,” The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978) 103. The emphasis is not mine; it is that of the author and editor. 19
Thou common whore of mankind, that putt’st odds
Among the rout of nations. (4.3.26-44)
Later in the same act, Timon addresses gold as “thou visible god” (4.3.391). Marx, as
Jonathan Gil Harris notes, is significantly drawn to Shakespeare’s “trope of inversion.”46
This is corroborated as Marx outlines two main points about the properties of money as expressed in Timon of Athens: “(1) It is the visible divinity—the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries, the universal confounding and overturning of things: it makes brothers of impossibilities. (2) It is the common whore, the common pimp of people and nations.”47 These observations show early traces of
Marx’s theory on commodity fetishism that is elaborated on in Capital. As money is an autonomous entity—a visible god governing the capabilities and properties of a person and his or her social relations—a commodity has mysteriously autonomous properties reflecting “the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves” that result in “sensuous things which are at the same time supra-sensible or social.”48 According to Marx, money and commodities are social things, and humans’ innate characteristics and labor are the objective property of these social things.
Lenin, on the other hand, never mentions Shakespeare in his writings, and he certainly is not a literary theorist. It is unclear whether or not Lenin actually read
Shakespeare. It is also unclear how much time Lenin had to engage in art and literature.
Although there are records that suggest he loved music, believed film to be a useful organizing mechanism, and had been to the Moscow Art Theatre on multiple occasions,
46 Jonathan Gil Harris, Shakespeare and Literary Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) 149. 47 Marx, “The Power of Money” 104. 48 Karl Marx, Capital: Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1990) 164-165. 20
Lenin typically left discussions of art and literature to his associates. Lunacharsky was usually his go-to man. In a reflection piece called “Lenin and the Arts,” Lunacharsky states, “In the course of his life Lenin had no time to engage in anything like a close study of the arts, and since dilettantism had always been hateful to him and alien to his nature he did not like to make any statements on art.”49 Lunacharsky reiterates Lenin’s answer to a question of whether or not he would offer a quote on art: “No, why? I don’t claim to be an expert in the arts. Since you’re a People’s Commissar you ought to be enough of authority yourself.”50 The consensus as Lunacharsky and others point out suggests that Lenin was drawn toward the classics. Vyacheslav Polonsky, based on second-hand accounts, even suggests that Lenin had taken Shakespeare with him on trips abroad.51 Repeated statements by people close to Lenin appear to corroborate that Lenin migrated toward the classics. This sheds light on Lenin’s openness toward teaching the youth about bourgeois culture, even if to merely explicate the harm of it and the cultural accumulation that led to the practice of communism.52
When scholars connect Shakespeare to proletarian culture of twentieth-century
America, they frequently turn to Orson Welles because of his role in providing the masses with a re-popularized Shakespeare by means of new media. Taking advantage of new popular forms of media—radio, recordings, and film—Welles draws our attention
49 Anatoly Lunacharsky, “Lenin and the Arts,” Lenin on Literature and Art, Vladimir Lenin (Wildside Press, 2008) 235. The publisher of Lenin on Literature and Art notes that all translations of texts from this collection are taken from Lenin’s Collected Works in 45 volumes unless otherwise noted. Lunacharsky’s “Lenin and the Arts” comes from Recollections of Lenin (Russia: Partizdat, 1933) 46-50. 50 Ibid 240. This particular quote comes from Anatoly Lunacharsky, “For the Centenary of the Alexandrinsky Theatre,” Epochs of the Alexandrinsky Theatre, Konstantin Derzhavin (Russia: Lengikhl, 1932) ix-xi. 51 See Vyacheslav Polonsky, “Lenin’s Views of Art and Culture,” Artists in Uniform: A Study of Literature and Bureaucratism, Max Eastman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934) 229. 52 See Vladimir Lenin, “The Tasks of the Youth Leagues,” The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1975) 661-674. 21 not just to Shakespeare, but to new forms of media by which to appropriate him. If we are to categorize Welles within a left-wing movement, we should situate him within the
Popular Front. The Popular Front was a movement in the United States that was born during the mid-1930s. It united unionists, communists, bourgeois intellectuals, independent socialists, and activists. For the most part, until the late 1930s, the American
Left battled with the Popular Front. As Michael Denning points out, the Popular Front was controlled by the “fellow-travelers”—Leftist sympathizers, primarily bourgeois intellectuals, who were hesitant to commit to the communist agenda. The heart of the
Popular Front was comprised of “non-Communist socialists and independent leftists, working with Communists and with liberals, but marking out a culture that was neither a
Party nor a liberal New Deal.”53 Orson Welles, like most individuals playing a role in the
Popular Front, wanted to use mass media “to democratize elite culture, expropriating the cultural wealth of the past for the working classes.”54 The want to democratize culture in contrast to the want to create a new culture is what separates the Popular Front from the
American Left.
Welles’ contribution to Shakespeare and culture is invaluable, but his career is more representative of popular culture than it is of proletarian culture. He certainly represented the people, but he profited from the capitalist market when democratizing
Shakespeare. I concede that Welles’ anti-fascist Julius Caesar certainly was backed by political content, thus reflecting a proletarian political consciousness. However, Welles ultimately took advantage of an opportune moment to bring Shakespeare’s plays to many
53 Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1996) 5. Key figures in the Popular Front include Orson Welles, F. O. Matthiessen, Elizabeth Hawes, Carey McWilliams, and Kenneth Burke. 54 Ibid 371. 22 consumers, a smart and timely capitalist maneuver. Michael Anderegg claims that
Welles “attempted to reverse the process whereby Shakespeare had…ceased to be perceived as ‘lowbrow’” and that Welles simultaneously became “a cultural artifact in his own right, someone who was simultaneously an icon of popular and elite culture.”55 His emphasis on access to culture over political consciousness is what makes him a part of the Popular Front rather than the Left.
Reconstruction: What does a Leftist Shakespeare Look Like?
Shakespeare was a part of the American Leftist tradition in a non-traditional manner. Delving into the writings of the American Left, we sometimes see Shakespeare praised and other times see him denigrated. At times, we even see him used as an authorial voice through which to speak. James D. Bloom notes that Mike Gold and
Joseph Freeman, arguably the two most important figures in the American Leftist movement, turned to Shakespeare as an author of choice; but Shakespeare was both
“selectively honored and resisted” by Gold and Freeman.56 In “The Password to
Thought—To Culture,” Gold presents Shakespeare as a figure of high culture and uses
Shakespeare in a narrative to oppose the same high culture.
In this short story, an adolescent boy named David, coming from a working class family, is reprimanded at the workplace for reading. The boss Mr. Neuheim tells David to quit reading about thought and culture, but if David is going to read, the boss tells him
55 Michael Anderegg, Orson Welles: Shakespeare and Popular Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) x. Because this is not a project on the Popular Front or Orson Welles, I do not have the time to spend a large portion of this project discussing Shakespeare and Welles. See Anderegg for a full delineation of the relationship between Shakespeare, Orson Welles, and popular culture. 56 James D. Bloom, Left Letters: The Culture Wars of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman (New York: Columbia Press, 1992) 8. 23 that he should read “good American reading.” We observe that this includes Shakespeare when Mr. Neuheim asks David if he has read Shakespeare: “Well, ye know in his
Choolyus Caesar, this man Caesar says: Let me have men about me that are fat, and that don’t think; that is, don’t think outside of business, ye understand.”57 Therefore, through the character of Mr. Neuheim, Gold reinforces the fact that Shakespeare was
Americanized and considered to be “good American reading.” The boss does not speak with the enunciation that a member of high society should, and he misinterprets Julius
Caesar. In a way, the boss engages in a popular form of citation, simply turning to
Shakespeare’s cultural authority to make a point. Here, however, the one who is a part of the class that “owns” Shakespeare appears ridiculous. David is the articulate and educated one, but he is also the one selling his labor to a controlling boss. We could understand this story as Gold criticizing the capitalist classes for not even understanding their own culture.
“The Password to Thought—To Culture” is just one instance that we see
Shakespeare appropriated for American Leftist propaganda. There are numerous accounts of similar methods used. By recovering archival and rare materials, I will show how Shakespeare makes proletarian culture and proletarian culture provides a new vision of Shakespeare. Considering Shakespeare’s pervasiveness in Soviet and German Leftist literature, it only makes sense that the American Left would appropriate Shakespeare as well. In terms of recovering Leftism in Shakespeare, I am not interested in Shakespeare the person. Nor am I overly concerned with arguments pertaining to authentic play-texts.
W.B. Worthen looks at Shakespeare as a link to performance studies because of
57 Mike Gold, “The Password to Thought—To Culture,” Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, ed. Michael Folsom (New York: International Publishers, 1972) 103. 24
Shakespeare’s prominent history in theatre and his iconic status.58 This is exactly why
Shakespeare can be applied to political literature; he is so widely used on an international scale that he serves as a common denominator of cultural capital.
When it comes to depicting what Shakespeare in proletarian culture looks like,
Daniel Aaron concludes that Gold and other editors of the New Masses sought to create a
“Shakespeare in overalls.”59 Aaron is most likely responding to Gold’s promise of a
“proletarian Shakespeare.” In “Proletarian Realism,” Gold claims that bourgeois intellectuals criticized proletarian literature for being “mediocre” and that they asked,
“Where is your Shakespeare?” Gold answered: “He is on his way. We gave you a Lenin; we will give you a proletarian Shakespeare, too; if that is so important…we promise you a hundred Shakespeares.”60 The allusion to a proletarian Shakespeare, or Shakespeare in overalls, is not a reconstruction of Shakespeare, per se, but rather a post-1929 sentiment that “the new poetry would be increasingly penned by workers and reflect working-class experience from a Marxist perspective.”61 Shakespeare’s name is used as a signifier for a great writer; thus, Gold promises that great working class writers will grow out of the proletarian movement.
The American Left did less dressing Shakespeare in a guise than speaking through him to oppose bourgeois culture. Speaking through Shakespeare led to appropriative adaptations of Leftist Shakespeares. Appropriative adaptation is a term I use to define a
58 See W.B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and W.B. Worthen, “Shakespeare 3.0: Or Text versus Performance,” Alternative Shakespeares, vol. 3. ed. Diana E. Henderson (London: Routledge, 2008) 54-77. 59 Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992) 205. 60 Mike Gold, “Proletarian Realism,” Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, ed. Michael Folsom (New York: International Publishers, 1972) 204. This article is excerpted from Gold’s “Notes of the Month” published in the September 1930 issue of the New Masses. 61 Alan M. Wald, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 2002) 16. 25 practice that includes appropriating an authorial figure, in this case Shakespeare, to fit within a set ideology and adapting him to serve as a vehicle to disseminate that respective ideology. I justify this by suggesting that all art and literature are political; therefore, they contain ideological and partisan components. Margaret Jane Kidnie argues that the problem with adaptation is that it presupposes a fixed text; and since texts and performances are always at an intersection with one another, adaptation is an evolving process. She prefers the term instance to place Shakespeare’s works in a set temporal arena.62 My theory builds on this, yet significantly deviates. I agree that works are always evolving; however, I argue that appropriation allows for a fixed ideological model even if a text is not fixed. Once a model is established, Shakespeare may be textually adapted to take on a practical role that supports an ideological model. Kidnie believes that archives are not stable because editors’ annotations alter the archives.63 Annotations are part of the adaptation process—extending an ideological belief to the readers by means of citations and annotations. All performances, films, citations, and allusions fit under the term appropriative adaptation because Shakespeare is appropriated before he is adapted to serve a specific purpose.
To reflect the Marxist-Leninist ideology, Leftist appropriative adaptations of
Shakespeare had to meet the proletarian literary guidelines. The trouble with this is that there was never one set definition for proletarian writing. Gold maintained that a single model would actually be counterintuitive to the movement: “Within this new world of proletarian literature, there are many living forms. It is a dogmatic folly to seize upon
62 See Margaret Jane Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2009). 63 See Margaret Jane Kidnie, “Citing Shakespeare,” Shakespeare, Memory, and Performance, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 117-134. 26 any single literature form and erect it into a pattern for all proletarian literature.”64
Hence, proletarian literature constantly evolves and resists being categorized as one genre. Consequently, we see proletarian literature in disparate forms: poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, reportage, and literary theory.
Generally speaking, literature was considered proletarian if it reflected “the struggle of the workers in their fight for the world. It portrays the life of the workers.”65
Foley, however, notes that Leftist writers suggested criteria by which proletarian literature should be evaluated: 1) criterion of authorship; 2) criterion of subject matter; and 3) criterion of perspective.66 The first criterion means that literature must be written by the workers. But because Marxism-Leninism emphasizes the need for a vanguard, the criteria of subject matter and political perspective emerged. As long as a piece of literature was written by an author who portrayed the realities of the class struggle from a
Leftist perspective, the piece could be categorized as proletarian. Abiding by the vanguard standard, to create great worker writers, the workers must first obtain a political class consciousness. Therefore, in the proletarian tradition, the second and third criteria are the ones that really stand out. Accordingly, revolutionaries began to write from a political perspective about subject matter that portrayed the class struggle. It was believed that then the members of the working class could follow suit and become great writers.
Ultimately, the political perspective is the criterion that really matters. Louis
Althusser says that “[t]o be a Communist in philosophy is to become a partisan and
64 Gold, “Proletarian Realism” 206. 65 Ibid 205. 66 See Foley, Radical Representations, especially her chapter “Defining Proletarian Literature” (86-128). 27 artisan of Marxist-Leninist philosophy: of dialectical materialism.”67 According to this, the political perspective is the beginning of Leftism put into action. But the partisan political perspective is just the philosophy; the artisanship is the practice that exhibits political commitment. This is why we see the vanguard’s efforts to lead the organization of a proletarian class consciousness—because they cling to the philosophy of Marxism-
Leninism. The worker’s writing becomes proletarian in nature when the worker encompasses the proletarian class consciousness. But the question arises: is proletarian literature art or propaganda? Foley notes, “When it was a matter of exposing the formalist and elitist premises of contemporaneous bourgeois critics, the Marxists had no trouble subscribing to the notion that all literature is propaganda for one side or another in the class war.”68 This was one way to get around the propaganda question. But in truth, literature from the political perspective of the Left was expected to propagate a specific ideology.
Because there is a reconstruction component in my dissertation, there is also a presentist moment in this project. While presentism might be a bit reductive in its fetishizing of the present, Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes make salient points. They argue,
[T]he critic’s own “situatedness” does not—cannot—contaminate the past.
In effect, it constitutes the only means by which it’s possible to see and
perhaps comprehend it. And since we can only see the past through the
eyes of the present, few serious historians would deny that the one has a
major influence on their account of the other.
67 Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and other essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001) 2. 68 Foley, Radical Representations 131. 28
They continue, “All history…is contemporary history and we need urgently to recognise the permanence of the present’s role in all our dealings with the past.”69 These statements are important when thinking about the archive. The archive, in its original form, cannot be contaminated in itself. Therefore, Leftist appropriations of Shakespeare should be seen not as a contamination of Shakespeare, but as pieces of literary history in their own right. By putting the past into dialogue with the present, we have the opportunity to negotiate our present perspectives on the past.
We should read Shakespeare historically, but we should also read transhistorical appropriative adaptations of Shakespeare from our viewpoint in the present. By recovering the past, we do not change moments of the past, but we can make the past part of the present. If materialist approaches to literature have become hegemonic, it is because we have continued to use and have expanded these theories because they are relevant to the present. And if because of mass culture, as Richard Burt suggests,
“Shakespeare’s heterogeneous cultural presence often cannot be recuperated as so many examples of resistance to hegemony and cultural imperialism,”70 it is because we have continued to produce and distribute inventions and ideas of the past to the point of mass homogenization. This is where a presentist view becomes especially useful. By bringing the past to the present we can retrieve a heterogeneous Shakespeare. Of course, to reconstruct the archive, we must put the present stamp on it. Or, as I prefer, we must put the past’s stamp on the present. Consequently, even by discussing these Leftist
69 Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes, “Introduction: Presenting Presentism,” Presentist Shakespeares, eds. Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes (London: Routledge, 2007) 3. 70 Richard Burt, “Introduction: To e- or not to e-? Disposing of Schlockspeare in the Age of Digital Media,” Shakespeare after Mass Media, ed. Richard Burt (New York: Palgrave, 2002) 7. 29 appropriative adaptations of Shakespeare, I make them relevant to current scholarly discourse and open up questions about Leftist approaches to Shakespeare.
Recovering and Reconstructing Leftist Shakespeares
Because my dissertation is a recovery and reconstruction project, I accordingly have divided it into two sections. In a sense, recovery and reconstruction are not completely inextricable terms. While acknowledging their mutually determining relationship, I make nuanced distinctions between the two. Recovery refers to the exhumation of a buried tradition—a theoretical tradition held together by a common ideological and cultural consciousness. The reconstruction aspect of this project denotes action—putting the theory into practice. Applying this to Žižek’s theory of truth and partisanship, I apply recovery to truth and reconstruction to active partisanship.
The first two chapters work together to show how Shakespeare was incorporated into Leftist literary and political theory. Shakespeare was in a precarious position within the American proletarian movement—sometimes accepted and other times rejected.
Both kinds of approaches to and attitudes toward Shakespeare demonstrate the important role he played in the proletarian movement. These chapters act as surveys, but both support the argument that Shakespeare helps illustrate that proletarianism is a byproduct of communist-led movements. Moreover, Shakespeare is an important factor in the divide between capitalist and proletarian literary culture.
The first chapter, “A Revived History: Shakespeare’s Proletarian Cultural
Authority,” centers on the recovery of the Leftist literary tradition. Pulling together important Leftist theorists, I reveal that Shakespeare was an important subject of critique
30 when the Left made plans for the future of proletarian literary theory. To emphasize that the Leftist experience with Shakespeare is a unique tradition, I make clear distinctions between proletarian culture and popular culture as well as between proletarian culture and elite culture. I begin with a brief survey of the evolution of proletarian literary theory and then move into proletarian appropriations of Shakespeare as he appears in critical theory and plans for proletarian development.
In the second chapter, “Leftist Hamletism: The Exorcism of the Bourgeois Spirit,”
I examine the phenomenon of “Hamletism”—a practice that involves extracting Hamlet from the play and adapting him into an archetypal figure that signifies one who vacillates, indulges in self-melancholia, and philosophizes rather than acts. This practice dates back to the mid-nineteenth-century, but I argue that American Leftist Hamletism has distinct features that make it unique. I propose it is a radical attempt to exorcise the bourgeois spirit from the proletarian class. Additionally, Leftist Hamletism is in essence advocacy for an international proletarian class consciousness. Ultimately, Leftist extractions and implementations of Hamlet exemplify the general purpose and agenda of the American
Left.
In the second half of the project, I examine appropriative adaptations of
Shakespeare. I reconstruct them within their historical and cultural context so as to demonstrate the Leftist imprint on Shakespeare’s cultural history. By reconstructing these appropriative adaptations, I also recreate historical and cultural constructs that deal with the mutually determining relationships between politics, literature, and society.
Thus, I read Shakespeare historically and also analyze the appropriative adaptations of
Shakespeare within their historical context. A major difference from recovery is that the
31 reconstruction aspect demonstrates Leftist efforts to appropriate Shakespeare’s voice, not just his cultural authority.
Chapter three, “Hamlet and Shylock; Revolutionists and Artists,” reconstructs two appropriative adaptations of Shakespeare: a New Masses’ questionnaire called “Are
Artists People?” and a skit by Robert Lewis titled Red Hamlet. I reconstruct these archival works to show how American Leftists took advantage of Shakespeare to actively demonstrate their political commitment. They exemplify the practice of Marxist-Leninist theory in literature. I reveal that these two appropriative adaptations can teach us about the history of Shakespeare’s cultural authority as well as teach us about the history of the proletarian movement. Therefore, the chapter serves not only as a reconstruction of
Shakespeare, but as a reconstruction of history.
In chapter four, “The ‘Non-accommodated’ Proletariat: A Leftist Shakespeare
Narrative,” I look at the representation of characters in American Leftist fiction and poetry. More specifically, I look at literary texts in which names of Shakespeare’s characters appear. There are two different Leftist approaches to the incorporation of
Shakespeare’s characters into proletarian literature. The first involves simply alluding to his characters. This practice builds off of the attitude that Shakespeare is a symbol of bourgeois culture; therefore, his characters are portrayed negatively and as counterproductive to the proletarian movement. The second approach includes appropriating Shakespeare’s voice—literally taking ownership of his characters and creating a new narrative. I propose that American Leftists create a non-accommodated proletariat that works in opposition to the unaccommodated man as represented in King
Lear and Timon of Athens.
32
My project ends with a conclusion entitled “Go Left, Young Scholars!” The title is an alteration of Gold’s article titled “Go Left, Young Artists!” As the title suggests, I conclude my dissertation by inviting scholars to turn Left—to actively take part in
Shakespeare scholarship through the lens of Marxism-Leninism. Scholarship is not enough to re-politicize Shakespeare studies, but it is a starting point to expose a truly political Shakespeare and can help provide students and scholars alike with theoretical views that suggest there are alternatives to oppressive capitalist institutions.
Budgen, Kouvelakis, and Žižek argue that once a person shows signs of engaging in a political movement that seriously challenges the existing order, he or she receives the reaction: “Benevolent as it is this will necessarily end in a new Gulag!” Thus, the
“liberal scoundrels can find hypocritical satisfaction in their defense of the existing order: they know there is corruption, exploitation, and so forth, but they denounce every attempt to change things as ethically dangerous and unacceptable, resuscitating the ghost of totalitarianism.”71 It is not hard for one to theorize the dangers of monopolistic global capitalism and the oppressive apparatuses that sustain the containment of the masses.
Nonetheless, it is apparently difficult for one to take a firm position. Today, real commitment to partisanship is heavily looked down upon. But Marxism-Leninism is a politic of responsibility; and we need to take responsibility to counter the oppression of capitalist dominance by incorporating a Leftist discourse into critical theory. It is time for us to take a stand, actively and ideologically, against the oppressive chains of capitalism. “Leftist Shakespeares” provides an opportunity for Shakespeare scholars to participate in the recovery and reconstruction of a politicized Shakespeare.
71 Budgen, Kouvelakis, and Žižek, “Repeating Lenin” 2-3. 33
Part I: Recovery Chapter 1: A Revived History: Shakespeare’s Proletarian Cultural Authority
Cultural Appropriations
As a result of being constantly appropriated and re-appropriated, Shakespeare has become a sort of cultural super-creation. Throughout historical epochs, cultural spheres, and national heritages, when Shakespeare is appropriated he is broken down, recycled, and reconstructed to serve the agenda of his appropriator(s). But even if his appropriators attempt to control the meaning of “what Shakespeare is,” he continues to encompass the residual and dominant conceptions of past Shakespeares when emerging alterations to his image occur. To this end, Shakespeare as a cultural subject resides in a liminal position—traversing temporality, national barriers, medium-specificity, and ideological constraints. Or more fittingly, Shakespeare is a subject of simultaneity—embodying properties of different historical moments, multiple forms of media, disparate national traditions, and contradicting ideologies. For this reason, we can examine Shakespeare as a cultural subject in order to understand, analyze, correct, and revise the histories of cultures with which he has come into contact.
In this chapter, I recover Shakespeare’s proletarian history. The chapter serves mostly as a survey of the evolution of American proletarian literary theory. However, there is greater significance behind the survey as it contributes to Shakespeare’s cultural history and will help us write a corrective view of the American Left. American proletarian archives show an unforeseen and neglected preoccupation with Shakespeare and the early modern English social climate. This is due in part to Marx’s veneration for
Shakespeare and the Left’s interest in epochal transitions. Because the early modern period has been characterized by collapsing feudalism and emerging capitalism, the 33
American Left recognized the period to be a useful resource when discussing the possible shift from collapsing capitalism to emerging communism in the early-twentieth-century.
This chapter will illustrate that Shakespeare is located at the intersection between classes, cultures, and nations. The American Left’s fascination with Shakespeare speaks to his iconic global status as well as his cultural history in America. Because the Left wanted to disseminate its political agenda to a mass audience—subordinate and dominant classes alike—Shakespeare was logically an advantageous vehicle because of his position in American popular culture during the nineteenth-century and in American high culture during the early-twentieth-century. The Left could use Shakespeare to appeal to a greater audience because of his popularity. Shakespeare also strengthened the bond between the
American Left and its German and Soviet counterparts, both which embraced
Shakespeare’s cultural authority.
To effectively make a case for the importance of a proletarian revival in
Shakespeare studies, I must clarify that proletarian culture is exclusive from popular and dominant cultures. It is easy to assume that proletarian culture and popular culture are interconnected or are even synonymous with one another because they both to a degree are composed of the culture of the masses. However, there are clear ideological differences. As Douglas Lanier asserts, “popular” implies “the genuine culture of the people, a populist, working-class, or democratic alternative to the ‘great tradition’ preserved by an educated elite and dominant cultural institutions.”1 I find this definition to be accurate in that it describes popular culture in terms of the democratization of mass materialist production, primarily in regards to access and ownership of particular media and cultural capital. Hence, popular culture works within the confines of a nation’s
1 Douglas Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 5. 34 material production. Proletarian culture, on the other hand, reflects an ideological
“internationalist spirit.”2 While it is intended to represent the people, proletarian culture is historically influenced by Leftist ideals—those conditioned by Marxism-Leninism— which entail propagating a clearly partisan political consciousness.
Proletarian culture is not organically-formed, but rather constructed by a vanguard comprised of highly educated people with access to high and popular culture. It does not matter if one is lowbrow, middlebrow, or highbrow. As long as one writes for the proletariat and from the Leftist political perspective, he or she contributes to the proletarian vanguard. In the case of American proletarian culture, the majority of the people who made up the vanguard were well-versed in Shakespeare. American Leftists took advantage of their education and access to both popular and elite culture to publicize a working class consciousness among the people. In its efforts, the Left used
Shakespeare as an ideological apparatus to challenge capitalist society and bourgeois culture. As I will show, the American Left spoke through Shakespeare to oppose the culture of which he was a part. I suggest that the American Leftist experience with
Shakespeare may be useful to future scholarship that pertains to his popular and elite cultural status.
With the rise of mass media, scholars have been given the chance to examine the antagonistic, yet mutually dependent, relationships between popular and high culture.
Lanier’s Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture and Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare and Modern Culture are two works that delineate a culture’s impact on Shakespeare and
Shakespeare’s impact on that respective culture. Garber asserts, “Shakespeare has
2 Vladimir Lenin, “Two Cultures in Every National Culture,” The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1975) 655. 35 scripted many of the ideas that we think of as ‘naturally’ our own and even as ‘naturally’ true: ideas about human character, about individuality and selfhood, about government, about men and women, youth and age, about the qualities that make a strong leader.”3
We construct these conceptions according to our historical assumptions and through our experiences with multiple forms of media—films, books, television, theatre.
Due to the globalization of capitalism and, in effect, the homogenization of culture, these scholars face the challenge of making definite distinctions between
Shakespeare’s popular and elite cultural presences in a society that is dominated by the production of mass culture. For example, Lanier states,
Because [popular culture] consists of mass-produced commodities
designed for profit, popular culture is saturated with the imperatives of
capitalism. Yet because those commodities depend for their market
success upon speaking to the experience of subordination, popular culture
opens up spaces for measured expressions of resistance to and partial
escape from that social system.4
The market forces of cultural production make it difficult for us to identify ownership, access, and dominance. As I mentioned in the introduction, Shakespeare scholar Richard
Burt similarly notes that there is an extent to which “Shakespeare’s heterogeneous cultural presence often cannot be recuperated.”5 Taking a step back from materialism and stepping toward a politic of ideological partisanship may prove to be valuable to efforts that aim to retrieve Shakespeare’s heterogeneous cultural presence. Rather than
3 Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare and Modern Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008) 3. 4 Lanier 51. 5 Richard Burt, “Introduction: To e- or not to e-: Disposing of Schlockspeare in the Age of Digital Media,” Shakespeare after Mass Media, ed. Richard Burt (New York: Palgrave, 2002) 7. 36 examining the medium, it may be more beneficial to examine the content for a political message.
This chapter consists of sections that work together to show Shakespeare’s effect on proletarian culture and proletarian culture’s effect on Shakespeare’s cultural history. I will show that the history of American Leftist Shakespeare appropriations is an American literary culture in its own right. Because literature was a powerful tool used to disseminate the proletarian political consciousness, I begin with a brief outline of the inconsistent plans for proletarian literature and the history of Shakespeare’s inclusion in proletarian culture. In some cases, certain literary programs essentially required the removal of Shakespeare from the proletarian tradition. I then turn to specific American
Leftists who appropriated Shakespeare as a means to create political theories and political literature—theories and literature that make proletarian culture unique. I close the chapter by discussing how the American Left’s experience with Shakespeare is not synonymous to its Soviet counterpart. By the chapter’s end, I hope to have provided an adequate account of American proletarian roots and of the importance of employing
Shakespeare as a purely partisan apparatus. In addition, I expect to have effectively communicated a separation between popular and proletarian culture.
Shakespeare and Early Proletarianism
At the First American Writers’ Congress in 1935, Kenneth Burke articulated concerns that he had during the early 1920s when “the Leftists first began to move onto the scene.” Burke feared that many writers were “dishonoring Shakespeare.”6 Burke
6 Qtd. in Malcolm Cowley, Conversations with Malcolm Cowley, ed. Thomas Daniel Young (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1986) 63. 37 was an avid lover and a guardian of Shakespeare; therefore, his apprehensions were seemingly justified on a personal level. When they first began to emerge, many
American Leftists did not only dishonor Shakespeare; they sought to implement a strict doctrine that authorized the eradication of bourgeois art and literature, which included
Shakespeare. This caused many to lash out against the Leftists. In his book The Red
Decade: The Stalinist Penetration of America, Eugene Lyons ruthlessly criticizes the
American Left and its news organ the New Masses for putting Shakespeare into the “New
Masses’ Index Expurgatorious.”7 Burke, who held Leftist sympathies and was a vital member of the Popular Front, was very close to these literary politics. As he began to draw up outlines for articles in defense of Shakespeare, Burke came to a realization:
“Look, this fellow has taken care of himself for a long time, and probably will continue to survive without help.”8
Scott L. Newstok suggests that Burke was probably singling out critics such as
Mike Gold who in his early Communist Party days did not consider Shakespeare to be of much significance to the development of proletarian literature. Newstok asserts that such a way of thinking “involves forgetting an immensely [American] populist culture of
Shakespeare performance and oratory in the nineteenth century.”9 But dishonoring
Shakespeare was a move made by the American Left that was less about forgetting him and more about distancing proletarian culture from high culture. By the early-twentieth- century, as Lawrence Levine documents, Shakespeare was no longer a part of American
7 Eugene Lyons, The Red Decade: The Stalinist Penetration of America (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1941) 134. 8 Qtd in Cowley, Conversations 63. 9 Scott L. Newstok, “Editor’s Introduction: Renewing Kenneth Burke’s ‘plea for the Shakespearean drama,’” Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare, ed. Scott L. Newstok (West Lafayette: Parlor Press, 2007) xxviii. 38 popular performance and oratory but rather a part of “polite culture.”10 Shakespeare was wrested from the masses and protected by the elite to keep legitimate theatre from being contaminated by the masses. Businessmen who owned theatre companies felt the need to secure their product; and with the rise of new media such as film, television, and radio, the masses had alternative entertainment options. Shakespeare had essentially already been stripped of his populist connections, and the American Left was not interested in reviving his populist past. It was concerned with breaking down elite culture. Therefore, rescuing Shakespeare was not a top priority because he was a part of the culture from which the American Left wanted to disengage itself.
Burke’s fears were most likely responses to the general tendentiousness of particular Soviet theories that were adopted by the American Left. He, along with other
Leftist sympathizers, was not just concerned about Shakespeare, but also about the possibility that America’s entire literary heritage might be erased. During the First
Period of the Communist International (1918-1922), Soviet anti-heritage programs established by the Proletcult and the Left Front of Arts (LEF) organized the development of American proletarian culture. Proletcult principles demanded the separation of proletarian culture from anything bourgeois; thus, the Proletcult negotiated between the old/new, dying/born, and dead/living. Bourgeois literature with which Shakespeare was associated was considered the old, the dying, and the dead while proletarian literature was considered a living thing.
Proletcult extremists ultimately considered the industrial proletariat “as the sole source of the future culture of Soviet society and rejected the past and outside cultural
10 Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988) 31. 39 influences.”11 This meant that proletarian literature needed to be written by the worker, about the worker, and for the worker. Likewise, the LEF, which reached its peak during the Second Period of the Communist International (1922-1928), refuted outside literary influences from bourgeois and capitalist tendencies. These views diametrically oppose
Marxism-Leninism which teaches that “[p]roletarian culture must be the logical development of the store of knowledge mankind has accumulated under the yoke of capitalist, landowner and bureaucratic society. All these roads have been leading, and will continue to lead up to proletarian culture.”12
Lenin criticized the Proletcult for its “attempts to invent one’s own particular brand of culture, to remain isolated in self-contained organisations.”13 Nonetheless, even though the Proletcult had separated from the Bolsheviks following the 1905 defeat, it sustained its commanding influence on proletarian literature for nearly two decades. In efforts to single-handedly dictate the future of proletarian literature, the Proletcult set up factory workshops where workers convened and collaborated to create what was considered to be authentic proletarian writing. Lenin was not in disagreement with the factory workshops, but the Proletcult groups significantly digressed from Marxism-
Leninism because a tradition of literature limited to texts written by the workers, about the workers, and for the workers eliminated the need for a vanguard.
Throughout the majority of the 1920s, anti-heritage positions were commonly held by members of the American Left because of its dependence on Soviet mentorship.
11 James F. Murphy, The Proletarian Moment: The Controversy over Leftism in Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991) 22. 12 Vladimir Lenin, “The Tasks of the Youth Leagues,” The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1975) 664. 13 Vladimir Lenin, “On Proletarian Culture,” The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1975) 676. 40
Despite the establishment of Leftist news organs including the Masses and the Liberator during the previous decade, in the early 1920s American Leftists looked abroad for literary advice—dominated by the Proletcult—to shape its customs. The Soviet
Revolution was still fresh in their minds, and for the most part, their Leftist principles were based on accounts from Americans who actually went to Russia to witness Soviet political and social reconstructions. Books such as John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the
World (1919) and Eden and Cedar Paul’s Proletcult (1921) provided the American Left with second-hand access to records of the Soviet front and the 1917 Revolution.
In Proletcult, the Paul’s provide their opinions about Shakespeare’s position in the workers’ education. They argue that it is better for students to not learn about
Shakespeare:
A worker who is given special opportunities for adult education, and who,
instead of asking for lectures on Shakespeare or on Greek art, demands
information on the mechanism of contemporary social life, is at any rate
well on the way to an understanding of the fact that the working class and
the employing class have nothing in common.14
This crucial proletarian resource supported the idea that learning about Shakespeare was counterintuitive to the future of the proletarian movement. It was not until 1926, with the commencement of the New Masses, that the American Left legitimately began to seek out a purely Americanized proletarian literary tradition. And it was not until the late-1920s and early-1930s that the majority of the American Communist Party’s members began to visit the Soviet Union themselves and started to develop their own conclusions about the future of proletarian literature and culture.
14 Eden and Cedar Paul, Proletcult (New York: Homas Seltzer, Inc, 1921) 13. 41
Gold is often accused of having Proletcult tendencies during the early 1920s. In his book Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism, Daniel Aaron associates Gold’s early “proletarianism” with the Proletcult which “wished to purge the minds of the masses of ‘petty bourgeois and anarchist sentiments’ and of ‘capitalist bourgeois culture.’”15 This is supported by Gold’s 1921 manifesto “Towards Proletarian
Art” in which he makes an adamant anti-heritage declaration:
We cling to the old culture, and fight for it against ourselves. But it must
die. The old ideals must die. But let us not fear. Let us fling all we are
into the cauldron of Revolution. For out of our death shall arise glories,
and out of the final corruption of this old civilization we have loved shall
spring the new race—the Supermen.16
Following the publication of this article, Gold was given credit for popularizing the term
“proletarian art” in America. It is very clear that he was preoccupied with the old/new, dead/alive, and dying/born binaries that the Proletcult emphasized.17 Gold, however, separated himself from the Proletcult. He believed that the proletarian community was imbued with bourgeois culture; thus, he followed Lenin’s advice and attempted to get the masses and his fellow writers to recognize their dependence on the past so they could break away from it. He assumed the role of a member of the vanguard by providing this sort of guidance.
15 Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992) 94. 16 Mike Gold, “Towards Proletarian Art,” Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, ed. Michael Folsom (New York: International Publishers, 1972) 62. This article was originally published in the February 1921 issue of the Liberator. 17 See Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). Foley explains that the terms “proletarian art” and “proletarian literature” were derived from the Soviet proletarian tradition, but Gold gave it “widespread currency when he spoke of the possibilities for a revolutionary art in the United States” (63, 64). 42
Nevertheless, Gold’s anti-heritage views continued through the mid-1920s. In “A
New Continent,” a 1926 proposal for the New Masses, Gold iterated a similar message:
“Let us forget the past. Shakespeare, Dante, Shelley, and even Bernard Shaw—for here are virgin paths that their feet could not have trod in time and space.”18 Although it is difficult to see distinctions between Gold’s attitude in “Toward Proletarian Art” and the
Proletcult agenda, putting the second quote in context will help us explain that Gold’s visions had evolved since 1921. The premise behind “A New Continent” is not a complete denunciation of the past culture; it is an effort to pitch the New Masses as an
American magazine free from bourgeois contamination and free from the “‘spiritual’ commands from Moscow.” There are traces of didacticism, but Gold is essentially supporting “a magazine of American experiment” and is collaborating with internationally famous proletarian writer John Dos Passos.19
Before becoming an official sponsor of the American Communist Party, the New
Masses was initially intended to be a collaborative project that would support the
Americanization of proletarian literature. By listing Shakespeare, Dante, Shelley, and
Shaw, Gold categorizes foreign authorship in opposition to American Leftist writers such as John Reed, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Max Eastman, and Horace Traubel.
Therefore, Gold was not excluding Shakespeare because of anti-heritage purposes; he was excluding Shakespeare because of his foreign heritage. However, when seeking to create a purely American proletarian culture, the American Left could not remove the pervasive effects of Shakespeare’s cultural authority.
18 Mike Gold, “A New Continent,” Communism in America: A History in Documents, ed. Albert Fried (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) 70. 19 Ibid. 43
Shakespeare became a topic of a critical conversation about literature, a topic that reveals that the American Left did come to accept Shakespeare as a resource.
Correspondence between Joseph Freeman and Gold indicates that Shakespeare was referenced in a serious conversation about the state of American proletarian literature.
Freeman blamed Leftist sectarians—“Red Puritans”—for public anti-Shakespeare propaganda. Explaining his concerns about the Red Puritans in a letter to Gold, Freeman wrote,
I meet American comrades in Moscow who think it a crime to read
Shakespeare at all on the ground that in some subtle manner he dilutes
your revolutionary ardour. My reference to Marx’s addiction to
Shakespeare was directed against these Red Puritans. You say to me: read
Shakespeare, but read him critically. I say to them, read him critically but
read him.
The sectarians were extremists who supported the LEF and who looked at the reading of
Shakespeare as in itself “a counter-revolutionary act.”20
By saying that we need to read Shakespeare, Freeman shows his allegiance to
Marxism-Leninism in contrast to the Proletcult and LEF. Lenin suggests, “We can build communism only on the basis of the totality of knowledge, organisations and institutions, only by using the stock of human forces and means that have been left to us by the old society.”21 Freeman supports the notion that one needs to have a totality of knowledge— especially of his or her own national heritage. As Michael D. Bristol has thoroughly described, Shakespeare is an American institution. He is received with “cultural
20 Joseph Freeman, An American Testament: A Narrative of Rebels and Romantics (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1936) 540. 21 Lenin, “Tasks of the Youth Leagues” 662. 44 goodness, wise teaching, and civilization.”22 Of course, the American Left rejected bourgeois cultural goodness, bourgeois wise teaching, and bourgeois civilization.
However, it would still be counterintuitive to Marxism-Leninism for the American Left to not read, master, and critique Shakespeare if it was to understand bourgeois culture and use the knowledge to reveal its flaws.
The conversation between Freeman and Gold sheds light on the American Left’s association with the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), the dominant
Marxist-Leninist literary program during the Third Period of the Communist International
(1928-1934). RAPP purported the idea of the “living person,” that proletarian literature should be written about the realities of the social conditions’ impact on the workers.
From this perspective, it was accepted that proletarian literature could be written by any writer who wrote about the workers’ living circumstances as long as it was written from a
Leftist political perspective. With regard to Shakespeare studies, the correspondence between Freeman and Gold shows that Shakespeare’s cultural authority had a huge bearing on decisions pertaining to the future of proletarian writing. In this case, he was even the focal point of conversation. By the end of the 1920s and into the 1930s, Gold embraced the RAPP conception of art as well. Understanding social and literary heritage was encouraged, though it was often used to detach proletarian art from bourgeois tendencies. To this end, Shakespeare was appropriated, usually appropriated to denounce capitalism because he was associated with bourgeois culture.
22 Michael D. Bristol, Shakespeare’s America; America’s Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1990) 1. 45
Shakespeare and the American Leftist Critics
While acknowledging admirable qualities in Shakespeare, the American Leftists familiar with Shakespeare were quick to show their criticism of and animosity toward particular cultural components understood to be true of Elizabethan society and cultural components that Shakespeare had accumulated throughout history. In an autobiographical follow up to his famous proletarian novel Jews without Money, Gold praises “Marvelous Shakespeare” who could “register some of the deeps of the Jewish tragedy.” In the same sentence, Gold is quick to point out Shakespeare’s “gentile prejudice.”23 In discussions pertaining to theoretical approaches to literary content and form, Freeman explains that Shakespeare’s line “To be or not to be” contains a “whole hinterland of thought and emotion”; he then alludes to Hamlet’s soliloquy to chastise bourgeois “art for art’s sake twaddle.”24 Similarly, Upton Sinclair places the Bard on a pedestal just to crush him. He calls Shakespeare “the greatest poet of all time” and claims that Shakespeare is “a whole universe in himself,” right before he contends that
“Shakespeare is a poet and propagandist for the enemy; for the present, at any rate, a burden upon the race mind.”25 The American Left’s concessions to Shakespeare’s genius combined with insults to his character are demonstrative of the unstable relationship between the American Left and Shakespeare.
Whether or not they were influenced by high culture’s stamp on Shakespeare during the early-twentieth-century or naturally understood Shakespeare to have bourgeois social roots, American Leftists took advantage of Shakespeare’s status in order to
23 Mike Gold, “A Jewish Childhood in the New York Slums,” Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, ed. Michael Folsom (New York: International Publishers, 1972) 312. 24 Freeman, American Testament 213. 25 Upton Sinclair, Mammonart: An Essay in Economic Interpretation (Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1925) 96, 93, 104. 46 challenge high literature and bourgeois sensibilities. It is not uncommon for Shakespeare to be appropriated by individuals with intentions to rebel against high culture. Douglas
Lanier asserts that appropriations by means of allusions may invoke “Shakespeare to resist, violate, evade, or critique the practices, values, and institutions of high culture.”26
While this is the foundation of the Leftists’ rhetorical arsenal, they employ this appropriative technique in an unusual manner. Lanier states,
Typically, Shakespeare per se is not the object of critique. Rather, these
appropriations target the sorts of social and interpretive decorum that
govern how high art is treated, as well as those who enforce that decorum,
authority figures like teachers, intellectuals, antiquarians, actors, and
bluebloods. Paradoxically, this sort of appropriation reinforces the high
cultural image of Shakespeare at the same time as it critiques those who
support that image.27
The latter portion of this passage is true of the Leftists. They used Shakespeare to attack bourgeois cultural institutions and practices. Simultaneously, they reinforced his cultural authority by the fact that he repeatedly turns up in American Leftist writing. Differing from these common forms of popular appropriations, the American Left made
Shakespeare as an object of critique. Nonetheless, the American Left’s critiques of
Shakespeare the person seem to be reactions to the evolutionary cultural makeup of
Shakespeare—the super-creation—rather than a critique of the biographical person.
When evaluating Shakespeare, the American Left added artifacts to Shakespeare’s cultural creation. For instance, Gold’s childhood experiences in the Jewish slums
26 Lanier, Popular Culture 54. 27 Ibid. 47 influenced his construal of Shakespeare’s treatment of Jews. Because Shakespeare the person probably never in his lifetime encountered a publicly practicing Jew in England,
Gold could not have known that Shakespeare created Shylock to represent the deep emotions of the Jewish history and Jewish tragedy. Shakespearean scholar John Drakakis asserts, “Those who seek to argue that Shakespeare’s ‘Jew’ is an authentic representation of a ‘real’ Jew, are in danger…of collapsing ‘art’ into ‘life.’” He says, “The figure of
Shylock, an ‘English’ Jew, a fantasy for an Elizabethan audience whose experience of
‘Jews’ was, as far as we can tell, wholly dependent upon religious prejudice and theatrical representation, fulfills the function of an ‘empty signifier’ that has been subsequently invested with historical and cultural meaning.”28
The Elizabethan audience’s understanding of Jews was indisputably negative— they were social constructions deeming Jews as innately evil. When Shylock asks, “If you prick us do we not bleed? / If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die” (3.1.54-55), the answer from the Elizabethan audience would have sounded like:
“No, you will not bleed; you do not die.” Gold’s sympathetic view of Shylock thus diametrically opposes the reality that an Elizabethan audience would never imagine a Jew with redeeming qualities. Shylock as an “empty signifier,” however, allows for historical reinterpretation. Gold came to his own historical interpretation that Shylock represents
Shakespeare’s sympathies for the Jews.
As a child, Gold attended a performance of The Merchant of Venice, which also influenced his construction of Shakespeare as a voice for the Jews. After seeing the audience’s reaction and his mother’s tears, Gold concluded, “Only a Jewish audience
28 John Drakakis, “Presenting Text: Editing The Merchant of Venice,” Presentist Shakespeares, eds. Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes (London: Routledge, 2007) 94. 48 could truly understand that cry of Shylock, the full depth of his tragedy.”29 Since
Shakespeare was not staging The Merchant of Venice for a Jewish audience, the
Elizabethan historical context is insignificant. But by seeing the extreme emotional responses of the contemporary Jewish audience, Gold envisioned an aspect of
Shakespeare that represents the Jewish population. According to Gold’s description of the audience’s reactions, the most tragic part of the play is when Jessica betrays her father and sides with the Venetians, to the “the killers.”30 Thus, it is Jessica’s disregard for heritage and culture that was so disturbing to the audience. Shakespeare as a voice for the Jews was ultimately a cultural inheritance—a Jewish cultural inheritance—rather than a bourgeois Elizabethan truth. Contemporary class struggles and ideological clashes between bourgeois and proletarian culture influenced Gold’s response to The Merchant of
Venice production. The Elizabethan worldviews and bourgeois sympathies are rejected, and Shakespeare is re-formed to speak for the proletarian Jewish subculture.
Sinclair sets Shakespeare up as a point of attack against bourgeois culture as well.
In his book Mammonart: An Essay in Economic Interpretation (1924), Sinclair traces
Western literary history in order to contest capitalism and bourgeois writers. He wrote the book with the intention that it would be used as a textbook in Russian schools, but it received little acclaim. This is due in part to Lenin’s lack of confidence in Sinclair.
Lenin, having read some of Sinclair’s literature, concluded that “Sinclair is naïve in his appeal, although fundamentally it is a very correct one.” His naivety is observed because
“he ignores the conditions for the growth of revolutionary action when an objectively
29 Gold, “A Jewish Childhood” 312. 30 Ibid. 49 revolutionary situation and revolutionary organisation exist.”31 Sinclair received criticism from his American colleagues as well, but the critiques of Sinclair were aimed at his fiction, not his theoretical work which is seminal to the development of the
American proletarian literary tradition.
Sinclair’s theoretical work was extremely influential and still has value today.
Despite disagreeing with Sinclair’s naïve utopianism, Gold praised him for being the “the most important writer in America.”32 Sinclair’s major theoretical contribution consists of a six-point list exposing the “bourgeois lies” of art: 1.) the Art for Art’s Sake Lie: the notion that the end of art is art; 2.) the Lie of Art Snobbery: the notion that art is something esoteric; 3.) the Lie of Art Tradition: the notion that new artists must follow old models, and learn from the classics; 4.) the Lie of Art Dilettantism: the notion that the purpose of art is entertainment and diversion, an escape from reality; 5.) the Lie of the
Art Pervert: the notion that art has nothing to do with moral questions; and 6.) the Lie of
Vested Interest: the notion that art excludes propaganda and has nothing to do with freedom and justice. This list is a combination of lies that Sinclair believed bourgeois writers perpetuated. The summary of the list is: “All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.”33 According to Sinclair, despite having a negative connotation, the term propaganda does not have to be positive or negative.
31 Vladimir Lenin, “From British Pacifism and the British Dislike of Theory,” Lenin on Literature and Art, Vladimir Lenin (Wildside Press, 2008) 101. This piece was written by Lenin in 1915 and published on July 27, 1924, in the Pravda, no. 169. 32 Mike Gold, “In Foggy California,” Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, ed. Michael Folsom (New York: International Publishers, 1972)171. 33 Sinclair, Mammonart 9. The emphasis is that of Sinclair. 50
Arguably, Sinclair issues the most ruthless attack on Shakespeare by calling him a propagandist and enemy of the proletarian population. He uses contrasting portrayals of the Bard to separate bourgeois from proletarian culture and also to form a theoretical approach that highlights these distinctions. To demonstrate the lies in practice, he highlights class-specific tendencies of past writers—from Homer to Goethe to Henry
James. Sinclair gives most of his attention to Shakespeare. Conceding that Shakespeare
“was gifted with the most marvelous tongue that has yet appeared on earth,”34 Sinclair makes it abundantly clear that he thinks Shakespeare’s class affiliations are and the purposes of his plays were products of bourgeois propensities.
With the argument that the six lies of art are bourgeois myths, Sinclair takes advantage of Shakespeare’s his iconic status to propose that Shakespeare is indeed a propagandist for the dominant capitalist classes. Responding to those who believe that
Jesus and Tolstoy are propagandists while Shakespeare and Goethe are “unsullied creative artists,” Sinclair argues, “Such distinction between ‘art’ and ‘propaganda’ is purely a class distinction and a class weapon; itself a piece of ruling-class propaganda, a means of duping the minds of men, and keeping them enslaved to false standards both of art and of life.”35 From this, we realize that Sinclair believes that bourgeois propaganda is a cultural component that Shakespeare accrued by being affiliated with high culture during the early-twentieth century.
Sinclair does not only criticize Shakespeare the propagandist; to serve the Leftist agenda and to alter Shakespeare’s cultural body, he rewrites Shakespeare’s Elizabethan
34 Ibid 97. 35 Ibid 104, 10b. 51 history as well. Sinclair’s explanation of Shakespeare’s character is worth noting at length:
What Shakespeare did was to make a series of chronicle plays dealing
with the intrigues and quarrels and fightings of the English nobility. He
followed tradition, but never hesitated to change the characters in order to
heighten the dramatic interest. The result has replaced English history in
the minds of all English school-boys, and those grown-up school-boys
called statesmen. Their national poet flatters their vanities and encourages
their insular prejudices. He did not like the Irish, he did not like the
Welsh, he did not like the Scotch, he did not like the French, and of course
he did not like the Spaniards. He liked the Romans, apparently because
they resembled the English ruling classes.36
Sinclair’s concessions to Shakespeare’s greatness as a poet do not come close to outweighing the exploitation, nationalism, and tendentiousness that he suggests
Shakespeare echoes by glorifying the Romans as a semblance of the “English ruling classes.” If we accept Sinclair’s account, Shakespeare is clearly a propagandist, but even
Sinclair implies that the propaganda has worked. Shakespeare is shown to have had authority over Renaissance English culture, and throughout history, he has touched numerous cultures globally.
Like Sinclair, Freeman is interested in early modern England’s social climate, but more so from the perspective that the English Renaissance was a time of radical social and economic transformation. In the article “Literary Theories,” Freeman provides a history of Marxist literary criticism by referencing Marx, Lenin, and Plekhanov to
36 Ibid 101. 52 validate the relationship between art and social conditions. More importantly, Freeman recognizes that literary theory is, like creative writing, is a form of literature. In other words, literary theory too is dependent on social climate and social relations. Freeman uses Shakespeare to satisfy desires that emphasize the importance of content over literary form. Turning to Hamlet’s eloquent, poetic speeches to endorse the removal of aesthetics and “art for art’s sake twaddle” in proletarian literature, Freeman explains that “[s]tyle is not so much a way of talking as a way of thinking.” He maintains, “‘Shall I kill myself or shall I not kill myself’ is an idea similar to the idea ‘to be or not to be—that is the question.’” He even concedes that the emotion and thought behind Shakespeare’s phrase offers more meaning than the former, but that this technique is not always desirable.
Freeman’s attitude is that "[a] well-written page is a page which says something worth reading. A man who writes nonsense in a charming ‘style’ is like a man who talks nonsense in a charming voice.”37 Freeman praises Shakespeare for his use of beautiful language, while at the same time he does not think that emphasizing aesthetics over content is productive to the development of proletarian literature. He makes the case that anyone can write, and as long as content depicts the reality of the class struggle, then proletarian literature has a political and social function. Because he is referenced when
Freeman is building a Leftist theoretical framework, Shakespeare helps to shape proletarian culture.
Form versus content was a large debate, one on which Gold also focused. Gold supported realistic, factual writing that reflected life. This attitude led him to explain,
“Facts are the new poetry. The proletarian writer will cut away from the stale plots, love
37 Freeman, American Testament 213. 53 stories, ecstasies of verbal heroisms of the fictionists of the past.”38 Because Shakespeare was widely accepted as an icon of great literary form, Gold made an example of him.
One example comes from a harsh critique of Thornton Wilder’s literary style. In
“Wilder: Prophet of a Genteel Christ,” Gold asserts that Wilder has “the most irritating and pretentious style pattern I have read in years.”39 Gold asks, “[W]ho could reveal any real agonies and exaltations of spirit in this neat, tailor-made rhetoric? It is a great lie. It is Death. Its serenity is that of the corpse. Prick it, and it will bleed violet ink and aperitif.” Gold alludes to Shylock’s question, “If you prick us do we not bleed?” (The
Merchant of Venice 3.2.54) to transition into an argument that “Shakespeare is crude and disorderly beside Mr. Wilder.”40 Based on his belief that Shakespeare is a bourgeois symbol, Gold proclaims that Wilder is worse than the bourgeois intellectuals.
Generally, those who attack Gold turn to his (in)famous allusion to a line from
Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy. Extracting the lines “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all” (3.1.85), Gold adapts the quote to read: “Technique makes cowards of us all.”41 In response to Gold’s quote, M. Keith Booker, referring to the
1920s in a discussion of anti-Cold War rhetoric, says, “Gold has typically been figured as a sort of Zhdanovite hatchetman who epitomizes the complete lack of respect for art and culture that formed a large part of the image of communism in the Cold War rhetoric of
38 Mike Gold, “Notes of the Month,” New Masses Jan. 1930: 7. 39 Mike Gold, “Wilder: Prophet of the Genteel Christ,” Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, ed. Michael Folsom (New York: International Publishers, 1972) 200. 40 Ibid. 41 Mike Gold, “A Little Bit of Millennium,” Mike Gold: An Anthology, ed. Michael Folsom (New York: International Publishers, 1972) 78. This article originally appeared in the March 1921 issue of the Liberator. 54 the West.”42 From Booker’s account, we can determine that in many cases this one quote has become a summary of Gold’s career. Hence, Shakespeare has become a part of
Gold’s legacy.
Gold’s appropriation of the quote from Hamlet is clearly anti-bourgeois, and even anti-heritage, but the context of the quote reveals that he is ultimately critiquing the capitalist teaching apparatuses. He was partaking in an anthropological study of the making of a town’s education system. To lead into the “Technique makes cowards of us all” quote, Gold says, “Let all who love art practice it; begin as the cave man began, without technique, without precedents and masters.”43 He is rebuking the precedents set by bourgeois liberal modernists while he provides a proletarian alternative. Foley notes,
“Gold’s often-quoted remark that ‘[t]echnique makes cowards of us all’ did not mean that craft was unimportant, but that beginning writers should not feel obliged to emulate bourgeois stylistic models.”44 James F. Murphy states that Gold’s proposals to “forget the past” were typically “an invitation to begin writing.”45 To discourage bourgeois imitation from becoming the only acceptable method, Gold appropriates Shakespeare to propose that everyone should be able to write and that they should write how and what they know.
Because he turns to Shakespeare as a supplemental source of instruction, Gold actively participates in the re-forming of Shakespeare. Shakespeare is appropriated to critique the past and at the same time is used as a plan for a new future. Lanier mentions
42 M. Keith Booker, “Mike Gold or James Joyce?: The Literature of Politics and the Politics of Literature,” Socialist Cultures East and West: A Post-Cold War Assessment, eds. Dubravka Juraga and M. Keith Booker (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002) 81, 82. 43 Gold, “Millennium” 67-68. 44 Foley, Radical Representations 91. 45 Murphy, Proletarian Moment 68. 55 that Shakespeare is often cited as “a way to evoke high culture concepts and institutions—literature, classical theatre, highbrow art, intellectualism—against which popular culture defines itself.”46 Considering Shakespeare was associated with high culture during the 1920s and 1930s, Gold employs this style of Shakespearean citation.
Gold, however, makes it proletarian. When he extracts the line from Hamlet to wrest
Shakespeare from high culture, Gold propagates a style of writing that is free from a bourgeois aesthetic policy. Murphy states, “In some worker-writers the effort to assimilate the heritage resulted in the very kind of purple prose that Gold had attacked in certain middle-class writers.”47 In this instance, Gold is not using “purple prose,” per se, but he does assimilate a line from a privileged writer to speak out against bourgeois elitism—bourgeois elitism with which Shakespeare was affiliated during the early- twentieth-century. He adds proletarian characteristics to the soliloquy in order to support a change in the method of literary creation and to promote education reform.
Gold’s citation to Hamlet’s line, while undermining Shakespeare’s cultural authority, still reinforces the cultural authority of Shakespeare. To use allusions is to recognize the iconic status of the Bard. Allusions also express one way the American
Party invited workers to write. To understand the cultural significance of the quote and the context in which Gold makes the statement, I turn to another strong claim made by
Lanier: “…the history of Shakespearian appropriation is closely tied to the history of cultural stratification, that is, of how modern cultures organize their productions in hierarchies of high and low, legitimate and illegitimate.”48 Ironically and intentionally,
Gold appropriates a line from a bourgeois writer to challenge the same heritage. It is
46 Lanier, Popular Culture 53 47 Murphy, Proletarian Moment 68. 48 Lanier, Popular Culture 21. 56 more than just wresting Shakespeare from high culture though because, as I mentioned earlier, Shakespeare was still connected to all American cultures to an extent because of his history in America. Gold challenges the bourgeois status of Shakespeare while molding Shakespeare’s cultural authority into a major component of American proletarian literary patterns.
Gold, Sinclair, and Freeman found use in Shakespeare to fulfill their desires to produce a proletarian culture, but other writers did not see much value in Shakespeare.
V.F. Calverton appreciates Shakespeare’s great value, but says the value will diminish as time moves forward. Calverton, rather than seeing Shakespeare as a symbol of bourgeois culture, recognized him for his feudal sympathies. Calverton let Shakespeare off the hook for supposedly not contributing to the advancement of his generation because
Shakespeare was “enmeshed in feudal politics, ethics, and metaphysics”; therefore,
Shakespeare certainly “could not but express the ideas of feudalism.” As a result,
Calverton thought it was “foolish…to attack Shakespeare for his numerous disparagement of both bourgeois and proletarian.”49
In a way, Calverton was belittling Shakespeare’s cultural authority, but he still identified the Bard’s place in Western literary culture. Belittling Shakespeare or not,
Calverton’s sociological framework by which to examine literature proved to be a great innovation for framing proletarian work and theory. His work led to his advancement as a major figure of the American Left during the 1920s. Following the publication of
Calverton’s The New Spirit: A Sociological Criticism of Literature (1925), Gold praised
Calverton’s work. Comparing him to the best of Russian critics, he wrote a letter to
49 V.F. Calverton, The Newer Spirit: A Sociological Criticism of Literature (New York: Boni and Liveright Publishers, 1925) 132. 57
Calverton professing, “We have not had a writer of your caliber in the Social-Communist movement in America for many years…What I really like is your revolutionary vision.”50
Nearly a decade later, Calverton was criticized in the New Masses for playing the role of
“conciliator”—taking sides of both the Left and the wavering bourgeois intellectuals. By never abandoning a strictly sociological method, Calverton was accused of a reductive
Marxism.51 Granville Hicks, though not giving sufficient attention to the potential value of Calverton’s theories, also accused him of applying “[o]ver-simplified Marxism.”52
Nonetheless, Calverton’s sociological approach to literature proved to contribute to Marxist-Leninist theory. Marxist literary analyses have sociological components, and
Calverton based his methodology on these components. Like other Leftist theorists, he made use of Shakespeare’s social roots. Calverton actually proposed that Shakespeare’s cultural value would lessen as society evolved:
Changes in social conditions, due to the introduction of machinery, have
changed the conceptions with the necessary result that today
Shakespeare’s attitude toward the working man, and his depiction of his
characteristics, has far less value than it had in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries. This means, of course, that his dramas as a whole, and no critic
can judge a drama aside from the social forces that created it, have a
different value today than they had during the whole period of feudalism.53
50 Michael Gold to V.F. Calverton, May 4, 1925, box 1, folder G, V.F. Calverton Papers, 1923-1941, New York City, New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Divisions. 51 See David Ramsey and Alan Calmer, “The Marxism of V.F. Calverton,” New Masses Jan. 1933: 9-27. 52 Granville Hicks, “The Crisis in American Criticism,” Granville Hicks in the New Masses, ed. Jack Alan Robbins (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1973). This article was originally published in the January 1934 issue of the New Masses. This is the year that the New Masses converted from a monthly journal to a weekly journal. 53 Calverton, The Newer Spirit 132. 58
According to Calverton, Shakespearean dramas depicting struggles of individuality and the ultimate resolution of the play do not and cannot symbolize struggles of entire classes of the 1920s and 1930s. By placing a different value on Shakespeare, Calverton illustrates the process by which Shakespeare and cultures adapt. In this case, not as much emphasis is placed on the mutually determining relationship between Shakespeare and culture. Nonetheless, by mentioning Shakespeare, even if suggesting that Shakespeare’s plays will become of little value to the modern proletarian audiences, Calverton situates him in a proletarian context to develop a sociological approach to literature. Therefore,
Shakespeare clearly has, if nothing else, small impacts on Calverton’s sociological method.
Calverton’s theories are not only crucial to our understanding of proletarian literature; they are also relevant to other materialist literary examinations. His method is very similar to those of more well-known Marxist-Leninist theorists such as Bertolt
Brecht who has essentially become commonplace in Shakespearean performance theory.
Shakespearean Gabriel Egan suggests, “The term ‘Brechtian’ is now commonly applied to almost any kind of surprising theatrical device, but the essence of Brecht’s thinking was this appeal to the rational over the emotional, and his later accommodations of realism were nonetheless in the service of reason.”54 Similarly, in a cultural materialist analysis of Brecht and Shakespeare, Margot Heinemann argues, “‘Brechtian’ has become a cliché. Any production that changes scenery or costumes in sight of the audience, reminds us that we’re in a theatre, shocks our expectations, or reduces properties to a
54 Gabriel Egan, Shakespeare and Marx (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 51. 59 minimum is apt to be called Brechtian.”55 Shakespearean scholars especially find use in
Brecht’s change of heart following World War II. It was then that he began to think more about the value of Shakespeare, but still within the confines of the alienation techniques inherent in epic theatre. He even drafted an outline for his own adaptation of Coriolanus.
Such Shakespearean readings of Brecht do not take into account his Marxist-Leninist tendencies in the 1920s and 1930s. Even in the 1940s Brecht opposed the “[b]arbaric delights” resulting from “Shakespeare’s great solitary figures”: “We know that the barbarians have their art. Let us create another.”56
Both Egan and Heinemann stress that there is much more to Brecht than alienation theories. Even though Brecht’s theories are founded on longings to create a new kind of theatre, Brechtian thought is inherently political, to the extent that he wants art to instruct the audience to reflect on past and current sociopolitical conditions. In his innovative theories on epic theatre, Brecht shares Calverton’s application of sociology to
Shakespeare:
[Y]ou, the sociologist, are alone in being prepared to admit that
Shakespeare’s great plays, the basis of our [German] drama, are no longer
effective. These works were followed by three centuries in which the
individual developed into a capitalist, and what killed them was not
capitalism’s consequences but capitalism itself.57
55 Margot Heinemann, “How Brecht Read Shakespeare,” Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, 2nd ed., eds. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) 247. 56 Bertolt Brecht, “A Short Organum for the Theatre,” Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992) 159. 57 Bertolt Brecht, “Shouldn’t We Abolish Aesthetics?” Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992) 20. 60
Brecht wanted new subject matter which would persuade the audience to exit the theatre while reflecting on the problems of society, rather than simply leaving the theatre with their emotions aesthetically satisfied. If Shakespeare’s plays were to be performed, they must be done so in their historical context so as to clearly distance the Elizabethan period from the proletarian moment. Brecht, staying more within the realm of Marxism-
Leninism than Calverton did, originally associated Shakespeare with capitalism and the bourgeois culture. Consequently, Brecht did not want the audience to view Shakespeare as universal. Therefore, his anti-Shakespeare rhetoric fit within programmatic Leftism.
Shakespeare as a Mark of Soviet and American Separation
The American Left and the Soviet Left treated Shakespeare quite differently. I believe that differences between ideological strategies of the American Left and the
Soviet Left are evident in their respective treatment of Shakespeare. The Soviet Union glorified the Bard much more than the American Left ever did. At the Soviet Writers’
Congress in 1934, a giant portrait of Shakespeare hung above the gatherers. Maxim
Gorky, one of Stalin’s favorite writers, praised Shakespeare. Shakespeare became a part of Soviet culture at the same time when socialist realism became the official aesthetic of
Soviet art. Shakespeare’s birthday began to be celebrated on the same level as a national holiday and by 1939, “mass Shakespearization was in full swing.”58
This was not always the case. In the years immediately following World War I and into the 1920s, Shakespeare was the center of convoluted Soviet literary and cultural politics. These debates dressed Shakespeare in disparate forms: “as representative of
58 Arkady Ostrovsky, “Shakespeare as a Founding Father of Socialist Realism,” Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism, eds. Irena R. Makaryk and Joseph G. Price (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006) 58. 61
‘bourgeois’ artistic traditions; as indispensable classic; as alien, foreign text; as
Renaissance precursor to new Soviet society; as valuable box office draw; as dramatic master; and as outmoded sympathizer of aristocratic circles.”59 The American Left would have agreed that Shakespeare represents bourgeois artistic traditions, and
Calverton’s theories are in accord with the idea that Shakespeare is an outmoded sympathizer of aristocratic circles. American Leftists, as we have seen, would have repelled the idea that Shakespeare is indispensable (even if it is evident that Shakespeare played a crucial role in American proletarian theory). They also would have resented the fact that Shakespeare was a huge box office draw for the capitalist enterprise. Although for many Marxist-Leninist literary critics, it was the combination of all of these views that made Shakespeare so appealing.
Bolshevik Karl Radek considered these debates when he posed his own question concerning Shakespeare: “We should ask ourselves the following question: why was there a Shakespeare in the sixteenth century, and why is the bourgeoisie today unable to produce a Shakespeare?”60 Speaking about the future of world proletarian literature and the promise of great artists, Radek discussed the relationship between literature and historical social conditions. Radek responded to a question about Shakespeare to which he responds as if “Shakespeare” is a universal signifier for “great creative genius”: the would be “one hundred times better chances that more Shakespeares, more geniuses will be found” compared to periods when “past Shakespeares were born” and only “a small
59 Irena R. Makaryk and Joseph G. Price, “When Worlds Collide: Shakespeare and Communisms,” Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism, eds. Irena R. Makaryk and Joseph G. Price (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006) 4. 60 Karl Radek, “Contemporary World Literature and the Task of Proletarian Art,” Soviet Writers’ Congress, 1934: The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism in the Soviet Union, Maxim Gorky et al., ed. H.G. Scott (London: Lawrence and Wishart Ltd, 1977) 122. 62 section of society had access to culture.”61 Making comparisons between the Elizabethan ere and the shift from capitalism to communism in the Soviet Union, Radek emphasized that it is during times of radical transition that great artists are born. He argues that “in the days when the bourgeoisie was fighting against feudalism…it produced writers who depicted these might battles.”62 The battling socioeconomic forces in history created the conditions for a Shakespeare, a great creative genius, to surface; and because the millions in the Soviet Union allegedly had access to culture following the 1917 Revolution, large numbers of great writers would be born in the Soviet Union.
Radek’s perspective on literature is very comparable to the more commonly known views of literature advocated by Georg Lukács, another Leftist who is not always identified by his ties to Marxism-Leninism. Lukács asserts that realist literature provides the masses with “an understanding of the great, progressive and democratic epochs human history.”63 This kind of art—from writers such as Cervantes and Shakespeare,
Balzac and Tolstoy, Grimmelshausen and Gottfried Keller, Gorky, Thomas and Heinrich
Mann—appeals “to readers drawn from a broad cross-section of the people because their works permit access from so many different angles.”64 As a firm supporter of Lenin and advocate for the vanguard of the proletariat, Lukács uses his understanding of Marxism-
Leninism to support his literary theories. Emphasizing the importance of totality, he quotes Lenin: “In order to know an object thoroughly, it is essential to discover and comprehend all of its aspects, its relationships and its ‘mediations.’ We shall never achieve this fully, but insistence on all-around knowledge will protect us from errors and
61 Ibid 148. 62 Ibid 122. 63 Georg Lukács, “Realism in the Balance,” Aesthetics and Politics, Theodor Adorno et al. (London: Verso, 2007) 56. 64 Ibid. 63 inflexibility.”65 These writers wrote during periods of historical transition; therefore, according to Lukács, the Marxist-Leninist should see their works as valuable because they may be examined from past and present theoretical lenses and lend themselves to socioeconomic scrutiny for the current generation.
These Marxist-Leninist perspectives crossed national boundaries into America, but the American Left took its own approach to Shakespeare and questioned Soviet commentary on Shakespeare. Examining Shakespeare within the social restraints of the
Elizabethan age, Radek concluded, “It is enough to read Coriolanus or Richard III in order to see what titanic passion, what strain and stress the artist is portraying. It is enough to read Hamlet in order to see that the artist was confronted with the great problems of which way the world was going.”66 It is clear that Radek provided his own reading to protect Shakespeare as an artifact in the Soviet Union. The American Left did not necessarily agree with the simplicity by which the Soviet Party came to certain conclusions.
Many Soviet Leftists proposed that we can identify Shakespeare’s own internal conflict simply by reading him next to the social conditions in which he lived. Milton
Howard, a reviewer for the New Masses, critiqued A.A. Smirnov’s Shakespeare: A
Marxist Interpretation, which had been translated into English and was made available to
American readers in 1936. Howard’s review is more of a personal testimony than an evaluation of the text, and he does not veer from Marxist-Leninist interpretations.
Howard explains, “Critics equipped with Marxism at least start out with the assumption that Shakespeare’s art was the creation of a historic person rooted in a given historic
65 Ibid 32. Italics are those of Lukács, not Lenin. 66 Radek, “Contemporary” 122-123. 64 epoch and immersed in moral and political forces which make his work amenable to critical analysis.”67 To this end, Howard recognizes a relationship between the author, the work, and the social conditions. This does not mean that we can know everything about that specific moment in time. Howard argues that Smirnov claims to know
Shakespeare’s psyche and exactly what each text intends to accomplish. The harshest comment is in response to Smirnov’s belief that Caliban is a true revolutionary. Howard makes the familiar controversial counterargument: “Perhaps Smirnov will then tell us why Shakespeare depicts Caliban as attempting to rape the young Miranda. Is it that
Shakespeare was a revolutionary in Act II and a counter-revolutionary in Act III?”68
Howard did not naturally accept Shakespeare as a revolutionary as some Soviets did.
Thus, through further analysis of Shakespeare’s texts, we see real distinctions between the Soviet and the American Left. This is understandable considering that
Shakespeare reached iconic status in the Soviet Union by 1934, but was not a prized possession of the American Left. Howard says, “Smirnov’s study of Shakespeare is an example of what to avoid if our criticism is not to degenerate into the laying of a dead hand on a live thing.”69 From Howard, we see the Leftist view that proletarian writing was considered a living thing, and we also see that Shakespeare continued to evolve.
Exploring Shakespeare’s history, we have seen the cultural development of Shakespeare and readings of his texts that change according to a specific moment in history.
67 Milton Howard, “Review and Comment: Smirnov’s ‘Shakespeare,’” New Masses 15 Sept. 1936: 22. 68 Ibid 23. 69 Ibid. 65
Forward with the Popular Front
Whether or not he was correct in saying that the American Left dishonored
Shakespeare, Burke had little to worry about by the end of the 1930s. With the rise of the
Popular Front, most American Leftists reluctantly submitted to the control of the bourgeois liberals. Foley notes that it was not Leftist tendentiousness that caused the proletarian movement to dissipate: “Literary proletarianism failed to move ahead and develop because the priorities of the left-wing movement…altered dramatically with the
Popular Front.”70 In 1937, Malcolm Cowley addressed the change of priorities: “At first the emphasis was on proletarian culture replacing bourgeois culture, motivated by angry scorn of bourgeois decadence. Emphasis was next upon the preservation of culture, with the underlying drive being fear and hope.”71 Preservation of culture included democratizing culture, which was the main goal of the Popular Front—to fight against social fascism by using mass media and providing the masses with access to culture.
Subsequently, Shakespeare was revitalized for the masses, due in large part to Orson
Welles, Langston Hughes, W. H. Auden, and Kenneth Burke.
As for the American Left, things got worse with rumors spreading about the
Moscow Purge trials in the late 1930s. American Leftists could no longer give the Soviet
Union its full support. And with the rise of the Nazi Party, Leftists and bourgeois liberals shared a common goal: to fight fascism. In 1936, several Leftist writers teamed with bourgeois intellectuals to form the League of American Writers. Members of the League, despite sharing a common enemy, could not reconcile their political differences.
70 Foley, Radical Representations 127. 71 League of American Writers Bulletin 1936-42, Jan. 1937, League of American Writers Archives, BANC MSS 72/242z, box 1, part 1, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
66
Communists kept the American Left together until the Nazi-Soviet Pact was established in 1939, but they were not quick to part ways with their Leftism or forget about their achievements; and bourgeois intellectuals were more interested in democratizing culture rather than supporting a new culture. In response to the Hitler-Stalin agreement, W. H.
Auden said,
[P]olitical collaboration between Liberals and Communists is no longer
possible…If the League is to continue, as I hope sincerely it will, it can
only do so by admitting that it is an organisation of writers whose political
opinions differ so widely that any statement by the League of a common
political faith is impossible; that the only things that its members still have
in common are that they are American and they write.72
If the political differences were not already too much for Leftists and bourgeois liberals to reconcile, the Nazi-Soviet Pact put an end to any Leftist leverage. The American Left could not gain liberal support when the “motherland” of communism joined fascist
Germany.
The Left’s defamation of Shakespeare’s character and body of work was influenced by its scorn of bourgeois decadent culture. And in truth, addressing
Shakespeare in a pejorative manner was less of a defamation of Shakespeare’s character than it was a castigation of bourgeois culture. Even in its rejection of Shakespeare, the
Left still reinforced his cultural authority just by referencing him. Shakespeare proved to be an unavoidable variable that needed to be considered. Thus, by giving Shakespeare attention, Shakespeare was a part of proletarian culture. This means that the Left battled
72 W. H. Auden, “Personal Correspondence,” 1939, League of American Writers Archives, BANC MSS 72/242z box 2, folder 8, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 67 against and added to the Bard’s cultural history. This also means that there is a point in
Shakespeare’s history that we have missed—a point where cultural clashes between
Western capitalism and communist ideologies of the East played a major factor. We should revive these moments in history.
We see that the precarious position of Shakespeare in the American proletarian movement was a result of the tension between the American Left and the fellow- travelers. Hence, proletarian and popular culture actually resist(ed) each other; therefore, we should not group proletarian culture with popular culture. With this separation made, we should return to the theoretical works of the Left—Soviet and American—to fill the gaps in materialist theory, to re-politicize Shakespeare studies. Our understanding of cultural materialism could change if we examine missing pieces of Shakespeare’s Leftist history. We will see in the second half of the project that Shakespeare not only appeared in proletarian literary theory; he was appropriated in creative writing by Leftists as well.
In keeping thematically true to its agenda, the American Left applied Shakespeare’s cultural authority to the proletarian tradition by appropriating him in ways that supported the worker and Leftism by following the theories presented in this chapter.
68
Chapter 2: Leftist Hamletism: The Exorcism of the Bourgeois Spirit
Ghosts and Character
In Bend Sinister (1947), the first novel Vladimir Nabokov wrote while living in
America, Nabokov brings to life the world of Padukgrad—a dystopian society reflective of the authoritarian regime of Joseph Stalin. The novel centers on Professor Krug, a renowned philosopher and a sure reflection of the novel’s émigré author. Krug appears to be in a “Hamlet dilemma”: to speak or not to speak in support of Ekwilism, the philosophy on which the ruler Paduk’s “Party of the Average Man” is based. In fact,
Siggy Frank encourages us to consider Hamlet as a source text for the entire plot of Bend
Sinister. Frank suggests, “Nabokov constructs a theatrical framework in which he develops the relationship between Krug and his author(s), in analogy with the bonds between Hamlet and his ghostly father.”1
Shakespearean tropes are pervasive throughout the novel, but a more obvious interest in Hamlet is evident in what is known as the “Hamlet Chapter” (Chapter 7). In this chapter, an obscure colleague named Ember tells Krug about a proposed adaptation of Hamlet that he intends to stage at the Padukgrad state theatre. The only way that the government will find it “worthwhile to suffer the production of a muddled Elizabethan play” is if the premise of the play is dramatically altered to meet the standards of the new regime.2 Consequently, Ember creates an adaptation based on the late Ekwilist Professor
Hamm’s translation entitled “The Real Plot of Hamlet” which contains a fascinating interpretation:
1 Siggy Frank, Nabokov’s Theatrical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) 179. 2 Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister (New York: Vintage International, 1990) 107. 69
Consciously, or unconsciously, the author of Hamlet has created the
tragedy of the masses and thus has founded sovereignty of society over the
individual. This, however, does not mean that there is no tangible hero in
the play. But he is not Hamlet. The real hero is of course Fortinbras, a
blooming young knight, beautiful and sound to the core.3
To emphasize that young Fortinbras is the hero of the play, Ember changes the Ghost’s character: the Ghost becomes the ghost of the late Fortinbras disguised as the late King
Hamlet. Ember explains that it may seem as if King Hamlet’s ghost is directing the action of the play, but it is actually the ghost of old Fortinbras that makes sure rightful order is restored at the play’s end as his son is given control of Denmark.
Although Nabokov does not touch on the history of Hamlet in the Marxist-
Leninist tradition preceding the taint of Stalin, Ember’s alteration of Hamlet in Bend
Sinister speaks to the history of Shakespeare in the Marxist tradition. The novel highlights two points of interest in Hamlet which are beneficial to fully understand proletarian literary culture: the Ghost and the character Hamlet. Nabokov’s attention to the Ghost raises issues pertaining to differences between Marx’s relationship with
Shakespeare and the Left’s relationship with Shakespeare. Marx’s fascination with ghosts, specifically the ghost of King Hamlet, establishes a separation between Marxist and Marxist-Leninist approaches to literature. Because the Left believed that literature must reflect real life, interest in ghosts would be considered ineffectual. In contrast, in
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx alludes to ghosts and Hamlet to describe the revolution as a process still “passing through purgatory” and “when [the revolution] has done this second half of its preliminary work, Europe will leap from her
3 Ibid 108. 70 seat and exultantly exclaim: Well grubbed, old mole.”4 This quotation is an allusion to
Hamlet’s address to his ghostly father: “Well said, old mole. Canst work i’th’ earth so fast? / A worthy pioneer” (1.5.164-165). As Marx appropriates these lines to develop his theories, Hamlet and the ghost of King Hamlet become a part of the Marxist tradition.
Marx’s appropriation of these lines is significant to Marxist criticism in
Shakespeare studies and has resulted in mixed scholarly interpretations. Martin Harries suggests that by appropriating these lines Marx
offers an example in forcefully suggesting that the Ghost belongs to a
crucial moment at once part of the scope of his work and outside of its
range of figuration: Marx cannot invent the ‘poetry’ of the future, but,
instead, suggests that Shakespeare already has. In Hamlet, the Ghost
registers the emergent future. The ghost in the mine is a spirit of
capitalism.5
Peter Stallybrass, on the other hand, does not perceive Marx’s “old mole” as a spirit of capitalism, but instead views it as a figure of revolution.6 Stallybrass supports his argument by turning to Marx’s 1856 “Speech at the Anniversary of The People’s Paper.”
In this speech, Marx appropriates Hamlet’s words in order to compare the old mole to
Robin Goodfellow: “In the signs that bewilder the middle class, the aristocracy and the poor prophets of regression, we recognize our brave friend, Robin Goodfellow, the old
4 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978) 606. 5 Martin Harries, Scare Quotes from Shakespeare: Marx, Keynes, and the Language of Reenchantment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) 97-98. 6 Peter Stallybrass, “‘Well grubbed, old mole’: Marx, Hamlet, and the (un)fixing of representation,” Marxist Shakespeares, eds. Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow (London: Routledge, 2001) 25. 71 mole that can work in the earth so fast, that worthy pioneer—the Revolution.”7 Here,
Stallybrass sees “Hamlet, the father/king, as Puck; Puck, like ‘Da-Da,’ as the bewilderer of the bourgeoisie.”8 Thus, King Hamlet serves as a metaphor for the specter that is instigating the future revolution.
The Left did not view the ghost of King Hamlet as a precursor of the revolution.
Placing too much emphasis on the figure of a ghost would not be consistent with the depiction of social realities. The play itself, however, historically appears as if it is an apparition that haunted the Left. More specifically, it appears as if the spirit of Hamlet haunted the Left. Ember’s alteration of Hamlet reflects the controversial history of
Hamlet on the Soviet stage. By the mid-1930s, even though Shakespeare continued to dominate the Soviet stage, Hamlet was essentially erased from the repertoire because
Hamlet’s internal conflicts and hesitancy did not echo the so-called optimistic spirit of the times.9 As Arkady Ostrovsky explains, the “source of tragedy in the 1930s could be an accident, a misunderstanding, or a mistake as in Othello or Romeo and Juliet, but not the innate conflict or guilt of the protagonist as in Hamlet and Macbeth.”10 The play was considered to represent bourgeois individualism, and the character Hamlet symbolized a weak-kneed individual who is the source of his own tragedy. Broadly speaking, Hamlet was observed as counterproductive to the Leftist agenda.
7 Karl Marx, “Speech at the Anniversary of The People’s Paper,” Collected Works, vol. 14, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1980) 656. 8 Stallybrass, “Well grubbed” 27. 9 Eleanor Rowe, Hamlet: A Window on Russia (New York: New York University Press, 1976) 127. There is no doubt that Nabokov was familiar with the Hamlet controversy. And it is quite possible that Ember’s report that the “only respectable” Hamlet actors “left the country in disguise” (Nabokov 107) is an allusion to Soviet actors, namely Mikhail Chekhov, who took their business abroad. Chekhov was considered to have been Russia’s best Hamlet, but after his performance in a 1924 production, he was publicly censured for appearing to be “so crushed by grief and despair for himself and mankind that his consciousness seemed to disintegrate” (Rowe 128). 10 Arkady Ostrovsky, “Shakespeare as a Founding Father of Socialist Realism,” Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism, eds. Irena R. Makaryk and Joseph G. Price (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006) 61. 72
In this chapter, I explore Leftist extractions of Hamlet, which I refer to as
“Leftism Hamletism.” Building from the practice of “Hamletism,” the Left turned
Hamlet into a projection of Leftist-sympathizers who did not fully commit to the proletarian movement and who allegedly restricted the proletarian movement from evolving. Mike Gold claimed, “We are prepared for economic revolution of the world, but what shakes us with terror and doubt is the cultural upheaval that must come. We rebel instinctively against that change. We have been bred in the old capitalist planet, and its stuff is in our very bones.”11 Figuratively speaking, the American Left believed that Hamlet signified this old capitalist planet and the (bourgeois) stuff in the people’s bones. According to Gold, to join the movement toward a classless society, one must be freed from the bourgeois past that haunts the movement. We see that this means that one must be free from Hamlet-esque vacillation. Seemingly, Leftist Hamletism was an attempt to exorcise the bourgeois spirit from the wavering intellectuals.
I will demonstrate how Hamlet the play and Hamlet the character were appropriated by the Left as literary expressions to challenge the dominant political climate of the 1920s and 1930s. From this, we will see that Leftist Hamletism is a method of advocating radical social change and that an understanding of it will benefit current political discourse in literary studies. I also argue that Leftist Hamletism is unique and progressive. Susan Bennett might have objections to my argument as she would likely see Leftist Hamletism as a nostalgic practice. In her book Performing
Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past, Bennett asserts that even if
Shakespeare is “vandalized,” the new “text” is still “bound to the tradition that
11 Mike Gold, “Towards Proletarian Art,” Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, ed. Michael Folsom (New York: International Publishers, 1972) 62 73 encompasses and promotes the old.” Thus, all manifestations of nostalgia are by default
“conservative.”12
Although she focuses on Shakespearean performances, Bennett may still consider
Leftist Hamletism as a longing for the past because it conserves the past. I, however, observe the Left’s turn to Hamlet as a negotiation between remembering and forgetting, between recovering and restoring. The Left needed to address the past in order to transform the future. Andreas Huyssen argues, “The past is not simply there in memory, but it must be articulated to become memory,” and therefore, “[t]he temporal status of any act of memory is always present, and not, as some naïve epistemology might have it, the past itself, even though all memory in some ineradicable sense is dependent on some past event or experience.”13 Huyssen also thinks that time and memory are “haunting our present.”14 I propose that Hamlet was considered a symbol of the capitalist memory that haunted the Left.
I begin by outlining the history of Hamletism and Hamlet in the Leftist tradition.
The biggest players in the international proletarian literary movement were the Leftists from the Soviet Union, Germany, and the United States—the only three countries that provided reports at the Kharkov Conference of Revolutionary Writers in 1930.15
Therefore, I direct my attention to the Leftist traditions of these nations. Following my historical outline of Hamletism, I move forward to provide examples of Leftist experiences with Hamlet. Whereas, as I will show, most applications of Hamletism are
12 Susan Bennett, Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past (London: Routledge, 1996) 12, 5. 13 Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (London: Routledge, 1995) 3. 14 Ibid. 15 See Editors, “The Charkov Conference of Revolutionary Writers,” New Masses Feb. 1931: 6. 74 motivated by nationalist and imperialist desires, Leftist Hamletism was implemented to develop an ideological consciousness that supported international social, political, and economic reform. The Left focused on creating a hegemonic proletarian literary tradition and did not use Hamlet as a popular expression without a literary and political purpose.
In Germany, Marxist-Leninists such as Bertolt Brecht and Leopold Jessner implanted
Hamlet into performance and cultural criticism to agitate the masses, to reform society, and to advocate political commitment. The Soviets approached Hamlet differently; they identified Hamlet’s dilemma with the vacillating positions of the intelligentsia. After explaining Hamlet’s role in global Leftist movements, I turn to Hamletism in the
American Leftist tradition and situate Hamletism within the context of the wider proletarian movement. Finally, I suggest that a dithering Hamlet haunts scholars today and needs to be expelled if we want to truly politicize Shakespeare.
Roots of Leftist Hamletism
Extractions of Hamlet are not unique to the Left. Over time Hamlet has been turned into a cultural code in popular and high culture alike. In his book Hamlet versus
Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art, R.A. Foakes delineates the history of the phenomenon commonly referred to as “Hamletism,” a term that designates Hamlet as a cultural signifier for “the problems of [an] age” and politicized as “mirroring those who from weakness of will endlessly vacillate.”16 While this description may apply to a multitude of political purposes and disparate ideologies, the common ground in
Hamletism is that it is “interconnected, and developed from an image of Hamlet as well-
16 R.A. Foakes, Hamlet versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 19. 75 intentioned but ineffectual, full of talk but unable to achieve anything, addicted to melancholy and sickened by the world around him.”17
As we trace Hamletism back to Ferdinand Freiligrath’s 1844 poem “Deutschland ist Hamlet,” we see that Hamletism has typically been motivated by nationalism. In this poem, the speaker describes the German population as one filled with revolutionary thinkers who substitute philosophizing for action. In 1877, following German victories in the Franco-Prussian War, Horace Furness delivered a different message as he dedicated his staging of Hamlet to the “GERMAN SHAKESPEARE SOCIETY OF WEIMAR
REPRESENTATIVE OF A PEOPLE WHOSE RECENT HISTORY HAS PROVED ONCE FOR ALL
THAT GERMANY IS NOT HAMLET.”18 Furness’ dedication implies that military victories changed Germany’s image, removing the properties of Hamlet from the nation’s identity.
In the West, nineteenth-century British imperialists also turned Hamlet into political currency to mandate that the British soldiers not be Hamlets.19 And even in the
United States, as recently as the 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State George P.
Shultz applied a similar allusion to Hamlet during a policy debate over the Nicaraguan conflict, declaring that the United States would not become the “Hamlet of Nations.”20
These examples of Hamletism reveal imperialist-motivated—militaristic and nationalist—deployments of Hamlet. The literary Left during the 1920s and 1930s, in contrast, was far less concerned with military action than it was with political
17 Ibid 20. 18 Qtd. in Foakes, Hamlet 19. The capitalization of this quote is how it appears in Foakes. 19 Foakes, Hamlet 37. 20 In Thomas Cartelli, Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formation, Postcolonial Appropriations (London: Routledge, 1999), Cartelli makes a noteworthy assessment of Shultz’s application of Hamlet. Cartelli explains, “The image of ruined bodies draped across the stage at the play’s end and familiarity with the Reagan Administration’s position on the fatal consequences of U.S. indecision and Vietnam combine to suggest that if decisive action is required to enforce yet another Cold War intervention, the United States is well prepared to play the role of the late imperial Fortinbras” (87). 76 commitment. Joseph Freeman explains, “Whatever role art may have played in epochs preceding ours—whatever may be its function in the classless society of the future— social war today has made it the subject of partisan polemic.”21 And for this reason
Leftist Hamletism was employed—for a partisan political purpose.
Leftist Hamletism has Russian roots. During the nineteenth-century, the intellectual class sought to disgrace the nobility for resisting change. To this end, literary references to Hamlet were often projected onto the nobility. During this time, it was the literary intellectuals who appropriated Hamlet to single out writers from noble origin who
“overemphasized psychology.” These “superfluous men” were eventually dubbed
“Russian Hamlets.”22 Moving into the twentieth-century, during the development of the proletarian movement, the intelligentsia’s appropriations of Hamlet were fundamentally turned against them. Explaining the evolution of Hamletism in Russia throughout the nineteenth-century, Eleanor Rowe explains, “[Hamlet] came more and more to be associated with inaction, excessive intellectualization, and weakness of will, qualities which Russian intellectuals subsumed under labels ‘Hamlet-like’ and ‘a Hamlet.’”23 A
“Russian Hamlet” became known as one who would not commit to the proletarian movement.
American Leftist and New Masses editor Joshua Kunitz, after traveling to the
Soviet Union in 1930 to observe the political climate, provided an account of the
Bolsheviks’ opposition to the wavering fellow-travelers:
21 Joseph Freeman, “Introduction,” Proletarian Literature in the United States: An Anthology, eds. Granville Hicks et al. (New York: International Publishers, 1935) 9. 22 Ibid. 23 Eleanor Rowe, Hamlet 60. Rowe also delineates an invaluable record of Hamlet in the Russian literary tradition. See her book for an in-depth account of Russian Hamletism. 77
In contrast to the unswerving Bolsheviki, [the intellectuals] seemed a
pitiable lot. And it is as such that we see them portrayed in Soviet
literature. Weak-kneed Hamlet’s whose “native air of resolution” had been
“sickled o’er by the pale cast of thought,” superfluous people, ludicrous
creatures, nonplussed mourners with their noses timorously tucked in their
ragged furs.24
At one time they praised themselves as the “conscience of the Russian people, the flower of Russian culture, the dreamers, the poets, the prophets of Revolution”; but the intellectuals soon saw themselves reduced to the level of Hamlets.25
The class of intellectuals came to accept their Hamlet identities. Although from their perspective, the intellectuals viewed themselves as a Hamlet of a different lot; they were modern men seeking to cope with the social changes. The optimism that the bourgeois intellectuals saw with the fall of the Romanov monarchy changed to pessimism, and the ones who did not follow the communist vision felt the same hopelessness of plight that Hamlet does. The transition from feudalism to capitalism presented Hamlet with a moral conflict that led to his downfall; likewise, the transition to communism placed the intellectuals in a precarious position. They viewed themselves as stuck between the bourgeois world and the proletarian world. According to Kunitz, if the intellectuals did not fully commit themselves to the Marxist-Leninist program, they were damned:
For even those of them who had accepted the Revolution were, from a
revolutionist’s point of view, not wholly satisfactory. Instead of declaring
24 Joshua Kunitz, “Men and Women in Soviet Literature,” Voices of October: Art and Literature in Soviet Russia, eds. Joseph Freeman, Joshua Kunitz, and Louis Lozowick (New York: Vanguard Press, 1930) 85. 25 Ibid 83. 78
themselves Communists, most of them had slipped off at a tangent,
busying themselves with fine-spun theories, embracing the Revolution as
mystics, or nationalists, or Slavophiles, or Eurasians, or what not.26
We can gather from Kunitz’s assertion that accepting the Revolution was not the same as committing to the Revolution. Consequently, when the intellectuals came to see themselves as Hamlet in a more melancholic sense, the Soviet Left was not pleasant when it condemned the intellectual class of Hamlets.
Although Hamlet was removed from the Soviet stage, we see “Russian Hamlets” enter into Soviet literature. Lawrence Guntner points out that Marx, along with
Ferdinand Lassalle and Friedrich Engels, found optimism in Hamlet and could “readily identify with Hamlet’s predicament as a believer in the humanist ideas in an age unready for them: as such, Hamlet could be seen as a precursor of a socialist future.”27 Marxist-
Leninists did not find this to be the case, thus Hamlet was not taught or presented in a positive light. Rather, Hamlet was considered a product of bourgeois origin—full of myth, superstition, and unnecessary conflict. This is evident in the novel novel The
Diary of a Communist Schoolboy (circa 1923) by Soviet writer N. Ognyov.
Ognyov plays upon the belief in ghosts and superstition in Hamlet. The novel paints a picture of the post-Revolution Soviet society from the perspective of a fifteen- year-old schoolboy named Kostya. Kostya, though still young and a bit naïve, is a resilient embodiment of the nation’s loyalty to Lenin and to the dictatorship of the proletariat. More specifically, he is the embodiment of the future of the Soviet youth. To
26 Ibid 85. 27 Lawrence Guntner, “In Search of a Socialist Shakespeare: Hamlet on the East German Stages,” Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism, eds. Irena R. Makaryk and Joseph G. Price (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006) 178. 79 no surprise, Ognyov makes Hamlet a major theme in the text. In the novel, Kostya has reservations about a school production of Hamlet. In front of the entire class, he speaks up:
First of all, there is no such thing as a ghost; but, even supposing that one
did appear, and supposing I were Hamlet, I wouldn’t stop to talk to him,
but would run for my life; for you couldn’t protect yourself with any
weapon against a ghost, in case he suddenly took a fancy to fight you or
strangle you. Secondly, the ghost spins out a long yarn of how he was
killed by poison that was poured into his ear while he was asleep. I’ve
never heard of anyone being killed that way. However, I don’t know;
after all, it may have happened five hundred years ago.28
Kostya finds the ghost as impractical and the plot of the play absurd. The practical versus the impractical is a Marxist-Leninist theme. Speaking to the future of education, Lenin declares, “One of the greatest evils and misfortunes left to us by the old, capitalist society is the complete rift between books and practical life.”29 Kostya’s character is a product of the new education system; he learns about the old world and distinguishes it from new Soviet life. His rant about the unrealistic appearance of King
Hamlet’s Ghost reflects the Marxist-Leninist attitude that proletarian culture must make distinctions between fiction and practical life. To Kostya, Hamlet and ghosts are a part of the past. Even Shakespeare is a piece of the past. Kostya emphasizes that the play is 500
28 N. Ognyov, The Diary of a Communist Schoolboy, trans. Alexander Werth (London: The Camelot Press, 2011) 98. Even though this edition was printed by The Camelot Press, the book has no official individual or corporate copyright rights. 29 Vladimir Lenin, “The Tasks of the Youth Leagues,” The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1975) 664, 662. 80 years old and that he would prefer to perform a modern play with “barricades and revolutionary fights.”30
The Diary of a Communist Schoolboy gained international recognition and was translated into English by 1928. The book had also been translated for the Freiheit, the
American Yiddish Communist daily newspaper. Therefore, the American Communist
Party had access to Ognyov’s novel by the end of the 1920s and could experience the
Marxist-Leninist perspective in Soviet literature. A.B. Magil published a review of the novel in the July 1928 issue of the New Masses praising the novel for its lack of bourgeois aesthetics and accurate depiction of proletarian life. He explains that it is
“easy to understand the international popularity” of the book because it “is as fresh, as engaging, as unliterary as Huckleberry Finn.”31 Addressing his comrades and fellow workers, Magil states, “This is no glorified esthetic onanism [sic], ladies and gentlemen, but part of the great creative energy that will tear the lid off this stinking bourgeois world.” Magil appreciates that the emotion in the novel is a byproduct of the social order—namely, the death of Vladimir Lenin that fills Kostya and his schoolmates with
“unappeasable grief”—rather than a byproduct of aestheticism.32 Even though Magil does not directly mention Shakespeare or Hamlet, he recognizes the novel’s potential to free readers from bourgeois sympathies, which reflects the purpose behind Leftist
Hamletism. And the fact that Hamlet is a focal point in the novel shows that the play troubled Leftist society and literature.
30 Ognyov, Schoolboy 100. 31 A.B. Magil, “A Soviet Huckleberry Finn: Review of The Diary of a Communist Schoolboy,” New Masses July 1928: 19. 32 Ibid. 81
Battling the Hamlet Spirit
The process of removing the bourgeois spirit from the intellectuals resulted in a major battle between the intellectuals and the Left. The conflict is effectively expressed by Leftist Hamletism. The battle began because the Left needed the intellectuals’ support if proletarian culture was to become hegemonic, and this became a topic of interest at international communist writers’ conferences. Following the Kharkov Conference of
Revolutionary Writers in 1930—the biggest players being the Soviet, American, and
German Left—it was understood that “proletarian [culture]…had not yet established its undisputed hegemony [and] was still waging a battle against the literary tendencies represented by the so-called ‘fellow-travelers.’”33 This was even true in the post-
Revolution Soviet Union.
Contributing to the conference, American representatives created a ten-point list of things that needed to change. The first point read: “The widening of the activity of the
John Reed Club and the New Masses in two directions: a) extending the proletarian base of our movement by drawing in new proletarian elements; b) winning over of radicalized intellectuals.”34 In a personal follow up to the Conference, Gold wrote, “We must bring our young artists and writers closer to a revolutionary consciousness, for this will give their work strength and clarity.”35 Gold was not just directing this message to an
American audience, but to the entire Communist International. The class of bourgeois intellectuals lingered over the heads of the Left and continued to hinder the development of proletarian culture.
33 Editors, “Charkov,” New Masses Feb. 1931: 6. 34 Ibid 7. 35 Mike Gold, “Notes from Kharkov,” New Masses March 1931: 5. 82
Intellectuals inevitably found themselves in a precarious position—needing to decide if they should move on to their personal writing careers or to write for a cause in which they were supposed to be invested. Thus, the intellectuals were in a dilemma of their own. This conflict of mind is depicted in Leftist literature. In the sequel to The
Diary of a Communist Schoolboy, The Diary of a Communist Undergraduate, Ognyov realistically portrays the conflicting position of the Soviet intellectuals. There is a moment in the novel when one of Ognyov’s characters, N.P. Ozhegov, suggests that as a group the intellectuals have been destroyed because of their lack of commitment to the proletarian cause. He declares, “And if you tell me that the intelligentsia is co-operating with the Soviet Power, and serving the Soviet Power, I shall answer you that you are mistaken—for it is not the intelligentsia as a whole, but only a few categories, a few intellectuals.”36 As an intellectual himself, N.P. Ozhegov understands what is at stake for the future of intellectuals alongside the proletarian movement. He extends a question reflective of the “Hamlet dilemma” that the intellectuals faced: “To be or not to be? To live or not to live?”37 The intellectuals had no place in the new Soviet world; they could either commit to the Leftist agenda or remain lost. To survive, their Hamlet-esque characteristics had to be removed from them. No longer could the intellectuals wait around fantasizing about life and the future.
In a review of this novel, Magil reinforces this point by explaining that the protagonist Kostya is “living not in the ‘Marxian paradise’ of the bourgeois imagination, but in the dynamic realities of the workers’ and peasants’ republic that are building the
36 N. Ognyov, Diary of a Communist Undergraduate, trans. Alexander Werth (London: Victor Gollancz, 1929) 66. 37 Ibid. 83 socialist state and conquering new strongholds for the proletarian revolution.”38 In the novel, the Marxist paradise of bourgeois imagination clouds the fellow-travelers’ judgment, and, in effect, haunts the proletarian revolutionists. We see that the issue of
Leftist political commitment is described as a matter of progression and regression. It became compared to a matter of life and death. The “to live or not to live” theme is not one created by Ognyov; it is a theme pervasive throughout Leftist literature. The editors of the New Masses, for example, told the intellectuals: “Either you will accept the fact that the [class] war is upon you, and organize to delay and struggle against it, or it will destroy you. The issue is exceedingly clear, and there are but two alternatives.”39 The
Left believed itself to be helping the intellectuals by freeing them from their bourgeois sensibilities.
Questions pertaining to left-wing commitment clearly got the attention of many intellectuals who acknowledged their own sort of Hamlet dilemma. The sentiments behind Leftist Hamletism had a negative impact on the intellectuals’ status in American and Soviet society alike. They became a shipwrecked people. Constance Coiner notes that “views of the proletariat’s strengths and intellectuals’ weakness resulted in the self- deprecation on the part of many radical intellectuals.”40 Sherwood Anderson, in 1932, conceded, “My own feeling now is that if it be necessary, in order to bring about the end of a money civilization and set up something new, healthy, and strong, we of the so-
38 A.B. Magil, “Review of N. Ognyov’s The Diary of a Communist Undergraduate,” New Masses June 1929: 16. 39 Editors, “To All Intellectuals,” New Masses May 1932: 3. The editorial board at this time included Whittaker Chambers, Robert Evans, Hugo Gellert, Mike Gold, Louis Lozowick, and M. Olgin. The managing editor was Walt Carmon. 40 Constance Coiner, Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) 92-93. 84 called artist class have to be submerged, let us be submerged. Down with us.”41 A month later Anderson provided a segment for the How I Came to Communism:
Symposium. He still clung to his artist status, but admitted to being a writer of communist propaganda and told the revolutionists that artists who believed in communism should be “as free as possible to strike, by our stories out of American life, into the deeper facts.”42 Genevieve Taggard, an artist herself, admitted that if she was one of the practical individuals in charge of a revolution then she too would “get rid of every single artist immediately.”43 The self-deprecation of these artists exemplifies their inner conflict.
The individual responses to the clash between the Leftists and the intellectuals reveal that American Leftist Hamletism ostracized individual intellectuals but did not always ostracize them as an entire class. In the introduction to the Proletarian Literature in the United States: An Anthology, Joseph Freeman theorizes literary history; but he does so as to harangue the bourgeois “Man in White,” the liberal “‘impartial’ arbiter.”44 He reminds the liberal writer that in the nascent stages of bourgeois literature, the bourgeoisie “demanded the right of free speech against feudal institutions,” but “today it denies that right to the proletariat which employs it against capitalist institutions.”45
Targeting those who may have sympathized with the proletarian movement, but who were not willing to fully commit to the revolutionary purpose, Freeman tried to sell his agenda by urging the bourgeois writers to understand the Communist from an intellectual standpoint. In Gold’s eyes, “Literature and art are two powerful ways of organizing the
41 Sherwood Anderson, “A Writer’s Notes,” New Masses Aug. 1932: 10. 42 Sherwood Anderson, “How I Came to Communism: Symposium,” New Masses Sept. 1932: 8. 43 Editors, “Are Artists People?” New Masses Mar. 1927: 6. 44 Freeman, “Introduction” 9. 45 Ibid 22. 85 masses for the great creative tasks of the Revolution. For those whose talents lie in this work, there should be no hesitations and doubts.”46 The Leftists needed politically committed writers, not hesitant Hamlets.
Because both of Ognyov’s novels were translated into English and were available to American Leftists, Hamlet currency was right in front of the American Left. The
American Party, like most Marxist-Leninists, believed Hamlet to be a bourgeois creation and Hamlet to be the representation of the bourgeois individual. And like its Soviet counterpart, the American Left believed the bourgeois intellectuals needed to play a role in helping the proletarian literary movement survive. Therefore, it was necessary to recruit them. Hamlet became a signifier separating the non-Leftist writers from the committed Leftist writers. From Kunitz’s accounts of Hamletism in the Soviet Union, we see that the American Left was well aware of the literary situation abroad and, more importantly, aware of the struggle between politically-committed Leftists and fellow- travelers. In the Soviet Union, class wars waged on. Meanwhile, in the United States, the American Left was still trying to build a front that could enter the class war and a proletarian literary tradition that would complement the front. This meant recruiting individual writers to join the Leftist movement.
Freeman illustrates the Soviet influence on the American Left’s Hamletism. He recounts a conversation between Louis Fischer and Soviet critic Vyacheslav Polonsky.
The conversation revolved around the topic of the evolution of Russian writers and philosophers who once simply philosophized finally began to take action. Hamlet was not affiliated with the new writers. He was associated with the past “soft intellectuals”:
“Chekov, mystics, dreamers, vain protestants, egoists, Hamlets, anarchists, soul-
46 Gold, “Notes” 11. 86 hunters.”47 In America, communists also recognized Hamlet as a thinker and philosopher unfit to change the world—counterproductive to the Marxist argument that “[t]he philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”48
American Leftist Hamletism was an effort to change the world by removing the bourgeois spirit from the fellow-travelers. For Hamlet to be appropriated in a productive manner, his lack of action needed to be highlighted as counterproductive to the revolutionary movement which required action. Earl Browder, a main figure of the
American Communist Party, referred to Hamlet to attack The New Republic. The New
Republic, a Leftist newspaper that protested fascism, maintained neutrality during the nascent formation of the Popular Front in 1936—impartial toward the American
Communist Party and the bourgeois intellectual liberals. Browder criticized this neutrality, reproving “the Hamlet-like paralysis that has gripped the minds of The New
Republic’s editors under the hypnosis of fascism.”49 Like Hamlet who is caught in the transition between two different modes of production, so too were The New Republic’s editors who were presumably stuck between communism and fascism. Browder condemned Hamlet and those like him for not taking a stern position. The “Hamlet-like paralysis” became a categorical norm in American Communist Party writing.
Within the American Left, Hamlet criticism became extremely personal. In a review of John Howard Lawson's play Processional (1925), Gold chastises Lawson by
47 Joseph Freeman, The Soviet Worker: An Account of the Economic, Social and Cultural Status of Labor in the U.S.S.R. (New York: Liveright Inc. Publishers, 1932) 326. Lewis Fischer was the Moscow correspondent of the Nation and the Baltimore Sun. 48 Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978) 145. 49 Qtd. in Frank A. Warren, III, Liberals and Communism: The “Red Decade” Revisited (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966) 159. 87 calling him a “bourgeois Hamlet.”50 The adjective “bourgeois” presupposes an alternative Hamlet. By using “‘bourgeois’ Hamlet” as an insult, Gold radically molds
Shakespeare in order to use Hamlet to condemn wavering intellectuals. Douglas Lanier notes that Shakespeare “often epitomizes forces against which popular culture is pitted in its struggle for authority.”51 Instead of using Shakespeare simply to build cultural authority, Gold reduces the cultural value of a bourgeois Shakespeare. In doing so, though, he also builds Shakespeare’s cultural authorial by making him a part of American proletarian discourse.
Gold had his own vision of Shakespeare and Hamlet that was contaminated by elite capitalist performances. As a child, Gold saw a production of Hamlet directed by
Boris Thomasheffsky to which Gold responded, “What Anglo-Saxon star would dare to play Hamlet with such a Falstaffian stomach?”52 In what was probably his first theatrical encounter with Hamlet, Gold was introduced to a well-fed royal bourgeois Hamlet, not a heroic individual. In the Processional critique, he compares Lawson to an unheroic
Hamlet and insinuates that Lawson’s play “actually hurt the revolutionary movement by portraying the proletariat revolutionary” in a counterproductive fashion.53 Not only does
Gold harshly criticize Processional; he disparages Lawson as a stagnant playwright, one who did not understand his role in the proletarian literary movement: “[Lawson] is still lost like Hamlet, in his inner conflict. Through all his plays wander a troop of ghosts disguised in the costumes of living men and women and repeating the same monotonous
50 Michael Gold, “A Bourgeois Hamlet of Our Time,” New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties, ed. Joseph North (New York: International Publishers, 1969). This article first appeared in the weekly edition of the New Masses on April 10th, 1934. 51 Douglas Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002) 55. 52 Mike Gold, “A Jewish Childhood in the New York Slums,” Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, ed. Michael Folsom (New York: International Publishers, 1972) 310. 53 Jonathan L. Chambers, Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre 1923-1937 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006) 176. 88 questions: ‘Where do I belong in this warring world of two classes?’”54 Gold applied to ghost trope to make a distinction between fiction and reality.
Lawson did not wait long to respond to Gold’s accusations. A week after Gold’s verbal assault, in an article titled “‘Inner Conflict’ and Proletarian Art,” Lawson responded with “a long soliloquy” to oppose Gold's “scathing review.”55 The article reads much like one of Hamlet’s soliloquies—except in more explicit terms—in which
Hamlet struggles to convince himself of his role as a son and a loyal subject. And much like Hamlet is quick to announce his precarious position, Lawson unhesitatingly admits the hesitancy of many Leftist sympathizers—a category in which he does not include himself. In his own defense, stating that his position in the class war is both “definite and disciplined,” Lawson indicates that “many American intellectuals are so confused about the whole issue that they waver idiotically between Communism and various manifestations of social fascism.”56
In the article, Lawson never defends any positive qualities of Hamlet; quite the opposite, he only tries to clear his own name from being affiliated with such a stigmatizing comparison. He ultimately shared Gold’s attitude toward bourgeois Hamlet- esque writers. To provide some closure to this quarrel, it is important to note that by the end of 1934 Lawson removed all traces of being a fellow-traveler and fully sided with the
Party.57 Placing Hamlet in opposition to the American Communist Party agenda probably was not the major factor in Lawson’s union with the Party; but reflecting on the
54 Gold, “Bourgeois Hamlet” 200. 55John Howard Lawson, “‘Inner Conflict’ and Proletarian Art,” New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties, ed. Joseph North (New York: International Publishers, 1969) 204. This article first appeared in the weekly edition of the New Masses on April 17th, 1930. 56 Ibid 205. 57 See Chambers, Messiah 127. 89 principles behind a proletarian cultural revolution and its influences from Moscow, we should unquestionably recognize the pragmatism of using Hamlet to demand loyalty.
Jessner and Brecht: Leftist Hamletism in Germany
In Germany, Hamlet was approached in a different way because the play continued to be staged in Germany. Shakespeare was the foundation of traditional
German theatre for much of the nineteenth-and twentieth-century and Hamlet was a popular play. Nonetheless, the German Leftist approach still fits under Leftist Hamletism because it rejects ghostly presences and vehemently opposes sympathizing or empathizing with Hamlet. German Marxist-Leninists did not engage with the play in the traditional sense. In the Weimar Republic, artists established a new program for
Shakespeare which revolved around the social and political circumstances of the time.
They took the “deeply felt regard for the world of Shakespeare’s dramas” and combined it with “an acute awareness of the ‘real’ world outside the theatre.”58
Depicting the real world did not include glorifying ghosts as Marx did. In fact, it was the ghosts of the past, literally and figuratively, that German Socialist playwright
Leopold Jessner appears to have questioned in his 1926 Hamlet staged at the Prussian
State Theatre. Applying the emergent trend of expressionist aesthetics, Jessner situated the play in a modern context:
[I]n Jessner’s production the Danish court of Hamlet was not presented as
a mythical, timeless place concentrating on the inner conflict of the young
Danish prince. Rather, the court was identified as a political system
58 William George, “Shakespeare in the Weimar Republic,” Theatre Survey, 28. 2 (Nov. 1987): 90. 90
poisoned by conspiracy and spying, and which in its appearance strongly
resembled the Prussian court.59
Peter W. Marx argues that Jessner challenged the ghosts of the German past to “make them visible and at the same time to question their contemporary meaning”; by modernizing the play, Jessner attempted to remove the ghosts inherent in the “nostalgic view of the bourgeois canon.”60 The radicalized modern adaptation was not without criticism. Despite being a Jew and a Social Democrat, Jessner was criticized for creating a play that potentially could be used to subvert the new regime. For example, in the mouse-trap scene, Jessner’s Claudius appeared to be overcome by symptoms of physical paralysis. Because Kaiser Wilhelm II was born with a paralyzed arm, critics saw
Claudius as a negative representation of Wilhelm II.61 Supporters of the Wilhelm regime who did not support the communist or the national socialist movements took offense to
Jessner’s directorial choice.
Refashioned Shakespeare productions were demonstrative of the evolution of the
German theatre during the Weimar Republic. Modernized productions, including
Jessner’s, were “testimony to the high state which German theatre art had achieved.”62
Brecht, on the other hand, did not consider modernized productions of old plays to be an achievement. It was these adaptations of Shakespeare that he opposed. Although he admired Elizabethan theatre technique and aesthetics, Brecht called for a new German dramatic tradition with new content. He commended the acting, the directors, and the competition of the new German theatre, but blamed modern playwrights such as Jessner
59 Peter W. Marx, “Challenging the Ghosts: Leopold Jessner’s Hamlet,” Theatre Research International, 1.1 (2005): 76. 60 Ibid 73. 61 George, “Shakespeare” 96; Peter W. Marx, “Challenging” 76. 62 George, “Shakespeare” 97. 91 for not producing original plays that reflected the social conditions of the time—“[t]he building-up of a mammoth industry, the conflict of classes, war, the fight against disease, and so on.”63
Because of the German audience’s familiarity with Shakespeare’s plays, Brecht believed that even modernized productions of old plays evoked nostalgia—which blurred the separation between the past and the future. Therefore, he felt that Jessner’s performance of Hamlet reinforced the specter of the bourgeois spirit. To an extent,
Brecht’s attitude complements Bennett’s assertion that the most radical appropriations of
Shakespeare’s plays are still conservative in nature. Especially in a culture that embraced
Shakespeare for so long, there would always be a nostalgic feeling in response to radically adapted Shakespearean plays. Brecht provides a statement very similar to
Bennett’s: “Thus in the end the new plays only served the old theatre and helped to postpone the collapse on which their own future depended.”64 Because the foundation of modern German theatre was Shakespeare, Brecht essentially claimed that by staging
Shakespeare, artists were not only not moving forward, but were assisting in the stagnancy of German theatre.
The conservative traits of which Bennett speaks are exactly what Brecht is protesting. We see this point of view in Brecht’s own engagement with Hamlet that supports a Leftist attitude. Many Shakespeare scholars do not acknowledge that Brecht was a Marxist-Leninist. In the 1930s Brecht wrote, “Ceaselessly the thinking man
63 Bertolt Brecht, “The German Drama: pre-Hitler,” Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic,” ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992) 77. 64 Bertolt Brecht, “Shouldn’t we Abolish Aesthetics?” Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic,” ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992) 21. 92 praises Comrade Lenin.”65 Like Lenin, Brecht believed in concentrating on the bad new days rather than the good old ones. He believed in a theatre for instruction rather than a theatre for pleasure. According to Brecht, art, theatre, and literature are apparatuses that can form the ideological superstructure of a new society—but this meant that the art, theatre, and literature need to be educational tools. In this way, Brecht and Bennett come to differ as Brecht believed that theatre can be used as a progressive medium. In the instructive theatre, theatre is an “affair for philosophers, but only for such philosophers as wished not just to explain the world but also to change it.”66 Building on Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach,” Brecht intended his instructive theatre to provoke the audience to reflect on the current social conditions.
Brecht’s feelings toward Shakespeare may have changed throughout his career
(mostly after World War II), but his initial Leftist sympathies resulted in his contempt for the content in the classics. During the 1920s Brecht believed Shakespeare to “no longer be effective.”67 Even as late as 1948, he definitively marked his position on the adaptation of Shakespeare plays:
Shakespeare’s great solitary figures, bearing on their breast the star of
their fate, carry through with irresistible force their futile and deadly
outbursts; they prepare their own downfall; life, not death, becomes
obscene as they collapse; the catastrophe is beyond criticism. Human
65 Qtd. in Alex Callinicos, “Leninism in the Twenty-first Century? Lenin, Weber, and the Politics of Responsibility,” Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth, eds. Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007) 18. 66 Bertolt Brecht, “Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction,” Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic,” ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992) 72. 67 Brecht, “Shouldn’t we Abolish Aesthetics?” 20. 93
sacrifices all around! Barbaric delights! We know that the barbarians have
their art. Let us create another.68
It is Shakespeare’s focus on tragic solitary figures that motivated much of Brecht’s contempt toward the content of Shakespeare’s plays. The “barbaric delights” Brecht refers to characterize bourgeois culture. He makes sure to emphasize that it is “very important to keep the productive apparatus of the working-class theatre well clear of the general drug traffic conducted by bourgeois show business.”69 Essentially, the bourgeois theatre offers these moments of pleasure; in contrast, the instructional theatre offers moments of teaching, enticing the audience to leave contemplating the political climate and ways to reform society.
However, Brecht did find parts of Hamlet useful to his own theoretical and theatrical interests. He occasionally alluded to Hamlet to disseminate Leftist messages when discussing his instructive epic theatre. He was attracted to the relationship between
Hamlet and young Fortinbras and saw it as the most crucial point in the play. Brecht is correct in seeing their relationship as a key part of the plot. Although the Ghost’s revenge propositions and Hamlet’s inner conflict seem to be the driving forces behind the plot, the young Fortinbras/Hamlet dichotomy serves as a significant vehicle for the play’s actions leading up to Hamlet’s epiphany that his “thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth!” (4.4.66). Hamlet’s encounter with Fortinbras’ army which is fighting for a piece of land “Which is not tomb enough and continent / To hide the slain” (4.4.64-65) catalyzes Hamlet’s bloody revelation. Even at this point in the play, though, Hamlet
68 Bertolt Brecht, “A Short Organum for the Theatre,” Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic,” ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992) 189. 69 Bertolt Brecht, “On the Use of Music in an Epic Theatre,” Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic,” ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992) 89. 94 decides his “thoughts” must be bloody. He finally makes a decision, but he does not say that from now on his “actions” will be bloody. Therefore, thinking still takes precedent over acting.
Young Fortinbras and Prince Hamlet are fundamental opposites. Young
Fortinbras, who may be considered as a symbol of the old feudalist world, is motivated by power and revenge; and Hamlet is characterized by bourgeois individualism.
Fortinbras fights for a piece of land that has no value except in its name. This reflects feudalist imperialist; whereas capitalist imperialism would entail colonizing land to utilize the materials for trade and profit. In the first scene of the play, Horatio describes
Fortinbras as one “Of unimprovèd mettle hot and full” (1.1.95) and explains that
Fortinbras
Hath in the skirts of Norway here and there
Sharked up a list of landless resolutes
For food and diet to some enterprise
That hath a stomach in’t, which is no other—
And it doth well appear unto our state—
But to recover of us by strong hand
And terms compulsative those foresaid lands
So by his father lost. (1.1.96-103)
Not only is Fortinbras impulsively ready to avenge his father’s death, or at least recover his father’s lost land, he has recruited men to follow him. According to Horatio, the
“resolutes” have been motivated to enlist so that they will in return receive food for their services. Even though he takes advantage of the landless men by offering them food to
95 which they have no access, young Fortinbras displays leadership skills to organize an army ready to battle. The army stands by its resilient leader. Whereas Fortinbras shows
(barbaric) courage, Hamlet thinks about his thoughts which if broken into fourths are
“one part wisdom” and “three parts coward” (4.4.42-43). Fortinbras holds the military skills that Hamlet’s father held and has a vengeful desire similar to King Hamlet’s Ghost, both which are lacking in Hamlet. And because in the final scene Hamlet endorses
Fortinbras as King, one could argue that Hamlet himself recognizes Fortinbras as the true hero.
Brecht recognized Hamlet’s encounter with Fortinbras’ army in Act IV, Scene 4 as the pinnacle of Hamlet’s transformation. We know this from Brecht’s many allusions to this scene. From the perspective of a director implementing his theory of epic theatre,
Brecht delivered what he believed to be an effective reading of Hamlet alienated from the present moment. He told the actor to avoid “becoming” Hamlet on stage—in other words, avoid appearing to encapsulate Hamlet’s internal conflict. Brecht said that when one plays the part of Hamlet, the actor should portray Hamlet for what he appears to be in the text:
After at first being reluctant to answer one bloody deed by another, and
even preparing to go into exile, [Hamlet] meets young Fortinbras at the
coast as he is marching with his troops to Poland. Overcome by this
warrior-like example, he turns back and in a piece of barbaric butchery
slaughters his uncle, his mother and himself, leaving Denmark to the
Norwegian. 70
70 Bertolt Brecht, “A Short Organum” 201-202. 96
Brecht believed this moment in the play to be a confrontation between the old feudal system and the emergent bourgeois ideals, a point when Hamlet’s transformation of thought is a return to the “feudal business.” Hamlet’s conflict between the humanist
“Reason” received at Wittenberg and the irrational barbaric action causes him to fall
“victim to the discrepancy between such reasoning and such action.”71
Accordingly, by showing Hamlet as one who has unredeemable qualities, Brecht is saying that the crowd should receive the following message: “Don’t be Hamlet.”
Brecht is blunt in his description of the plot, keeping emotions out of the reading. Brecht maintains a reading of Hamlet that confines the play in its Elizabethan context. It is void of emotion that might appeal to a modern German audience. Brecht’s political techniques are meant to keep the crowd alienated from emotional connections and responsive to instruction and agitation. A bourgeois critic, according to Brecht, observes
“Hamlet’s hesitation as the interesting new element in the play, but considers the massacre in the fifth act, with the sweeping away of hesitation and the turn to action instead, as a positive solution.”72 As Brecht’s reading demonstrates a Leftist reading of
Hamlet that opposes bourgeois interpretations, his sonnet “On Shakespeare’s Play
Hamlet” (circa 1938) does the same:
Here is the body, puffy and inert,
Where we can trace the virus of the mind.
How lost he seems among his steel-clad kind
This introspective sponger in a shirt.
71 Ibid 202. 72 Margot Heinemann, “How Brecht Read Shakespeare,” Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, 2nd ed., eds. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) 241. 97
Till they bring drums to wake him up again
As Fortinbras and all the fools he’s found
March off to battle for that patch of ground
“Which is not tomb enough to hide the slain.”
At that his too, too solid flesh sees red.
He feels he’s hesitated long enough.
It’s time to turn to (bloody) deeds instead.
So we nod grimly when the play is done
And they pronounce that he was of the stuff
To prove “most royally,” “had he been put on.”73
The sonnet is a response to the play; it is not necessarily a translation. Brecht suggests that the ending of the poem portrays a bourgeois response to the play.
According to this view, Hamlet is still heroic and would have been a good leader. Brecht reveals the irony of this bourgeois interpretation by pointing out the imperialist motives that transform Hamlet into revenge-mode. Hamlet’s use of reason to contemplate what should be done in the play is taken over by irrational barbaric thoughts. It is important to note, as Michael Morley does, that “the main point about this sonnet and Brecht’s view of the play…is that his approach to the work is not primarily that of the literary critic, but that of the director and member of the audience.”74 While this is true, as a director and
73 Bertolt Brecht, “On Shakespeare’s Play Hamlet,” Poems, eds. and trans. John Willett and R. Manheim (London: Eyre Methuen, 1976) 321. 74 Michael Morley, “Brecht’s Hamlet,” Shakespeare: World Views, eds. Heather Kerr, Robin Eaden, and Madge Mitton (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996) 71. 98 member of the audience, he does not want to direct a bourgeois point of view that glorifies Hamlet’s indecision or his irrational epiphany. Brecht says, “Our working-class theatres need careful education and strict training if they are to master the tasks proposed here and the possibilities which are here offered to them. They in turn have to carry out a certain training of their public.”75 Brecht uses Hamlet to carefully educate actors and provide them with strict training, but his interpretation of the play reflects a common
Marxist-Leninist distaste for the play’s protagonist. Ultimately, Hamlet and Hamlet are associated with bourgeois culture, counterproductive to the future of proletarian culture.
Gold’s Final Word
When the American Communist Party began to dissolve in the late 1930s, those who were once affiliated with the Left, and who did not completely buy into the Popular
Front, tried to keep the proletarian legacy alive—still fighting for revolution—and did not remove Hamlet from the proletarian tradition. This is especially true of Gold who continued with his exorcist efforts. In a speech titled “The Second American
Renaissance” given at the Fourth Congress of American Writers in 1941, in an effort to validate the proletarian literary movement of the 1920s and 1930s, Gold again used the character Hamlet in an effort to mock the much more popular modernist movement.
Gold stated that modernist writers such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and
Gertrude Stein were a part of a “Hamlet generation” as opposed to the “lost generation.”
Once again, describing Hamlet's character as that of an inwardly confused individual,
Gold criticized the writers of the “lost generation” as “each [having] fancied himself a solitary and tragic Hamlet lost in a vulgar world.” Moreover, he referred to Archibald
75 Brecht, “Music” 88. 99
MacLeish's "The Hamlet of Archibald MacLeish” as a “long, whiny poem of self-pity.”76
Such a claim supports the notion that intellectuals were in a state of self-indulging melancholia.
In the speech, Gold shuns the modernist writers for not having the zeal, honesty, and revolutionary aspiration of the proletarian writers who were taught “to act and write like men and citizens, not like mere entertainers or perpetual Harvard boys or mystic outcasts from the national life.”77 Opposed to the Hamlets proud of their tragic solitude,
Gold praises the proletarian writers for understanding their position in society and commended their efforts to make their convictions a reality. He claims that writers of the modernist movement preferred to write not for the masses but for "the narrow circles of the over-educated.”78 Gold essentially tried to keep the proletarian movement alive within the Popular Front.
In another response to critics of the American proletarian movement, Gold said,
“The New York woods,” Gold remarked, “are full of glib intellectuals,
who can tear a novel, a poem or a political movement to pieces, but are
themselves as incapable as Hamlet of deed or decision.” These
“intellectual Hamlets go through enormous sweaty tragedies” but they
usually “drift contentedly” into the capitalist world where they serve as “a
kind of intellectual Bomb Squad.”79
76 Mike Gold, “The Second American Renaissance,” Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, ed. Michael Folsom (New York: International Publishers, 1972) 243. 77 Ibid 246. 78 Wald, Exiles 194. 79 Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1961) 329. Gold’s article in which this quote was first published in the Daily Worker on November 6, 1933. 100
In both cases, Gold appropriated Hamlet in order to accuse those whom he believed to be pseudo-Communists for not understanding their part in America's class war. References to “warring” and “Bomb Squad” emphasize the severity of the American class war in the eyes of the American Communist Party. This quote is relevant to scholars today. We are good at dissecting and criticizing literature and political movements, but it is seemingly difficult to take a definite partisan position. A partisan approach to literature, void of dithering Hamlets, might help to re-politicize Shakespeare scholarship in a manner that truly represents proletarian culture.
101
Part II: Reconstruction Chapter 3: Hamlet and Shylock; Revolutionists and Artists
Shakespeare Appropriated and Adapted
The previous two chapters outlined Shakespeare’s impact on the development of
American proletarian politics. I now shift focus from the recovery to the reconstruction of Leftist Shakespeares. The reconstruction process involves recovering archival materials and then reconstructing them into a version of Shakespeare to which we are not accustomed—an alternative Shakespeare based on specific Marxist-Leninist ideological practices. These Leftist Shakespeares help describe the class wars of the 1920s and
1930s and the internal battles between the communist supporters and the fellow-travelers in America. But more than anything, these appropriative adaptations of Shakespeare epitomize the practice of putting Shakespeare to political use. They are polemical and controversial, didactic and inspiring. Most of all, they are products of political commitment that will enhance our perception of Shakespeare’s history in America and
Shakespeare’s history in American proletarian politics.
Shakespeare’s plays did not appear in full on the communist-affiliated stage in
America during the 1920s and 1930s. Reasons for this include Shakespeare’s rise to elite culture and Leftist aversion to a bourgeois Shakespeare. A commonly held belief was that the American Leftist stage should “portray the conflict of the individual against his social environment” and distinguish itself from Shakespeare “whose heroes revolt against the moral order of the universe without due cognizance of the role played by social organization in the tragedy of human destiny.”1 Even though he was not a part of the
1 Ira Levine, Left-Wing Dramatic Theory in the American Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985) 24. 102 communist stage in America, Shakespeare was still appropriated and adapted by the Left for literary and political purposes. In this chapter, I examine two distinct examples of
American Leftist appropriative adaptations of Shakespeare. The first is a questionnaire by the editors of the New Masses called “Are Artists People?” It appears in the March
1927 issue of the New Masses. “Are Artists People?” is prefaced with an extracted and adapted version of Shylock’s “Hath a Jew not eyes?” speech from The Merchant of
Venice. The second is a short skit called Red Hamlet that was directed and performed by
Robert Lewis during the mid-1930s. For Red Hamlet, Lewis appropriated Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy and adapted it into a form of Leftist experimental performance.
These two appropriative adaptations exemplify two disparate forms of media that the American Left took advantage of to propagate its agenda. Red Hamlet was performed in front of small crowds at charity events and political rallies, and “Are Artists People?” is a survey that was distributed to 14 individuals; the participants’ answers were published in the New Masses and read by a fairly large readership.2 No matter how different these appropriative adaptations might seem, they both serve a Marxist-Leninist purpose. Published in the New Masses is a quote from Lenin pertaining to the value of art: “Art belongs to the people. Art must have its deepest roots in the vast creative masses. It must organize the feeling, thought and will of the masses…let us always have the workers and peasants in mind.”3 The editors of the New Masses and Robert Lewis created proletarian art that would resonate with the masses. These two appropriative
2 The fourteen individuals who partook in the survey are Harbor Allen, Bruce Barton, Van Wyck Brooks, Heywood Broun, Stuart Chase, Babette Deutsch, Waldo Frank, Robinson Jeffers, Joseph W. Krutch, Llewelyn Powys, Edwin Seaver, Upton Sinclair, Genevieve Taggard, and Edmund Wilson. 3 Vladimir Lenin, qtd. in New Masses Jan. 1930: 6. 103 adaptations also communicate that the conflict between the Left and the bourgeois intellectuals was a persistent battle in America.
“Are Artists People?” and Red Hamlet explain that Shakespeare was invariably extracted in small portions by the American Left. When extracting bits and pieces from
Shakespeare’s works, rather than adapting an entire play, the Left typically fixated on a character or a speech that ultimate reflects the nature of a character. Because these appropriative adaptations are interactions with Shakespeare’s texts, they tell us a great deal about how Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice were contextualized in the American proletarian movement. We have already seen that Hamlet was a site of concern for the
American Left, for better or for worse, but the integration of Shylock’s voice into proletarian literature tells us about Leftist feelings towards economic affairs and about the large Jewish proletarian population in America. Consequently, I am not just reconstructing these appropriative adaptations to provide a comprehensible version of these texts for my readers. By reconstructing them, I am also reconstructing a history and culture.
Ultimately, there is no circumventing the proletarian culture versus popular culture contradiction, so I will highlight that “Are Artists People?” and Red Hamlet are distinctively proletarian. Furthermore, I reveal the diversity of proletarian literary forms.
We will find that radically different media still share comparable contents and messages.
In regards to the form versus content debate, we see that juxtaposing these two works with one another allows us to truly see that the American Left believed that political content outweighs form. To this end, situating “Are Artists People?” and Red Hamlet in a larger theoretical context and within a specific historical timeframe, I provide a
104 portrayal of politically committed Leftist Shakespeares—appropriations of Shakespeare that have been adapted into proletarian literature to propagate a Marxist-Leninist ideology.
Shylock and Jews; Prostitutes and Artists
“Are Artists People?” is an important literary artifact from the American Left’s cultural history and from the history of political appropriation practices. It poses eight questions central to concerns dealing with politics and literature—questions that political and literary texts should respectively ask. Out of the 14 individuals who participated in the survey, some of them were self-identified Leftists; others belonged to the group of wavering intellectuals that the Left resented. To preface the survey, the editors of the
New Masses extracted Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech from The Merchant of
Venice. The opening of the questionnaire reads:
Are artists people? If you prick an artist, does he bleed? If you starve
him, does he faint? Is heaven his home or can he properly take an active
part in our mundane struggle for the fact of bread and the concepts of
liberty, justice, etc.? As a social critic and evaluator, can he not merely
say what’s wrong, but also, and by more than a negative implication,
declare what’s right? This, in substance, is what we asked of the writers,
artists and critics whose names are listed at the top of the page.4
With this extraction, the editors situate Shylock’s speech in a Leftist context. The issue at stake is clear; supporters of the proletarian movement wanted others to share their visions of liberty and justice and to “take an active” part in social reform. To introduce
4 Editors, “Are Artists People?” New Masses, January 1927: 5. 105 the issue at stake, Shylock’s speech is dramatically altered to set up a series of questions that are meant to persuade bourgeois artists (writers, dramatists, and painters) to reflect on proletarian literature and their own motives for writing. Although it is not cryptic, an underlying purpose of “Are Artists People?” is to expose the political positions of the artists and writers.
At first appearance, this passage might seem like a menial vandalized citation of
Shakespeare carelessly thrown into a newspaper to disseminate propaganda. With exception to the dry sarcasm reinforced by the word “mundane,” the preface is straightforward and plain. There is no real Shakespearean language that needs deciphering. Quite the opposite, a sentence ends with “etc.” This prescriptive bluntness reflects the nature of the proletarian style. Gold used this same passage from The
Merchant of Venice to criticize Thornton Wilder’s writing style (see Chapter 1). Upon close examination, this preface contains complex issues pertaining to proletarian culture and to the historical evolution of Shakespeare’s cultural authority. The “etc.” adds more irony to the notion that “liberty” and “justice” are mundane struggles, when in fact these are precisely the struggles against which the American Left was pitted.
While there are definitely other ways that the editors of the New Masses could have taken to make their point, I firmly believe that there are specific reasons that the editors chose to extract Shylock’s speech instead of other Shakespearean speeches. In reality, they could have followed the survey trend popularized in the magazine transition, which asked direct questions without literary implications.5 Instead, the editors chose a
5 Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). Aaron suggests that “Are Artists People?” may have been influenced by transition. transition is an avant garde press that was produced during 1927-1928. It was common for editors of 106 speech from a Jewish character, and this allows us to explore Shylock the usurer and investigate the question of Jewishness in a pre-Holocaust Marxist-Leninist context. For the American Left, Shylock was a class symbol, not a Jewish symbol.
In a post-Holocaust world, it is almost impossible, and certainly taboo, to offer an analysis of The Merchant of Venice that does not include a sympathetic reading of
Shylock. As Marjorie Garber so wonderfully explains, “Just as some nineteenth-century connoisseurs of Shakespeare portraiture in England and American wanted their idol to look ‘essentially English,’ so some twentieth-century audiences have wanted their
Shakespeare to share their own humane and ethical views.”6 Post-Holocaust audiences do not want to be called an anti-Semites, and they certainly do not want their Shakespeare to be an anti-Semite. Part of the history of appropriating Shakespeare includes appropriators’ fantasies about Shakespeare’s intentions which led to assumptions that
Shakespeare supported a specific political position. Although Gold alludes to Shylock’s tragedy as evidence that Shakespeare could portray the tragic lot of the Jews (see Chapter
1),7 Shylock was not considered a sympathetic character among the Left or even among the majority of the American Left’s Jewish population. The American Left rarely viewed
Shylock as a symbol of the entire Jewish population and generally did not believe that
Shakespeare intended to represent the working class or Jews. In fact, the American Left believed that Shakespeare meant for Shylock to represent the entire Jewish population, and this caused American Leftist backlash against Shakespeare.
transition to publish questionnaires in the paper. For example, one of the surveys asks why the expatriates preferred to live elsewhere (Aaron 111). 6 Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare and Modern Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008) 127. 7 Mike Gold, “A Jewish Childhood in the New York Slums,” Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, ed. Michael Folsom (New York: International Publishers, 1972) 312. 107
In his book Russian Literature and the Jew: A Sociological Inquiry into the
Nature and Origin of Literary Patterns, American Leftist Joshua Kunitz delineates the history of the heathen Jew as portrayed in the Russian literary tradition. He blames
Western authors, including Shakespeare, for the barbaric portrayals of Jews in literature.
Examples of models for the heathen Jew in Russian literature include the Barabases,
Shylocks, Nathans, and Isaacs.8 Kunitz says that pejorative Jewish archetypes depicted in Russian literature were inspired by “Western literary prototypes.”9 Kunitz denounces
Shakespeare, among others such as John Milton and Christopher Marlowe, for creating the Jewish prototypes consisting of “inhuman fiends, Judases, magicians, usurers, murderers, poisoners, spies.”10
It was in Western medieval and Renaissance periods, as Garber explains, that
“Jews were blamed for the death of Christ…Jews believed in ritual murder, and especially the ritual murder of children, sometimes as a part of some unspecified cannibal practice.”11 And Kunitz suggests that the Western literary tradition is to blame for providing Russian writers with myths of malicious Jews that in turn served as models for literary representations of the entire Jewish population. In other words, Kunitz, a Jew himself, considers Shylock an evil character. Therefore, although he disapproved of both
Western and Russian discrimination against Jews, he does not show sympathy for
Shylock—or even Jessica for that matter who is a prototype for Russian daughters who betray the religion because they are “in love with Christians.”12
8 Joshua Kunitz, Russian Literature and the Jew: A Sociological Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Literary Patterns (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929) 18. 9 Ibid 14. 10 Ibid. 11 Garber, Modern Culture 132. 12 Ibid. 108
When evaluating the American Left, it is important to separate Shylock from his religion because the large proletarian Jewish population cast religion aside to increase support for the revolution. Not only were many leaders of the American proletarian movement Jews, including Gold and Kunitz, but as Irving Howe explains, “Socialism, for many Jews, was not merely politics or an idea, it was an encompassing culture, a style of perceiving and judging throughout which to structure their lives.”13 A large population of
Jews was a proponent of communism during the 1920s and 1930s and played a crucial role in the development of proletarian culture. Because writers like Kunitz did not hold sympathy for Shylock on the account that he was Jewish, we see a sense of impartiality on the part of the American Left. More specifically, we see that Kunitz prioritized class over religious affiliations or ethnic backgrounds.
This was true in post-Revolution Soviet society and literature as well. Kunitz maintains that after 1917 the “[o]ld ideas and prejudices” about Jews (at least Jews a part of the proletarian and peasant classes) were “buried in the limbo of the past”—
“[e]verything has been swept aside—legal disabilities, official anti-Semitism, tottering social forms, the Old Torah—everything.”14 Reflecting on Jewish discrimination during the 1920s and 1930s, Joseph Freeman states, “While émigré writers stewed in a helpless anti-[S]emitism and hatred of the revolution, Soviet writers, in the first years of the revolution, cast aside all racial distinctions; types were class types; people were proletarians, peasants, priests or bourgeois, regardless of national origin.”15 A common class cause trumped individual differences. This, of course, did not keep Soviet writers from depicting Jewish businessmen in a negative fashion, but the issue of class took
13 Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (Irvine: Harvest Books, 1984) 9. 14 Kunitz, Russian Literature 169. 15 Joseph Freeman, “Literary Patterns,” New Masses June 1929: 15. 109 precedent over religious differences. In effect, it is Shylock’s economic practices that lead to the Left’s negative reception of his character. Much like Hamlet, Shylock became used as a negative archetype. He did not necessarily represent an entire attitude of life, but he did represent the malevolence inherent in particular capitalist occupations. He signified the corruption associated with usury and crediting.
The negative reaction to Shylock and his economic practices are not confined to the American Left; the pejorative cultural archetype of Shylock has a history of its own in the United States. Following World War I, many European countries questioned if the
United States should be called Uncle Sam or Uncle Shylock. Shylock was a term associated with a creditor. And after the war, the French owed a large debt to the United
States. In his article “Reassessing ‘Uncle Shylock’: The United States and the French
War Debt, 1917-1929,” Benjamin D. Rhodes notes,
America’s effort to collect war debts after World War I was undoubtedly
one of the least successful and most criticized foreign policies of the
United States during the interwar era. Not only was the majority of the
debt consigned to an economic graveyard by the defaults of 1932-1934 but
also the United States was widely stereotyped abroad as a sinister
creditor—“Uncle Shylock.”16
In 1926, the North American Review defended the United States by saying that “Uncle
Shylock reports a rising barometer.” And despite the “‘ill will’ which in the early summer threatened to engulf his fair land in dire calamity, mental, moral, spiritual,
16 Benjamin D. Rhodes, “Reassessing ‘Uncle Shylock’: The United States and the French War Debt, 1917- 1929,” The Journal of American History, 55.4 (March 1969): 787. 110 financial and commercial, has not made a dent in his thick skin.”17 The editor of the
North American Review reassures readers that the financial system in the United States was well and good and would continue to pursue its debts.
The American Left made use of this negative archetype. In the October 1926 issue of The Workers Monthly, an official news organ of the American Communist Party,
Maurice Mendelsohn plays upon the title “Uncle Shylock” to attack capitalism. As
France considered the United States an “Uncle Shylock,” Mendelsohn took advantage of the terminology to make an argument against Western capitalist imperialism. He claimed that the focus on money and imperialist power would inevitably cause more conflict and create a war between the Allies. He describes “Uncle Shylock” as a counterproductive bourgeois construction used by bourgeois nations to target other bourgeois nations.
Mendelsohn asks the question:
Where is Uncle Shylock going? Toward conflicts with the British
bourgeoisie for control of the world! Towards conflicts with Japan for the
Pacific! Towards conflict with each bourgeoisie for the control of its
wealth and resources! Towards a new world war of which he will be the
central object of hatred and antagonism.18
As a member of the American Communist Party, Mendelsohn is clearly condemning the
United States here, but he makes an overarching statement that the Shylocks (not the
Jews) of the world—power-hungry imperialist usurers—are going to cause a new world war. Because Shylock was affiliated with money-hungry capitalists during the 1920s, the
American Left found interest in Shakespeare’s character. Therefore, we must consider
17 Editor, “Uncle Shylock Looks Abroad,” North American Review June 1926: 385. 18 Maurice Mendelsohn, “Uncle Shylock,” The Workers Monthly, 5.12 (October 1926): 535. 111 that the editors of the New Masses utilized the preface of the questionnaire to begin their condemnation of the reinforcement of capitalism.
Examining the preface of “Are Artists People?” as it relates to Elizabethan and
Marxist analyses of Shylock, we find that usury is comparable to prostitution. Referring to the Elizabethan period, James Shapiro emphasizes that “Jewish usury” was “likened to the practice of female prostitution.”19 Laurie Maguire suggests that prostitution may be too bold of a comparison as she suggests that usury was “not just prostitution but sex in general.”20 Whether or not we understand usury to be comparable to prostitution or sex in general, we should recognize from The Merchant of Venice that usury is described as a form of unnatural reproduction. For example, in The Merchant of Venice, Shylock gloats about the ability to make money “breed” (1.3.92). But when Salerio notes that Shylock has lost his wealth—“His stones, his daughter, and his ducats” (2.8.24)—Salerio implies that Shylock has lost his manhood. Solanio makes this clearer when he says that Shylock was outraged by his loss of “two stones, two rich and precious stones” (2.8.20). Without his stones—money or male genitalia—Shylock does not have the means to take part in acts that lead to economic or sexual reproduction.
In Marxist discourse, the accumulation of money in comparison to whoredom is quite apparent. This is evidenced in Marx’s analysis of Timon of Athens. When Timon addresses gold as “Thou common whore of mankind” (4.3.43), Marx responds that money is the “common whore” of the people.21 In his introduction to “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” Marx alludes to Shylock—the “servile
19 James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1997) 99. 20 Laurie Maguire, Studying Shakespeare: A Guide to the Plays (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008) 155. 21 Karl Marx, “The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society,” The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978) 104. 112
Shylock” who “swears upon its bond, its historical, Christian-Germanic bond, for every pound of flesh cut from the heart of the people.”22 Marx’s quote refers to a bourgeois school of thought and to capitalism, and implies that receiving loans and owing debt is a tradition of German history. R.S White notes that because Marx identifies Shylock as a
“servile” Shylock, Marx saw two sides to Shylock. This might be idealist thinking as there is no evidence supporting that Marx ever acknowledged an alternative Shylock.
White corroborates this himself when he explains that “Marx was to return, time and again, to Shylock as an example of the one who, hiding behind the law, dehumanizes others and alienates them into mere property. He uses Shylock also as the example of the creditor who terrifyingly turns his debtor ‘into a martyr to exchange value.’”23
Consequently, it is appropriate that the editors chose a passage from Shylock, who already has links to usury and capitalist whoring. It sets up the third question in the survey very nicely: “How would you define literary or artistic prostitution?”24 While there are several intriguing answers, I am going to focus on a few that really stand out.
These include:
ROBINSON JEFFERS: Dishonesty for hire.
UPTON SINCLAIR: Lending the glamor and thrill of art to any ideals,
standards, or ways of life less worthy than the best I know.
BABETTE DEUTSCH: Work done purely for hire.
JOSEPH W. KRUTCH: Leaving one’s own love for another to secure material
gain.
22 Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978) 55. 23 R.S. White, “Marx and Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Survey: Hamlet and its Afterlife, vol. 45 (March 2007): 96, 97. 24 Editors, “Artists” 5. 113
Literary prostitution was a serious concern, or at least misconduct in which the Left could accuse the bourgeois intellectuals for taking a part. While Marx had his opinions about capitalist whoring, Lenin had his own theory about the bourgeoisie and literary prostitution. He declared,
We must remind you bourgeois individualists that your talk about absolute
freedom is sheer hypocrisy. In a society built on the power of money,
where the working masses starve and little groups of rich men enjoy a
parasitic luxury, there can be no actual, genuine “freedom.” Are you
authors free in relation to your bourgeois publisher and your bourgeois
public who demand from you a nicely presented and glossed over
pornography, and want prostitution as the supplement to the “sacred”
drama.25
According to Lenin and his followers, literary prostitution involves compromising one’s conscious and political sensibilities for public approval and monetary gain. From these answers to the poll, we gather that literary prostitution includes writing unrealistic fiction for hire, writing solely for the purpose of profit, and preferring to write glamorously in contrast to appealing to the masses. Krutch goes further to suggest that literary prostitution causes intellectuals to abandon the workers whom they are supposed to love.
Another participant, Bruce Barton, expresses a working compromise: “If the artists will just go ahead and do their work without taking themselves too seriously I think we workers are going to be able to provide an appreciative and profitable audience.”26 I believe that the most compelling answer to the question about literary
25 Vladimir Lenin, “Lenin on Working Class Literature,” trans. Anna Rochester, New Masses Oct 1929: 7. 26 Ibid. 114 prostitution comes from Edmund Wilson. He takes the Shakespearean allusion into account when giving his response: “Shakespeare’s comedies and historical plays were evidently written for order…Of writers who do not, as Shakespeare did, work themselves free to produce original work, we may conclude, not that they are prostituting themselves, but that their abilities are not first rate.”27 Wilson not only criticizes bourgeois writers for not being first rate; he also insults them by saying they will never be as original as their icon. Wilson claims that the bourgeois artists will never be as good as the writers who influenced them.
The political implications inherent in “Are Artists People?” relate to the political issues at stake in The Merchant of Venice. In her book Thinking with Shakespeare:
Essays on Politics and Life, Julia Reinhard Lupton argues, “Shylock’s question is political, since it broaches the conditions of personhood, civic belonging, and human rights.”28 “Are Artists People?” sticks to these themes of personhood, civic belonging, and human rights. The only question in “Are Artists People?” that directly addresses monetary gain is the question about literary prostitution. The other questions deal with culture and politics, ethics and humaneness. This is the “substance” that the editors are referring to when they discuss the content of the questions. Focusing on the political is consistent with Lenin’s argument that agitation is not effective if it is solely based on economic business; it must also be conditioned by “political exposure.”29 A Marxist view would agree that economic status predetermines political affiliation, and vice versa, but the editors of the New Masses emphasize that desires for civil freedoms determine a
27 Ibid. 28 Julia Reinhard Lupton, Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) 1. 29 Vladimir Lenin, What is to be Done?: Burning Questions of Our Movement, The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1975) 42. 115 political position as well. They want the artists to take part in the “struggle for the fact of bread and the concepts of liberty, justice, etc.” Hence, the editors essentially set up the questions to persuade bourgeois artists to join the Leftist vanguard.
Similar questions about individuality and humanity are asked in both the preface and Shylock’s speech, but there is a significant difference between Shylock’s speech and
“Are Artists People?” The speaker(s) of the two respective passages do not share the same role or status. Shylock, whether we view him sympathetically or not, asks questions that do not pertain only to him, but to the entire Jewish population. Throughout the speech he repeats the words “us” and “we” to include himself as a part of the larger
Jewish community. Turning to the question “If you prick us do we not bleed?” (3.3.41),
Lupton explains, “Shylock’s question pricks together not only politics and life in their constitutive relation to each other, but also two distinct ordering of politics and life, the
Jewish and the Christian, commingled in their daily dealings and shared histories and brought face to face with each other.”30 Shylock’s perceptions of the Christian religion and forgiveness are tainted (probably because of the way that he has been treated) when he alludes to the evils of human nature to further make comparisons between him and the
Christians: “And if you wrong us shall we not revenge? If we are like you / in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a / Christian, what is his humility? Revenge”
(3.2.65-58). This rejection of otherness does not only prick at the ordering of politics and life; it abolishes the distinctions as Shylock suggests that all humans—Christians and
Jews alike—share physical and emotional properties.
In contrast, the editors speak Shylock’s lines from a much different position in
“Are Artists People?” Whereas Shylock tries to convince the Christians to recognize his
30 Lupton, Rethinking 3. 116 human essence, the editors are the ones who ask the bourgeois artists to question their own humanity. The editors speak Shylock’s lines so as to project Shylock’s characteristics onto the artists. The artists are asked to reflect on their own baseness. The editors essentially make the artists the other. Interestingly, they do not use pronouns in the plural as Shylock does; they refer to the artist in the singular “he.” This reinforces the artist as an individual bourgeois other. Comparing justice and liberty to bleeding, the editors claim that caring about humanity is an essential trait of a human being. Without this trait, the bourgeois other becomes less than human.
Emily Miller Budick takes the editors’ efforts of transforming the intellectuals and makes a comparison to worldly Jewish assimilation. This is where the pre-Holocaust and proletarian context comes into play. Budick does not provide any context for “Are
Artists People?” but a post-Holocaust interpretation that assumes that Shylock is the victim makes her point relevant. She boldly asserts that “Are Artists People?” “depicts the artist in just the Jewishly resonant terms that suggest the transfer from religion to secular identity.”31 Historically speaking, I see where her assessment makes sense. Like
Jews were forced to assimilate to multiple cultures throughout history, the artists are placed in a similar predicament. But while Jews have faced centuries of discrimination, in American proletarian literature Shylock is not reflective of the entire Jewish population. Leftists welcomed the Jews and gave them a place where they could get their voice out to the public. It is a shame that proletarian culture was one of the only safe havens for the Jewish immigrants, but the proletarian movement was not a part of a conspiracy that sought to strip Jews of their roots.
31 Emily Miller Budick, “The African American and Israeli ‘Other’ in the Construction of Jewish American Identity,” Ideology and Jewish Identity in Israeli and American Literature, ed. Emily Miller Budick (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001) 211. 117
This is not the complete extent of Budick’s argument. She compares the artists to the historical Jewish predicament. However, in “Are Artists People?” the Leftists are in the minority, and as it ends up, they were the ones who ultimately had to assimilate to bourgeois culture. Therefore, although they certainly were tendentious in their efforts, I find it hard to make a connection between the American Leftists and authoritarian groups that forced Jews into cultural assimilation. The Left might have been trying to persuade the artists into political assimilation, but the bourgeois artists were the ones with the control, not the communists. Jeffers even explains that the demands of Leftists and those from society who attempt to alter bourgeois intellectual values would not likely succeed:
“Society may properly wish for it, but it would be fatuous to demand what there is only the most exceptional chance of getting.”32
Ultimately, the polemical issues behind “Are Artists People?” pertain to ideology and practice. Various artists provide responses that expose ideological similarities between them and the Left. Edwin Seaver declares that his sympathies are “naturally with the workers, not in whose ideas but in whose being there is life itself”33
Furthermore, they admit that a revolution would be good for art. Taggard says,
One thing chiefly interests me, as a person who writes poetry, in the
culture of the working class. When it is successful, it will permit a
positive attitude toward both life and art. It will be possible to think of life
as good, and to explore it as abundant, because a revolution will have
32 Editors, “Artists” 7. 33 Ibid 9. 118
made by the determination of a mass of people who feel that it is
sufficiently worthwhile to struggle for it.34
Harbor Allen concedes, “Nothing is surer than that the social revolution will be the torch for a new flame of art, hopeful where it is now frustrated, lusty where now it is anemic, bold and gleeful where now it is bound and surly.”35 The problem is that many of these artists do not commit, and that is why the editors of the New Masses ask if they can
“properly take an active part” in the struggle.36
Hamlet in Red
Red Hamlet demonstrates a much different approach to propagating a revolutionary agenda by using performance as an ideological apparatus. Lenin argues,
“As for calling the masses to action, that will come of itself as soon as energetic political agitation, live and energetic come into play.”37 On an international Leftist scale, performance made for an exciting way to propagate political programs. This too was the case in America. Communist playwrights such as John Howard Lawson and Clifford
Odets were well-respected dramatists among the proletarian population. American plays with communist spirit were modernized productions portraying real life situations in the current day. They did not modernize Shakespeare as German playwright Leopold Jessner did; rather, they stuck to creating new stories, realistic stories. Lawson’s Processional and Odets’ Waiting for Lefty are two examples of American communist plays.
34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid 5. The emphasis is mine. 37 Vladimir Lenin, What is to be Done? 44. 119
Just because most American Leftist playwrights were working on full productions of agitprop theatre, that did not mean that Shakespeare did not impact the creative process. He especially made an impact on theatre groups including The Theatre Union, the Workers Laboratory Theatre, the Theatre Collaborative, and the Group Theatre.
These companies offered acting workshops and classes. In these workshops, actors were asked to test their performative versatility by partaking in exercises that required them to improvise a poem or speech while taking on the role of a literary character. The goal was to inspire actors to practice evoking emotions through actions rather than by the literal meanings of words. This sort of practice was common in the Moscow Art Theatre under the Stanislavsky system which asked the actors interrogate the characteristics of human behavior in order to best act their roles.38 Similar to the RAPP’s conceptions of writing about the living person, these experiments allowed actors to bring the character to life through movements rather than simply words.
The exercises often incorporated a Shakespearean character into the experiments.
Wendy Smith lists some activities in which the Group Theatre actors would engage. For example, an actor might portray a prostitute while reciting a poem by E.E. Cummings.
Other examples included performing Shakespeare’s Sir Toby Belch while reciting John
Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” or reciting a Petruchio speech in the character of Hamlet or Macbeth.39 While these experiments certainly strengthened one’s acting skills, they served political purposes as well. Speaking for the entire Group Theatre, Lewis stresses
38 See Jean Benedetti, Stanislavski and the Actor: The Method of Physical Action (London: Routledge, 1998) and Jean Benedetti, Stanislavsky: An Introduction, Revised and Updated (London: Routledge, 2004) for in-depth delineations of the Stanislavsky system and techniques. See Jean Benedetti, ed., The Moscow Art Theatre Letters (London: Routledge, 1991) for information on Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theatre. 39 Wendy Smith, Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931-1940 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990) 92; Lewis 65. 120 that “everything we did was politically-oriented in the theater activities of the thirties.”40
With access to high art in the form of poetry and Shakespeare, the worker-actors were not restrained by bourgeois expectations of theatre and thus could ridicule bourgeois society while proletarianizing Shakespeare. The most radical of these experiments is arguably
Lewis’ Red Hamlet.
Susan Bennett explains theatre to be “generally and rightly regarded as a conservative form, and the devotion to Shakespeare a manifestation of that inherent conservativism.”41 But even though Lewis was retrieving a play from the past, the political instruction coming from his performance makes it difficult to question the radical nature of the skit. Representing the Group Theatre, Lewis directed and performed his skit titled Red Hamlet at a Workers Theatre Night in October 1933. This public
Leftist political function was put on by the Group Theatre in collaboration with the
Theatre Collaborative and the Workers Laboratory Theatre. What began as a simple exercise for acting workshops based on the Stanislavsky system during the summer of
1932, Red Hamlet became a popular appropriative adaptation of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy among the politically committed Left during the 1930s in America.
Lewis performed this skit at many charity events and Leftist political functions, and it was even put on the same bill as Odets’ Waiting for Lefty.42
Because Red Hamlet never reached mainstream status, no specific venues or dates have been recorded. In fact, the most detailed published description we have of Red
Hamlet appears in one paragraph of Lewis’ autobiography Slings and Arrows: Theater in
40 Robert Lewis, Slings and Arrows: Theater in My Life (New York: Stein and Day, 1984) 65. 41 Susan Bennett, Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the contemporary past (London: Routledge, 1996) 12. 42 Smith, Real Life 201. 121
My Life. However, a line-by-line outline with extensive directorial notes can be found in
Lewis’ personal papers.43 A reconstruction of these notes reveals that Lewis’ Red Hamlet was not only radical in its advocacy for a workers revolution, but also in its experimental techniques and its unconventional political deployment of Hamlet. This brilliant conglomeration of art and propaganda epitomized what politically committed theatrical performance sought to accomplish in the 1930s.
Influenced by the Moscow Art Theatre and the Stanislavsky system, Lewis relied on actions to construct meaning and emotion in Hamlet’s words. He methodically shifted between four different characters—worker, capitalist, mediator, and priest—using carefully drawn out physical adjustments to make distinctions between each role. Lewis began the act as a worker in chains. On “To be,” he emphatically raised his arms and broke through the restraints. Quickly transforming roles mid-line, Lewis placed a high hat on his head and sat down with his thumbs under his armpits assuming the position of a “fat, capitalist bastard.”44 The motionless capitalist reflected the lack of agency in the only words he was given: “or not to be.” Lewis, in the role of mediator, refereed the worker/capitalist dichotomy by directly addressing the audience with “That is the question.” In this meta-theatrical moment, it was clear that the audience should sympathize with, and even emulate, the worker. The character of the priest was used sparingly; his greatest moment occurred when Lewis simply gestured the sign of the cross with his hand to mock the idea of “the dread of something after death” (3.1.80).
43 Robert Lewis, “Notes on Red Hamlet,” Robert Lewis Personal Papers, 1920-1990, Special Collections and Archives, Kent State University Libraries, Kent, OH. Unless otherwise noted, all descriptions of Red Hamlet can be found in these personal papers. 44 Lewis, Slings and Arrows 62. 122
The line is appropriate considering Lewis was protesting the dreadful social conditions that workers suffered from during the 1920s and 1930s.
Privileging physical and thematic action over words, Lewis’ acting techniques effectively mimed the powerful political message that was being delivered. While Red
Hamlet contributed to the American proletarian artistic tradition, it was part of something much greater than strictly a national movement. Lewis extracted lines from Hamlet and adapted them into an ideological demonstration of international communist solidarity.
Lewis’ personal notes reveal that when the worker broke through the chains on “To be,” his newly freed hands became available to beat out the rhythm of “L’Internationale,” the globally recognized anthem for socialism and communism. The worker was not only conveyed as an icon for revolutionary resiliency; he symbolized leadership and martyrdom as well. Speaking the lines, “Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles”
(3.1.59-61), Lewis acted the part of the worker subjected to freezing conditions, reaching for bread and coffee before pointing in desperation to rally the audience. The end of the skit was even more revealing of international Leftist participation. Pausing after “And lose the name…” the worker marched toward the audience with a raised fist—making the salute of the workers of the world to unite—and screamed “ACTION!” Lewis’ personal annotations suggest that it was probable that the fist was replaced by a waving red flag at some performances.
In a theoretical account of cultural appropriations, Lewis’ Hamlet symbolizes a refutation of elite culture, but it also shows a separation between proletarian culture and popular culture. According to Doug Lanier, in popular culture people appropriate
123
Shakespeare “by changing the context in which Shakespeare’s words appear—without changing the words themselves—we radically change their meaning.”45 These practices are common and we may recognize decontextualized Shakespeares on film, on television, or in theatre. The aspiration is to wrest Shakespeare from high culture, and Lewis accomplishes this. In his case, though, the Stanislavsky system under which he operates contributes to a shift in the meaning of Shakespeare. He is using a “refined” artistic approach and performs his art in a meticulous way. Additionally, the playing of
“L’Internationale” signifies commitment to international proletarian unity. It voices the
“international spirit” that Marxism-Leninism maintains (see Introduction and Chapter 1).
Douglas Lanier also explains that popular appropriations of Shakespeare often represent fantasies of freeing Shakespeare from “the shackles of highbrows and professionals” and returning him to the people.46 Lewis goes further than fantasizing. In the character of the worker, he breaks through the shackles that represent highbrow control of the workers. Figuratively speaking, by taking control of Hamlet, Lewis also frees Shakespeare from the shackles of elite culture. He does this by making Hamlet his own and by using radical experimental performative techniques that were not seen in high theatre. Furthermore, he does not return Shakespeare to the people. Rather, he gives a Shakespearean model for the masses and for American proletarian culture to follow. And by rallying the crowd, thus giving legitimacy to his proletarian appropriative adaptation, Lewis follows the Leftist effort to convey “‘revolutionary élan’ and contribute to the overthrow of capitalism.”47
45 Douglas Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 5. 46 Ibid 18. 47 Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005) 128. 124
To make one more distinction between popular and proletarian appropriative practices, I turn to Lanier again. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, Lanier asserts that citations of Shakespeare in popular culture are “often a way to evoke high culture concepts and institutions…against which popular culture defines itself” and that popular citation takes on one of two forms: the first “embraces Shakespeare’s privileged status and seeks to use it to advantage…to substantiate the artistic or moral respectability,” and the second, dubbed “proverbialization,” describes when Shakespearean citations “are disengaged from their dramatic contexts and treated as freely applicable cultural truisms.”48 Lewis essentially reverses these. He recognizes Shakespeare’s privileged status, but he does not use it to substantiate his artistic or moral respectability. Still,
Shakespeare’s privileged status allowed for the audience to relate to the play. Lewis serves as the mediator, but it is the worker that turns Hamlet into a Red Hamlet. To this end, Lewis disengages Hamlet from his Shakespearean context while preserving the dramatic soliloquy form.
It is also worth mentioning that Lewis’ representation of Hamlet is extremely different than the archetypically structured indecisive Hamlet discussed in the previous chapter. Lewis challenges “Leftist Hamletism,” showing that Hamlet can be turned into a positive prototype if he is dressed in “red.” Lawrence Guntner claims,
There is no such thing as a “socialist Hamlet,” just as there is no such
thing as a “socialist Shakespeare.” On closer examination, what we find
are socialist Hamlets and socialist Shakespeares; or, better, socialist
readings or interpretations of what happens in Hamlet. Neither the
Communist world nor Shakespeare production behind the “Iron
48 Lanier, Popular Culture 53. 125
Curtain”—a metaphor in its own right—was as monolithic as the West
would like to believe it to have been.49
While I tend to agree with this statement, Red Hamlet provides us with a close construction of a communist Hamlet. Following the performance of Red Hamlet at a charity event, the master of ceremonies Heywood Brown detected the uniqueness in
Lewis’ appropriative adaptation and responded, “I didn’t know that Shakespeare was a communist.”50 Lewis stamps an imprint of Leftist internationalism on Shakespeare. The mediator—Lewis himself—validates his alliance to the Left by rallying the workers. In addition, the content of the performance presented real life depictions of the working conditions. In one movement, the worker acts as if he is shoveling snow and reaches toward his back as if he is in severe pain. Later, the worker gestures toward his stomach to project that he is starving. But to really put the Leftist imprint on Shakespeare and
Hamlet, the worker must triumph. By raising his fist or carrying a red flag, he demonstrates that he has obtained the proletarian class consciousness.
This is not to suggest that Lewis’ Hamlet is a prototype for a communist Hamlet.
By embodying four characters in one, Lewis’ Hamlet is an ideological acculturation. He does not become Red Hamlet until the end of the performance. Even if the revolutionary personality seems to triumph at the end of the skit, Lewis’ Hamlet struggles with multiple personalities. Lewis illustrates several interpretations of Hamlet and interpretive choices to make when staging a Leftist Hamlet. For one, we see the polarization of Hamlet’s mind when he gives his famous soliloquy. The two choices leading the tragic hero into a
49 Lawrence Guntner, “In Search of a Socialist Shakespeare: Hamlet on the East German Stages,” Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism, eds. Irena R. Makaryk and Joseph G. Price (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006): 197. 50 Lewis, Slings and Arrows 66. 126 state of inner conflict and contemplation are still present. To this end, Lewis presents a past perspective and current perspective, and he also presents a past Hamlet and a current
Hamlet. Lewis moves forward, though, giving the audience an evolved personality— one of dedication to action and political commitment.
The situation Lewis puts Hamlet in speaks to Anatoly Lunacharsky’s analysis of the character. Lunacharsky understands Hamlet as one whose “acute mind penetrates all the imperfections of the world. But to understand the imperfections of the world implies the possession of high ideals of some sort with which to contrast.”51 These contrasts include reason versus impulse, feudalism versus capitalism, and integrity versus corruption. Lunacharsky believes that Hamlet “dreams of a world which has been somehow made straight, a world of honest people, honest relationships, but he does not believe that such a world will ever in fact become reality.”52 In a way, Lunacharsky respects the dithering Hamlet, or at least has sympathy for him. Lewis moves away from this by providing resolution. Being a part of the Leftist movement, Lewis has faith in the classless society, and his depiction of the worker illustrates this. By breaking through the chains of capitalism, the worker sees hope and believes in a better future.
Lewis’ Red Hamlet becomes even more complex when we consider the role of the priest. Even though the priest does not receive much attention, in Lewis’ skit he is given an important line: “the dread of something after death” (3.1.80). This dread, or the fear of the unknown, consumes Hamlet’s thoughts in Shakespeare’s play. External
51 Anatoly Lunacharsky, “Bacon and the Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays,” On Art and Literature (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965) 297. The article was originally published in 1934, after the death of Lunacharsky in 1933. 52 Ibid. 127 influences, such as those impressed on him by feudalism, cause him to question religion and suicide in Act I, Scene 2:
O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God, O God,
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world! (1.2.129-134)
At this point in the play, Hamlet is broken by the death of his father and by his mother’s incestuous marriage to his uncle; in effect, he questions life on earth and the world’s disorder. Those familiar with the play, as most of Lewis’ audiences probably were, would be able to make the connection between this soliloquy and the “To be or not to be” soliloquy. It is during the latter that we really see Hamlet’s apprehensions of what awaits us after death: “But that the dread of something after death, / The undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns, puzzles the will” (2.2.80-82).
Lewis, while playing with Shakespeare’s text, erases any concern with religion or with what awaits a human after death. In his notes, Lewis writes that the actions applied to the lines previously mentioned are meant “to mock holiness,” to mock death and fear.
The worker has hope. Because he already suffers from starvation and from excruciating pain—resulting from lack of money and food and from strenuous labor—the worker mocks the idea of death in general. Here, we really see Lewis propagating a political message to his audience. He agitates the audience by suggesting that the dread of living
128 in the current social conditions cannot be worse than death. Therefore, he says that it is worth rallying together to fight against the capitalist world.
As a reader and writer who is familiar with Shakespeare’s plays, I find it difficult to not look at these small extractions in relation to the plays as a whole. Therefore, when
I reconstruct these two appropriative adaptations of Shakespeare, I find it necessary to examine crucial political issues that speak to the play texts as a whole. Lupton points out that at “the end of [Hamlet], Horatio and Fortinbras share the stage, suggesting opposing yet interdependent destinies of politics in a future organized election.”53 The Left does not want two opposing political manifestations sharing the stage. There needs to be a clear hero. This is why the capitalist, the priest, and even Lewis as the mediator are removed from the script and the communist revolutionary is the one who prevails and who receives the applause.
The common Leftist assumption is that wavering intellectuals are Hamlets. But in the case of Red Hamlet, Lewis makes a slight change. Keeping true to the play, I do not want to suggest that Hamlet is no longer an intellectual, but the Red Hamlet is portrayed as a radical revolutionary. A number of American Leftists criticize Shakespeare’s characterization of workers and peasants. Sherwood Anderson asserts, “In the old fiction, old poetry, old plays, the workers and peasants were invariably introduced as comic figures. Go to your Shakespeare and see what I mean.”54 In Red Hamlet, Lewis introduces Hamlet as a chained worker. He is not portrayed comically; however, the capitalist is. The lack of comedic qualities of the worker illustrates the seriousness of the
53 Lupton, Rethinking 21. 54 Sherwood Anderson, “How I Came to Communism: Symposium,” New Masses Sept. 1932: 9. 129 class war. By the American Left’s standards, Lewis’ Red Hamlet has indeed “proved most royally” (5.2.341). He has proved to be a loyal member of the vanguard.
Appropriate and Critique
Ultimately, Red Hamlet and “Are Artists People?” are not simply demands, but rather social and political critiques. They are ideological critiques and critiques of practice. This is evidenced in Lewis’ portrayal of the capitalist in Red Hamlet. By sitting down with his thumbs under his armpits, Lewis criticizes the inactivity of the bourgeoisie in two ways. First, the top hat symbolizes that the capitalist has made profits off of his employees. While the worker is breaking his back shoveling snow to make a small wage that is only enough to buy some bread and coffee, the capitalist sits back and relaxes.
The message is sent that something is wrong with society if an inactive person can make money by controlling and owning people. Second, based on Leftist Hamletism and
Hamlet’s association with the bourgeois intellectuals, it is also safe to say that Lewis is critiquing the bourgeois intellectual class as well. This is why it is so important that the worker gets the last words in the skit. Hamlet has turned into a Red Hamlet and is acting in the best interests of his fellow workers.
While critiquing bourgeois intellectuals, “Are Artists People?” also critiques capitalist culture. Thus, it becomes an ideological critique as well. In addition to iterating the obvious complaints about the reproduction of money, the editors are criticizing the political and economic consciousness of these writers. The critique is most apparent in the following questions: 1) “Do you regard our contemporary American culture as decadent. If so what do you think will succeed it?” and 2) “Does the advent of
130 the machine mean the death of art and culture, or does it mean the birth of a new culture?”55 Ultimately, art and literature are inextricable from cultural production and from the social conditions in which they are created. The assessment pertains to class distinctions and unethical means of capitalist industrial production.
Michael D. Bristol argues, “Ideological criticism in the sense of interpretations motivated by an ideology of a substantive and programmatic kind is not very likely to have any positive role in criticism if criticism is predicated on the criterion of a
‘contribution to knowledge’ as in other kinds of research.”56 He is referring to literary criticism, but I think many would agree that programmatic criticism of any kind is not likely to be well received. But there is a second part to Bristol’s assertion: “On the other hand, such ideological criticism could have overriding strategic importance to anyone whose primary affiliation is with the militant phase of a particular social movement.”57
This is true of both of these appropriative adaptations. Following the Soviet Revolution of 1917, the American Left saw itself as approaching the militant stage. We see this in the propaganda. As a result, both appropriative adaptations have strategic purposes—to agitate the masses and intellectuals by incorporating Shakespeare.
The editors and Lewis are surely following the Marxist-Leninist program. Lenin claims, “For it is not enough to call ourselves the ‘vanguard,’ the advanced contingent; we must act in such a way that all the other contingents recognise and are obliged to admit that we are marching in the vanguard.”58 But is the agitation really a matter of
55 Editors, “Artists” 5. These are the fourth and fifth questions listed on the survey. 56 Michael D. Bristol, “Where does Ideology Hang Out?” Shakespeare Left and Right, ed. Ivo Kamps (London: Routledge, 1991) 35. 57 Ibid. 58 Lenin, What is to be Done? 53. 131 strictly telling the workers and writers how to think? Does it eliminate choices? Krutch, in an answer in “Are Artists People?” states,
I do not think it will do society any good to demand of the artist anything
he does not feel like giving. Shakespeare is Shakespeare, even if he isn’t
Shaw. Even a conservative may be sincere. Why try to make a hypocrite
of him by demanding that he be a revolutionary? Isn’t that just as bad as
demanding that he be a conservative?
Besides insulting Shakespeare for being conservative, presumably for having bourgeois roots, Krutch makes a strong case for leaving artists alone to create their own creative work. Therefore, some might argue that these Leftist appropriative adaptations are neither art nor literature because they are examples of self-appointed individuals impressing partisanship onto a group comprised of individuals who are considered incapable of truly thinking for themselves. However, it is clear that Lewis’ experimental theatre in is worthy of obtaining artistic status because of his use of innovative performative techniques. Lewis’ appropriation and adaptation of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet—turning the play into an ideological apparatus—demonstrates how art and propaganda are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Terry Eagleton makes a claim about the capability of thought and about what intellectuality actually means. He asserts, “It is curious how intellectuals, when expressing their customary liberal distaste for telling ordinary people what to do, assume with typical narcissism that it is middle-class intellectuals like themselves who are at issue here.” He continues, “Intellectuals in general are specific functionaries within social life, and revolutionary intellectuals are functionaries within a political
132 movement.”59 Lewis is a part of the revolutionary intellectuals, functioning as a member of the vanguard supporting the workers. He speaks to an audience who is knowledgeable on the subject. Workers are capable of seeing the struggles, and the art only helps to remind the workers of their struggles. Even if he does not truly understand the injustice the workers face, Lewis’ political perspective and subject matter illustrate that the skit falls into the category of legitimate proletarian art. He demonstrates partisanship and practices his role in the class war by reinforcing a working class political consciousness by staging his Red Hamlet.
By reading these two appropriative adaptations alongside the cultural history of
Shakespeare and alongside the play texts Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice, we will find new ways to challenge the hegemony of capitalism and the institution of education.
In these examples, Shakespeare is not merely wrested from elite culture; he is transformed into a subject of use-value—to serve a political purpose. Within Hamlet and
The Merchant of Venice are many compelling issues, from military imperialism to education to mercantilism to religion and politics. These same sorts of issues come up in
Red Hamlet and in “Are Artists People?” Examining the Leftist appropriative adaptations alongside of Shakespeare’s play texts, we can find value in studying the early modern period to understand modern social issues. These partisan appropriative adaptations demonstrate ways to make Shakespeare truly political. They are what I call instructive agitation. While Shakespeare has been used for instructive purposes for centuries, he has been incorporated into political agitation as well.
59 Terry Eagleton, “Lenin and the Postmodern Age,” Lenin Reloaded, Toward a Politics of Truth, eds. Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007) 47. 133
Chapter 4: The “Non-accommodated” Proletariat: A Leftist Shakespeare Narrative
What is Not Done Cannot be Undone
You are a girl, A revolutionist, a worker Sworn to give the last, undaunted jerk Of your body and every atom Of your mind and heart To every other worker In the slow, hard fight That leads to barricade, to victory Against the ruling swine. Yet, in the softer regions of your heart, The shut-off, personal, illogical Disturbance of your mind, You long for crumpled ’kerchiefs, notes Of nonsense understood Only by a lover: Long for colors on your dresses, Ribboned sleeves, unnecessary buttons, Bits of laughter chased and never Dying: challenge of a hat Buoyant over hair. Youth and sex, distinctions Still unmarred by centuries of pain, Will not be downed, survive In spite of hunger, strikes, riot-guns, Sternness in the ranks.1
In the subsequent line of Maxwell Bodenheim’s “To a Revolutionary Girl,” the speaker says, “We frown upon your sensitive demands.” The fact that natural human wants and needs (such as love, laughter, and youth) are so trivial to the speaker not only speaks to the severity of the social conditions in the 1930s, but also to the lack of accommodation that the proletariat received. Bodenheim, a devout supporter of the proletarian movement, uses a militant speaker to ironically suggest that the girl should not waste time fantasizing about things that will not come true. She has an ultimatum: dream about and become distracted by bourgeois luxuries or fight for all of humanity. It
1 Maxwell Bodenheim, “To a Revolutionary Girl,” New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties, ed. Joseph North (New York: International Publishers, 1969) 39-41. This poem was published in the April 3rd, 1934, issue of the New Masses. 134 is a battle of both will and mind. Bodenheim’s choice to have the poem addressed to a female may raise issues pertaining to gender stereotypes, but it seems that he uses her sex as a sign that economic social oppression does not always discriminate against sex or youth.
It might be a ploy to evoke sympathetic responses, but it indicates that like religion (see Chapter 3) class takes precedent over sex for Marxist-Leninists. The girl is repeatedly identified as a “worker” and “revolutionist” among “men and women” on
“every picket-line throughout the world.” Her sex, as well as her natural human rights, has been stripped, thus illustrating sameness in all of the proletariats victimized by what is perceived as capitalist social fascism. This is where Marxism-Leninism truly separates from cultural Marxism. Cultural Marxists may be inclined to consider the gender issues in the poem rather than the class politics. As Bodenheim is a Leftist, I will focus on class; but examining the girl as a female in the working class could allow both Marxism-
Leninism and cultural Marxism to work together. But Marxism-Leninism emphasizes the collective whole of the working class to privilege class camaraderie.
In proletarian literature, we consistently see the theme of the collective versus the individual. As I have shown in previous chapters, the individual generally symbolizes the ill-willed bourgeois enemy. In proletarian fiction and poetry, we view another version of the individual—what I refer to as the non-accommodated proletariat. I use this term to make a distinction between the hopeless plight of the proletariat and the unaccommodated man in Shakespeare’s plays. Michael D. Bristol provides an accurate working definition for “unaccommodated man”: “It means, literally, a man without
135 commodities, without the barest minimum of social amenities or even basic needs.”2 In
Shakespeare’s plays, most notably King Lear, the status of taking on the role of the unaccommodated man is a choice. After seeing the baseness of Poor Tom’s state, Lear chooses to strip himself of his clothes and becomes “unaccommodated,” reduced to a
“poor, bare, forked animal” (3.2.91-92). A similar incident occurs in Timon of Athens when Timon rips off his clothes to expose his “nakedness” (4.1.33) as an act of defiance against the society that he has chosen to leave.3 These characters imply that to become un-accommodated one must have been accommodated at one point. In contrast, the non- accommodated proletariat has never had accommodation; therefore, the proletariat cannot become undone without ever being done. Whereas the unaccommodated man is reduced to the basest of human existence, the non-accommodated proletariat is reduced to labor, property, and machines.
Lear’s own decisions lead to his unaccommodation. He gives away his kingdom to his daughters, Gonoril and Regan. Similarly, Timon, after recklessly giving away his fortune, chooses to become a recluse. It is often suggested that these acts reflect autonomy on part of the characters, or at least that Lear and Timon seek autonomy.
When appearing as beasts, they are free from the confines of society and the constraints of politics, and they are able to recognize the self and able to feel what it is like to truly be alive. Emily Sun states, “Lear seems to think…that he has discovered who or what he is—bare, unaccommodated man—and thus resolved the crisis of identity he has been
2 Michael Bristol, “Confusing Shakespeare’s Characters with Real People: Reflections on Reading in Four Questions,” Shakespeare and Character: Theory, History, Performance, and Theatrical Persons, eds. Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights (New York: Palgrave, 2009) 23. 3 For an analysis on the identification of Timon as an unaccommodated man, see the section “Timon as Unaccommodated Man” in Gabriel Egan, Shakespeare (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007) 228-231. 136 suffering since his abdication.”4 In a Marxist reading of King Lear, Marshall Berman argues, “Shakespeare is telling us that the dreadful naked reality of the ‘unaccommodated man’ is the point from which accommodation must be made, the only ground on which real community can grow.”5 Berman essentially implies that Lear’s self-effacement should be viewed in a positive light—as a sign of social progress—because the individual is finally aware that he has “left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest.”6
In a Marxist-Leninist response to Berman’s claim, I argue that proletarian literature shows that it is the dreadful reality of non-accommodation that is the point from which accommodation must be made. In proletarian literature, we do not see one soul searching after giving away his or her fortune or property. The proletariat already suffers from his or her place in capitalist society. The girl in Bodenheim’s poem has no real identity. She does not have the luxury of giving up a fortune or property. She is the property of the capitalist. Like other characters I will address in this chapter, she has never been accommodated. I believe that Marxist-Leninist writers use the theme of non- accommodation to remind the workers of their struggles and suffering. They do this to summon a working class consciousness. The worker does not have the material luxuries that the bourgeois class has. The worker does not have basic human provisions; however, he or she does have a mind and nothing to lose.
4 Emily Sun, Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure, and the Possibility of Politics (Fordham: Fordham University Press, 2012) 38. 5 Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1988) 108. 6 Berman comes to his conclusion by interpreting this quote from The Communist Manifesto. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore (New York: Penguin Books, 2002) 222. 137
Individual characters in proletarian literature often take on the names of
Shakespeare’s characters. Perhaps this is because, as Anatoly Lunacharsky states,
Shakespeare’s time was one of “tempestuous individualism” and that “[t]he emancipated individual is the constant object of Shakespeare’s concern.”7 We do, in fact, see the Left to be preoccupied with Elizabethan individualism because early modern England was a time of historical transition. But Lunacharsky frequently celebrates Shakespeare for a
“concentrated and intuitively brilliant” appearance of the individual’s reason and intellect,8 whereas the individual does not appear as brilliant in proletarian literature.
Through the use of Shakespeare’s characters, the American Left portrays the character either as the bourgeois enemy or as the non-accommodated proletariat who suffers in a world that benefits bourgeois individualism. The tragic individuals in proletarian literature are born with nothing, and the only real accommodation they are likely to receive is death. Joining in a collective battle against capitalism looks to be the proletariat’s only option for survival; hence, we see the proletariats rally together in response to tragedy.
I propose that Shakespeare studies, a discipline in which Paul Yachnin and Jessica
Slights claim that “[c]haracter has made a comeback,”9 can benefit from an examination of Shakespeare’s characters in proletarian literature. The 1930s in particular have a lot to offer in terms of character studies. In his book Shakespeare and National Character
(1932), Cumberland Clark analyzes the nationalities of Shakespeare’s characters and
7 Anatoly Lunacharsky, “Bacon and the Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays,” On Art and Literature (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965) 273. The article was written in 1934. 8 Ibid 275. 9 Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights, “Introduction,” Shakespeare and Character: Theory, History, Performance, and Theatrical Persons, eds. Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) 1. 138 outlines the impact that these characters have on developing Elizabethan perceptions of national identities.10 Clark’s analysis matches up with Yachnin’s and Slights’ assertion that “character is the organizing principle of Shakespeare’s plays—it organizes both the formal and ideological dimensions of the drama and is not organized by them.”11 I will illustrate that the American Left shows the opposite to be true. The American Left recognizes social factors as the organizing agent of the texts. This is to say that the formal and ideological dimensions of the proletarian literary movement shape the characters. I am not suggesting that the specific character names do not hold weight or purpose. But rather than seeing characters as subversively autonomous, we will see that it is the proletarian text that is politically subversive in content.
I begin by providing a summary and analysis of the incorporation of
Shakespeare’s characters in proletarian writing. This entails giving common Leftist perceptions of the characters. I present portrayals of American Leftist Shakespearean characters in comparison to Lunacharsky’s analysis of Shakespeare’s characters. From here, I reconstruct Leftist perceptions of Shakespearean characters and compare them to an article written by Mike Gold. The reconstruction process requires me to engage in new character criticism, so I investigate the agency and perceptions of character in
American proletarian writing. I offer descriptions of the bourgeois characterizations before shifting my focus to the non-accommodated proletariat. When I make the transition, I illustrate that the characters are appropriated and owned by the writer. For example, Calibans and Ariels become proletarian recreations. To conclude the chapter, I
10 See Cumberland Clark, Shakespeare and National Character (New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1932). 11 Yachnin and Slights, “Introduction” 7. 139 discuss the possibility that by using Shakespeare’s characters, American proletarian writers are using Shakespeare’s voice to write a new narrative.
Against Shakespeare and His Accommodations
In his analysis of Shakespeare’s characters, Lunacharsky illustrates Shakespeare’s portrait of the new chaotic world of nascent capitalism. He notes that in Shakespeare’s plays the “individual wills are so mercilessly pitted one against the other.”12 While he identifies capitalism as the force that pushes individual wills to clash with one another,
Lunacharsky admires the fact that Shakespeare presents individual reason “as a weapon in the struggle for success.”13 Three characters that Lunacharsky focuses on are Richard
III, Edmund, and Iago. Lunacharsky spends the most time discussing Iago’s cynical nature. Admitting that Iago uses his mind as a “weapon against his fellow man,”
Lunacharsky pronounces that Iago is cognizant of his internal power:
It is quite evident that Iago is aware of tremendous strength in himself; he
understands that he is his own master; he understands that…he may plant
out a remarkable series of most subtle poisons; he understands that he is a
man of strong will and clear mind, a man not bound by any prejudices
whatsoever, not enslaved by any laws outside himself, by any moral
heteronomy, and that such a man is terrifyingly strong.14
Even though he acts without a sense of morality, Iago is aware of his ability to manipulate and control others. Rather than condemning Iago for committing acts of evil,
12 Lunacharsky, “Characters” 273. 13 Ibid 275. 14 Ibid 288, 290. 140
Lunacharsky suggests that Iago’s immorality is a product of the time, and he proposes that Iago’s recognition of his powers illustrate commendable qualities.
Lunacharsky follows trends of other Soviet literary critics who argue that the psychological makeup of Shakespeare’s characters proves that the Bard was remarkably cognizant of human nature. Lunacharsky praises Shakespeare for being a “subtle psychologist.”15 A.A. Smirnov implies that Shakespeare is not only a psychologist, but a brilliant sociologist as well. He says that the proof is in Hamlet’s dilemma: “Hamlet, the humanist, can exist only by comprehending and accepting the world—hence the hopelessness of his plight. But all these psychological motivations are but concrete personal reactions to the general socio-historical conditions.”16 These “truths” about
Shakespeare are precisely what American Leftist Milton Howard is taking about when he criticizes Smirnov for proceeding “to explain every single development in Shakespeare’s plays as the immediate response to the historic changes of which Shakespeare is assumed to have understood the significance, every character as the representative of a historic tendency.”17 Howard does not believe in presumptuous assertions that glorify
Shakespeare’s unrivaled genius.
In fact, Howard claims that a “created character in a play has no psychology”—
“he has a character definition constructed out of social components, without which the play could not be understood.”18 This view of a character does not carry over to all
American proletarian literature. Even though American Leftist writers usually use formulaic plots and stock characters in proletarian fiction, they did not always portray a
15 Ibid 279. 16 A.A. Smirnov, Shakespeare: A Marxist Interpretation, 3rd ed. (New York: Critics Group, 1936) 64. 17 In Milton Howard, “Review and Comment: Smirnov’s ‘Shakespeare,’” New Masses 15 Sept. 1936: 22. 18 Howard, “Review and Comment” 23. 141 character without psychological complexity.19 However, when Shakespearean characters are integrated into proletarian literature, their psychological depth carries little weight.
They are stock characters branded by their social environments. In effect, we do not see
Shakespeare’s dramatic characters celebrated in American proletarian literature as we see in Soviet literature.
The American Left demonstrates more of a Brechtian attitude toward
Shakespeare’s characters (see Chapter 2). The solitary figure is either shown as overly concerned with the self or as a tragic figure who is a victim of society. In both cases, we see that the character is a byproduct of his or her place in society; and more often than not, names of Shakespeare’s characters are applied to individuals who represent the abject of society.
In his article “In Foggy California,” a mostly positive assessment of Upton
Sinclair’s writing, Gold criticizes Sinclair for over-idealizing the proletariat. Gold states that his only quarrel with “this great writer” is that Sinclair portrays “easy victories of virtue.”20 Describing what he acknowledges as the realities of the class struggle, Gold disputes,
There is nobility in the revolutionary camp; there is also, gloom, dirt and
disorder. The worker is not a bright radiant legend like one of Walter
Crane’s Merrie England peasants. The worker is a man. We don’t need to
19 In Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), Foley describes two distinct observations of character: 1) the representation of the “living man” as established by the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers and 2) the Left Front of Arts’ hostile reactions to texts that “psychologized” and “heroized” characters (67). Also, see Foley’s chapter “The Proletarian Fictional Autobiography” (284-320). She notes that in proletarian fictional autobiographies, the characters, while not always taking on the name of the author, have psychological depth. 20 Mike Gold, “In Foggy California,” Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, ed. Michael Folsom (New York: International Publishers, 1972) 169. This article was originally published in the November 1928 issue of the New Masses. 142
edit him. Let us not shirk our problems. Let us not rob the worker of his
humanity in fiction. Not every worker is like Jesus; there are Hamlets,
Othellos, Tom Joneses and Macbeths among them, too. And I prefer this
variety of life to abstractions.21
The reference to Jesus resembles Sinclair’s claim that Jesus symbolizes a revolutionary
“propagandist.”22 The Jesus-like workers are not characterized by their religious fervor, but rather are depicted as revolutionaries who have presumably obtained a proletarian class consciousness. Thus, the references to Shakespeare’s characters require more analysis.
Gold brands the characters as clear expressions of different types of people. He does not elaborate on the traits of each respective character. From the context of the passage, we cannot ascertain which type of person each character represents, but we can determine that they are negative personifications. To reconstruct the proletarian conception of these three characters, I turn to other Leftist character analyses. As I clarify in Chapter 2, “Hamlets” refers to uncommitted bourgeois liberals, but the meanings behind other characters’ names are not so obvious. Therefore, other Leftist interpretations of Shakespeare’s characters become useful to get a better idea about the cultural codes that the characters signify.
Kenneth Burke, though not a confirmed communist, states that “[s]pecial literary works can be analyzed to show basic images” like we see in Macbeth: “‘Macbeth’ may be seen as the symbol of a new rising class, uncomfortable in the ambiguity of its
21 Ibid. 22 Upton Sinclair, Mammonart: An Essay in Economic Interpretation (Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1925) 9. 143 situation and suffering guilt consciousness.”23 This interpretation lends itself to the reading that Macbeths compare to Hamlets—not in that they are wavering, per se, but that they suffer from guilt as a result of their inability to make decisions or as a result of their made decisions. In staying true to Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Gold’s recognition of the revolutionary camp, Macbeths might refer to revolutionaries who have had combative success and are remorseful because of the means they took to contribute to proletarian progress. These interpretations, of course, are only speculations; nevertheless, we see that the Macbeths symbolize those who are not sure of their place in the class war.
Thus, they are portrayed in a negative light showing that a Macbeth symbolizes one with an unfinished proletarian political consciousness.
In his poem “Sonnet 26,” Joseph Freeman depicts Macbeth much differently. The poem consists of 14 lines and is written in iambic pentameter, though it does not have a formal rhyme scheme. Whether or not Freeman is emulating a type of Shakespearean sonnet is unclear, but by not using a rhyme scheme, he expresses that a proletarian sonnet does not need to stick to a strict traditional form. This relates back to his distaste for “art for art’s sake twaddle” (see Chapter 1).24 In the poem, Freeman makes a comparison between the “age of innocence and primal urge” and the “modern magic of Monopoly and mind” (lines 2, 9).25 The speaker of the poem says that Shakespeare “records it as it really was / And truth prevails forever and a day” as “Mere ambition, mere cupidity, mere murder” have been resolved by “Fortune’s coin” and order is restored (lines 6-7, 4).
23 League of American Writers Bulletin 1936-42, Jan. 1937, box 1, part 1, League of American Writers Archives, BANC MSS 72/242z, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 24 Joseph Freeman, An American Testament: A Narrative of Rebels and Romantics (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1936) 213. 25 Joseph Freeman, “Sonnet 26,” The Fire is Falling, Book One: Another Voyage, Joseph Freeman Papers, ca. 1920-1965, box 4, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York. 144
In the poem, however, Macbeth symbolizes monopolistic capitalism, thus is the “creator and redeemer, / protagonist and chronicler in one / He does the deed and falsifies the tail”
(lines 10-12). The speaker suggests that the modern Macbeth makes history and decides how it is read, which leads to the poem’s turn in the final two lines: “There was no murder and there was no Banquo; / In all the world, Macbeth alone was king” (lines 13-
14). Freeman’s Macbeth is not a convoluted character, and the only real similarity to
Shakespeare’s Macbeth is that they are both ambitious usurpers.
Common American Leftist assumptions about Othello are more clearly defined than those of Macbeth. In “A Note on ‘Othello,’” a foreword to the bill for the Yiddish
Art Theatre’s Eleventh Year Season (1928-1929) production of Othello, Maximilian
Hurwitz provides a commonly accepted view of Othello in contrast to the interpretation of the play that director Boris S. Glogolin delivers. Hurwitz explains that the tragedy is generally understood as a play about “all-consuming jealousy, as typified by Othello, and of cool and calculating malignity, as exemplified by Iago.”26 Unlike Lunacharsky, the
American Left viewed Iago as one with such calculating malignity. Gold corroborates this by comparing Iago to the intellectual who “during the latter part of the nineteenth century up to the present is permeated with the bitter poison of frustration, and the malice and pessimism that accompany it.”27 More specifically, he targets the deceptive pseudo-
Marxist intellectuals: “We can…discard all the new ‘Marxist’ jargon these people have
26 See Maximilian Hurwitz, “A Note on ‘Othello,’” Almanach of the Yiddish Art Theatre, Eleventh Year Season (1928-1929), Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University Libraries, New York. This Yiddish production of Othello was written by Mark Schweid and directed by Boris S. Glagolin. 27 Mike Gold, “Renegades: A Warning of the End,” Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, ed. Michael Folsom (New York: International Publishers, 1972) 266. This article was published in 1941. Gold, however, is quoting an article that he wrote in 1937. 145 picked up in the past few years, and pierce to the malice of the frustrated intellectual, hating life. Iago has merely found a new mask to assume in a new situation.”28
Even if Iago is “malignity personified,” Hurwitz makes a point that Othello’s
“childlike” jealousy is a byproduct of his naivety. This differs from the Soviet Left’s interpretation of Othello who is not considered a victim of the self, but rather a victim of deceit (see Chapter 1). Using Othello as a pejorative term, Gold is likely referring to those who are naïve and easily persuaded. However, in his Yiddish production of
Othello, Glogolin wants the moral of the play to be “a call for a return to nature, an appeal for a new logic and morality based on a realistic view of the laws of life, and not perverted by hypocrisy toward others and ourselves.”29 Glogolin quotes Henrik Ibsen to highlight the point of this production: “Before the social revolution can take place, there must be a revolution in the very logic of mankind.”30 Consequently, Glogolin intends for every character—no matter what his or her flaws are—to reflect characteristics that all people share. Each character represents a “lack of reasoning” in people—“the demonical passion of Iago, the sensual love of Othello, the romantic affection of Cassio, the infatuation of Roderigo, the fatherly love of Brabantio, the jealousy of Emilia, the unashamed animality of Blanca, and the secrets of the clown.”31 Even though Brecht did not find Shakespeare to be useful to modern German theatre, similarities to his instructive theatre are evident in Glogolin’s message as Glogolin directs the audience to become rational and see humanity as it really is.
28 Ibid. 29 Hurwitz, “On ‘Othello.’” 30 Qtd. in Hurwitz, “On ‘Othello.’” 31 Hurwitz, “On ‘Othello.’” 146
With these conceptions of Shakespeare’s characters in mind, we can come to educated conclusions as to which traits each character embodies. Without further analyzing these traits, I suggest there are more important issues at stake. These include answers to questions about why different American Leftists turn to these particular characters and what purposes the characters serve in the texts. The allusions to
Shakespeare’s characters are not thoughtless moves on the part of these writers. The three plays in use here—Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello—are all tragedies. And even though Soviet interpretations do not blame Othello for his fall, American Leftist analyses of these characters reveal that Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth are all at fault for their respective downfalls. Hamlet’s vacillation, Macbeth’s ambition and guilt, and Othello’s naivety appear to be the traits on which the American Left focuses. Such traits are not favorable to the Marxist-Leninist agenda.
Most American Leftist writers intended to depict proletarian suffering in their literary texts, thus it makes sense that they turn to tragedies and tragic characters.32
Additionally, Macbeth and Hamlet were two of the top ten most read literary texts in
American universities during the early-twentieth-century, and Othello was also a popular text.33 Therefore, most American Leftists had access to these texts; and because the plays were so popular, proletarian readers might have been familiar with the texts as well. This means that a large portion of the readership would recognize these characters and be able to compare them to real people.
32 In League of American Writers Bulletin, Burke points out that Cymbeline symbolizes “buying and selling.” This is a theme that is certainly relevant to Marxism. We, however, do not see Cymbeline in proletarian literature, likely because Cymbeline is a comedy. 33 Henry W. Simon, “A Survey of Modern Trends,” The Reading of Shakespeare in American Colleges and Universities: An Historical Survey (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1932) 138. The top two read literary works during this time were The Merchant of Venice and Julius Caesar. 147
Identifying Shakespeare’s characters with real people is not unique to the
American Left, but the political aspirations and motivations of the American Left makes their methods stand out. Speaking to this common practice, Bristol makes a case that projecting Shakespeare’s characters onto real people has positive effects: “Engagement with a character has a moral dimension; it corresponds to the imperative of respect for our human vulnerability to loss and grief. We learn about our own complex human nature by thinking about and coming to respect Shakespeare’s characters.”34 The
American Left demonstrates a level of respect for Shakespeare’s characters by turning to them even if there is a lack of respect for the individuals who are given characters’ identities. However, they reduce the nature of the characters and their psychological makeup to simplified personifications. This is exemplified in Freeman’s “Sonnet 26” where Macbeth is the personification of capitalist monopoly. There is not a complex psychological dynamic to the character—only ambition and dominance.
American Leftist interpretations of Shakespearean characters are one-sided.
There is no in-depth analysis. Iago is “malignity personified.” Macbeth signifies guilt and ambition, stock characteristics that everyone can relate to on some level. Internal individuality in these characters does not exist. The extractions, while carefully chosen, remove any sense of multi-dimensionality in these tragic figures; the characters become solely defined by their falls. Fittingly, the negative aspects of the characters are revealed in order to refer to people who are not, as Gold says, in the nobility of the revolutionary camp. A level of disrespect is apparent as the characters are defined by one dimension and are applied to people for whom the American Left has no respect. Hence, the people,
34 Bristol, “Confusing” 38. 148 mostly intellectuals, attached to the names become nothing but catastrophic obstructions to proletarian political development.
The proletarian appropriative adaptations of Shakespeare’s characters do not suggest that the characters have the agency to organize the text. Yachnin and Slights maintain that “character is the principle bridge over which the emotional, cognitive, and political transactions of theater and literature pass between actors and playgoers or between written texts and readers.”35 While this may be true of the dramatic character in theatrical performances, this is not the case for Shakespearean characters in American
Leftist writing. There are at least two reasons for the characters’ lack of agency. First, unlike in the actual plays, the Macbeths, Othellos, and Hamlets lose their discourse biography in proletarian writing. Discourse biography is a term that William Dodd uses to emphasize “the unique history of interactions that accrues to its character and is more than the sum of its social determinations.”36 Dodd turns to Othello’s autobiographical speech to Desdemona as an example. Yachnin and Slights use Hamlet to make a general statement that when we are presented with background information, “we are far more interested…in how the action of revenge seems to Hamlet than we are in the working out of the revenge plot.”37 From Gold’s article and Hurwitz’s analysis of Othello, readers do not get the same depth of biographical information.
My second point relates to the lack of a discourse biography. By removing
Shakespeare’s characters from the context of the play, the American Left essentially deletes their biographies. Bristol claims, “We don’t need any specialized historical
35 Yachnin and Slights, “Introduction” 7. 36 William Dodd, “Character as Dynamic Identity: From Fictional Interaction Script to Performance,” Shakespeare and Character: Theory, History, Performance, and Theatrical Persons, eds. Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) 63. 37 Yachnin and Slights, “Introduction” 7. 149 knowledge to understand Constance or Shylock or Lady Macduff if we are really alive to our own feelings and capable of empathy with other people.”38 Whether or not there is historical context, Bristol’s argument is contingent upon familiarity with the texts. This familiarity can provide one with an understanding of the characters. Most proletarian writers were certainly familiar with the texts, and there is evidence that they attended theatrical productions of Shakespeare. A small percentage of the proletarian readership may have accessed the texts as well, but it is unlikely that most proletarian readers were well-acquainted with Shakespeare’s works. This would make it more difficult for a proletarian audience to connect with these characters.
This is especially true when considering that the American Left removes any sense of truly understanding the characters, at least on a personal empathetic level.
Gold’s reference to Hamlets, Othellos, and Macbeths was used to create contempt toward, not empathy for, these characters. They represent the filth in the proletarian movement. Additionally, the proletarian readership has no way of empathizing with
Freeman’s Macbeth who “alone was king” (line 14).39 It can perhaps empathize with
Banquo whose existence is erased under the reign of Freeman’s Macbeth. Nonetheless,
Banquo has no true discourse biography, thus Bristol’s assertion does not have a universal application.
The combination of an explanation of the history of socioeconomics and the lack of a discourse biography means that the social environment defines the characters. For
Gold and Freeman, characters are not meant to catalyze an emotional response in the readers; instead, the social conditions in which the character lives are supposed to create
38 Bristol, “Confusing” 38. 39 Freeman, “Sonnet 26.” 150 the response. Instead of accentuating the characters’ psychology, Gold defines them in terms of social “gloom, dirt, and disorder.”40 Similarly, Freeman’s Macbeth is an abstraction of corporate society. Freeman wants us to respond to the social circumstances that lead to the “modern magic of Monopoly and mind” (line 9). The proletarian readership is directed to consider its erasure from history by the hands of the capitalists.
Shakespeare for the Non-accommodated Proletariat
There is another type of Shakespearean character in American proletarian literature. This type depicts the victimized worker—the non-accommodated proletariat.
Like the allusions to Macbeth, Othello, and Hamlet, American Leftist writers do not provide a biography of the Shakespeare characters that they use. This might be an act of subversion against high culture; it also might be an indication that the American Leftist writers lay claim to Shakespeare and create Shakespeare in their image. When Gold promised “one hundred [proletarian] Shakespeares,”41 he acknowledged Shakespeare as a cultural signifier for a great writer to appease the cynical bourgeois intellectuals (see
Introduction). When appropriating the characters, the promise comes true to an extent.
By taking ownership of Shakespeare’s characters, American Leftists are reconstructing his characters to fit a new theme. Without contextualizing the characters within their respective plays, the writers take on the voice of transformed Shakespeare. Moreover, they take on the role of Shakespeare as they speak through him and his characters. But rather than introducing bourgeois individualists, these Shakespeares write about proletariats; in effect, Shakespeare speaks for the proletariats.
40 Gold, “In Foggy California” 169. 41 Mike Gold, “Proletarian Realism,” Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, ed. Michael Folsom (New York: International Publishers, 1972) 204. 151
To further explain the key differences between what I propose to be the non- accommodated proletariat and the unaccommodated man, I return to King Lear and
Timon of Athens. Lear tells Poor Tom: “[T]hou are the thing itself” (3.4.95). For Lear, the “thing” is a “poor, bare, forked animal” (3.4.96). In other words, the unaccommodated man is base, but alive. The human is the beast—what Sun calls “a specimen of naked life outside of political life.”42 When Poor Tom/Edgar, Lear, and
Timon are outside of society and without clothes, they are connected to nature. Poor
Tom and Lear are caught in a storm—one that Lear tells Kent “invades us to the skin”
(3.4.7). As the storm continues and Edgar and Lear are naked, the storm literally invades the skin. Likewise, Timon strips off his clothes and says, “Timon will to the woods, where he shall find / Th’unkindest beast more kinder than mankind” (4.1.35-36). He digs for roots to “sauce his palate” (4.3.24). He intends to live off of the earth as a beast himself. Still, the unaccommodated man is a “thing” that has life and a place in nature— he experiences the essence of life.
The non-accommodated proletariat is the thing itself too; but this thing, figuratively speaking, is void of life. He is base, but has no connection to nature. In
Louis Untermeyer’s poem “Caliban in the Coal Mine,” the speaker addresses God:
God, You don’t know what it is—
You, in Your well-lighted sky,
Watching the meteors whizz;
Warm with the sun always be. (lines 5-8)43
42 Sun, Succeeding 38. 43 Louis Untermeyer, “Caliban in the Coal Mines,” Modern American Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921) 309. 152
For Untermeyer’s Caliban, there is “Nothing but blackness above” (line 13). Outside of the coal mine is life and beauty. There are spectacular natural phenomena—meteors and the sun. But in the coal mine, the non-accommodated proletariat is not a man at all. He is the product of his work environment, which is “cold and dark” and “dark and damp”
(lines 4, 12)—dark like the coal that he mines. He has been reduced to a thing itself, but this thing is the essence of the worker’s labor—an inanimate product, a commodity.
Without having life, the non-accommodated proletariat has no human existence.
We get a small sense of this from Freeman’s “Sonnet 26.” Freeman’s Macbeth, who has been provided with everything he needs to control society, is diametrically opposed to
Banquo. Macbeth stands for that which is all-powerful, and Banquo essentially does not exist: “There was no murder and there was no Banquo” (line 13). The only thing he is left with is a name—no life, no history, no accommodation. Although the proletarian audience cannot empathize with Macbeth, it can perhaps empathize with Banquo. As we see in proletarian literature, the proletariat is smothered by the powers of the dominant capitalist classes. Banquo could serve as a kind of proletariat “everyman,” or rather proletariat “no-man.” The proletariat has no property—no materialistic belongings to signify an existence. His existence is dependent on being the property of the capitalist.
And like Banquo, proletariat deaths are often compared to murder as the proletariat falls victim to the social system. The only way this victim remains a part of history is if his comrades rally around the tragedy and continue on with the proletarian movement.
Banquo, like Untermeyer’s Caliban, is only given recognition by the poet’s hand.
Society’s consumption of the worker shows that, unlike the unaccommodated man, the non-accommodated proletariat has no means to escape. He has been born into
153 the constraints of society, politics, and capitalism. Without any autonomy or self- recognition as a person, the non-accommodated proletariat is already deceased. Gold’s poem “Strange Funeral in Braddock” is a perfect example of a literary text with a non- accommodated proletariat character. The poem opens with chorus lines that are repeated after each verse: “Listen to the mournful drums of a strange funeral. / Listen to the story of a strange American funeral.”44 These lines are accentuated more as the poem moves forward. The protagonist of the poem is Jan Clepak, and the strange funeral is for him.
The chorus begins its song before Jan dies, which means that Jan is already dead. The question to be asked is whether or not he was ever alive. He “sweats half-naked at his puddling trough” and is woken up by furnaces “roaring like tigers.” Like Lear and
Timon, Jan is without clothes. But while Lear and Timon become part of nature, Jan is a part of the factory that is his workplace, home, and deathbed. Jan dies, but the words
“die” and “death” do not appear in the poem suggesting that Jan never really lived.
Rather, we see that the “steel has swallowed [Jan] forever.” Jan becomes a part of the
“three tons of hard steel” that “hold at their heart, the bones, flesh, nerves, the muscles, brains and heart of Jan Clepak.” The capitalist machine erased his existence, both literally and figuratively.
Jan is the epitome of the non-accommodated proletariat. He owns no property; he is the property of the steel mill. He wears no clothing. And when he transforms into steel, he is put into a “steel coffin,” one that he presumably helped create at the mill. At the end of the poem, when Jan has transformed into steel, his wife says she will make
44 Mike Gold, “Strange Funeral in Braddock,” Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, ed. Michael Folsom (New York: International Publishers, 1972): 126-128. In Alan M. Wald, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 2002) 347, Wald mentions that the poem first appeared in the June 1924 issue of the Liberator. The poem gained popularity and was occasionally recited to music. One version included a composition by Aaron Copeland. 154 bullets out of his body to “shoot them into a tyrant’s heart!”45 Once again, we have a female playing an active role in the revolution. In regards to the fight against capitalism,
Jan has more use-value when he is dead than when he is alive. Dead, he is a martyr and a weapon for his wife; alive, he slaves away for the capitalist. We also know that he has not been undone because he has never had enough material goods to lose in order to become undone. His family has been born into this life by class affiliation. His wife makes this clear when she says that she will become a “fifty-cent whore” so that her kids will not have to work in the steel mill. She is willing to commodify herself so that her kids might have a chance to escape the lifeless world of the steel worker.
Even though Shakespeare scholars do not appear to engage in Shakespeare’s role in the proletarian movement, experts in American proletarian literature find
Shakespearean tropes in American Leftist writing. One such expert is Alan M. Wald. He finds allusions to Shakespeare in proletarian texts, and he analyzes them to illustrate the uniqueness of the proletarian tradition. Wald offers interpretations that support my theory of the non-accommodated proletariat. He makes an ambitious argument that
Gold’s poem “Strange Funeral in Braddock” is a “proletarian reworking of Shakespeare’s song by Ariel in The Tempest of ‘sea change.’”46 By referencing the song, Wald alludes to the message that Ariel relays to Ferdinand, the message that Ferdinand’s father has died at sea:
Full fathom five thy father lies.
Of his bones are coral made.
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
45 Gold, “Strange” 128. 46 Wald, Exiles 61. 155
Nothing of him doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell. (1.2.400-407)
Wald compares Alonso’s transformation from human into choral to Jan’s transformation from worker “into molten steel.”47 It is difficult to make a clear connection between
“Strange Funeral in Braddock” and The Tempest, but there are traces of similarities. For example, both Alonso’s (presumed) death and Jan’s actual death transform the two into components of the respective forces that cause their deaths. There is, however, a major difference; Alonso becomes part of nature’s beauty, and Jan becomes a product of industrialism.
Returning to Untermeyer’s poem, we see that “Caliban in the Coal Mines” presents a worker who has been swallowed by his workplace as well. David C. Duke comments on this writing trend: “Untermeyer’s ‘Caliban’ anticipates other twentieth- century poets’ views of the mine as a dismal and uninviting place even for the radiance of the Almighty.”48 The coal mine, however, is not just dismal and uninviting; it is a place of darkness and a place of unanswered prayer. The poem opens with Caliban speaking to
God: “God, we don’t like to complain / We know that the mine is no lark” (lines 1-2); and the poem ends with a prayer: “God, if You wish for our love, / Fling us a handful of stars” (lines 15-16). In the mine, Caliban fantasizes about watching meteors and feeling
47 Ibid. 48 David C. Duke, Writers and Miners: Activism and Imagery in America (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 2002) 147. 156 the warmth of the sun, luxuries to which he has no access. He apparently gets no reprieve from his boss, so he asks for God’s accommodation.49
It is difficult to find a clear link between this Caliban and Shakespeare’s Caliban.
The only shared qualities are that they both are workers—slaves—and are characterized by darkness. Shakespeare’s Caliban says that, if Prospero bids them, the spirits will lead him “like a firebrand in the dark” (2.2.6), and Prospero refers to him as “this thing of darkness” (5.1.278). Similarly, Untermeyer’s Caliban is defined by the dark mine in which he works. By no means do these references to darkness make a direct comparison between the two Calibans. In fact, there is no reason that the poet needs to use
Shakespeare’s character. It could just as easily be called “A Life in the Coal Mines” or
“A Worker in the Coal Mines.” What is important, though, is that Untermeyer does not use either of those other titles; he calls the poem “Caliban in the Coal Mines,” thus appropriates Shakespeare’s character as the voice of the poem. Untermeyer speaks through Shakespeare to become the voice for the proletariats. I say proletariats in the plural because Caliban uses plural pronouns: “we” and “us.” He does not represent only the voice of the speaker; he is the voice of all of the miners.
Other Leftists were inclined to incorporate Caliban as a symbol of the non- accommodated proletariat in proletarian literature. In “The American Famine,” Gold talks about “ignorant men whom the rich are killing and taming.”50 These men know no other way of life. They are “[t]housands of tired men and women, half asleep and
49 An unanswered prayer is common in proletarian literature. One example appears in Freeman’s poem “Samson,” the speaker begins the poem saying: “GOD!...Are You there? Are You somewhere? O hark! / They have taken my eyes and I cry in the dark: / They have spit on me, trampled me, sported my name; / They have broken my strength and have shouted my shame. (lines 1-4) See Joseph Freeman, “Samson,” n.d., Poems: 1915-1932, Joseph Freeman Papers, ca. 1920-1965, box 3, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York. 50 Mike Gold, “The American Famine,” Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, ed. Michael Folsom (New York: International Publishers, 1972) 88. 157 bloodless…on their way to the factories.” One of these men is a “strange dark Caliban rushing on the errands of man.”51 In this passage, Caliban is the only worker given a name. He represents all “smouldering in gloom.” This Caliban has been tamed. In The
Tempest, Stephano wants to “recover [Caliban] and keep him tame and get to Naples / with him, he’s a present for any emperor that ever trod on neat’s / leather” (2.2.65-67).
In both cases, Caliban is essentially treated as a commodity. Like Untermeyer’s Caliban,
Gold’s Caliban has no other option but to work—as he is ignorant and becomes smoldered in gloom like the factories and city in which he works.
Gold’s Caliban crosses over into a different text as well. In Jews without Money, the speaker refers to the miser Fyfka as “this Caliban.” There are questions about whether or not this Caliban is a sympathetic character. We are introduced to Fyfka with the speaker saying, “This miser watched women night after night until he could endure it no longer. He came to know some of them, stole contacts, groveled before them to be kind…but was too stingy to pay the regular price of fifty cents.”52 This could be a correlation to Caliban’s lusty behavior exemplified by his attempted rape of Miranda.
However, the narrator of the novel does not hold Fyfka culpable for all of his wrongdoings. The narrator says, “Poverty makes people insane” and “[t]his Caliban was tortured, behind his low puckered brow by a horrible conflict between body and mind.”53
Consequently, Fyfka’s avarice is a product of the society in which he lives. It has been impressed upon him. Society has made him “this yellow somnambulist, this nightmare bred of poverty; this maggot-yellow dark ape with twisted arm and bright, peering,
51 Ibid. 52 Mike Gold, Jews without Money (New York: Avon Books, 1972) 52. 53 Ibid 51. 158 melancholy eyes; human garbage can of horror; fevered Rothschild in a filth shirt; madman in an old derby hate.”54
Caliban as Fyfka is described as a monster. Nonetheless, the images of him as a tortured individual invite a sympathetic reading. James D. Bloom, a historian of the proletarian movement, makes a noteworthy assessment of the differences between
Caliban/Fyfka and Caliban in Shakespeare’s play. Bloom reminds us that people for quite some time have read Caliban as a colonized subject who curses those who have colonized him. Bloom draws attention to Caliban’s famous speech: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language” (1.2.466-368). Bloom, referring to Gold’s novel, notes,
“This Caliban…never speaks, unlike Shakespeare’s, who has warned or inspired centuries of cultivated readers as to the power of subjugated expression.”55 Like Bloom,
I find the silence to be extremely compelling and telling. Caliban/Fyfka represents the non-accommodated proletariat in the worst form because even his mind has gone. He becomes a type of an impoverished victim. Bloom states, “[T]he imperative that introduces Caliban instructs readers simultaneously to rely on and to transcend what we think we know of social types.”56 No matter what kind of a person Caliban/Fyfka was before, he has been completely assimilated to capitalist culture and has adopted their avaricious practices. Simultaneously, he lives in poverty like a proletariat. The antagonizing forces make him go mad.
54 Ibid. 55 James D. Bloom, Left Letters: The Culture Wars of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992) 52. 56 Bloom, Left Letters 64. 159
Interestingly, Bloom takes Gold’s appropriations of Shakespeare and calls Gold a
“Communist Caliban.”57 Bloom bases his argument on the grounds that Gold not only appropriates Caliban, but also appropriates Caliban’s cursing. While Caliban/Fyfka does not speak, Gold speaks for him and spews curses at society. To make his point, Bloom turns to one of Gold’s contemporaries, Lewis Mumford, who identified Gold’s rebellious nature as “the uprising of Caliban.”58 Bloom’s analysis of Gold’s proletarian leadership is thorough, whereas I think he is a bit presumptuous in his claim that Gold himself is
Caliban. Caliban/Fyfka appears as a non-accommodated proletariat, but Gold was a part of the Leftist vanguard. Nonetheless, by incorporating the name Caliban, Gold is appropriating Shakespeare and changing the narrative in order to make it fit into the proletarian tradition. And by silencing the outspoken Shakespearean character, Gold could perhaps be conveying the message that the proletarian readership needs to find its own voice so as to refrain from living as “a human garbage can.”
Freeman provides a completely different type of Caliban. In his “Sonnet 219,”
Freeman makes Caliban the tyrant.59 Ariel is the one who takes on the role of the victim—the victimized spirit of the working class. To preface the poem, Freeman extracts lines from The Tempest and places them into an epigraph to the book in which this poem is included: “I had forgot that foul conspiracy / Of the beast Caliban and his confederates / Against my life” (The Tempest 4.1.139-141). Prospero speaks these lines when he remembers that Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano have threatened his life. When considering what we have seen from American Leftist appropriations of Caliban, we
57 Ibid 12. 58 Qtd. in Bloom, Left Letters 58. 59 Joseph Freeman, “Sonnet 219,” The Fire is Falling, Book Four: The Sun is New, Joseph Freeman Papers, ca. 1920-1965, box 4, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York. 160 might assume that these lines would be used to adapt Caliban into a proto-revolutionary.
This is not the case.
Prospero’s speech serves an important purpose in that it sets up Caliban as a murderer and a tyrant. Prospero knows that Caliban has made plans to murder him, but by not integrating Prospero into the poem, Freeman does not specify whose life is threatened in the epigraph. The poem begins: “This is the memoir of the murdered man /
Who did not know till it was far too late / That those he deified had murdered him” (lines
1-3). Keeping the epigraph in mind, the speaker appears to have once been one of
Caliban’s cronies; and it is not until he is in his “pillaged tomb” that he sees the world
“Surrender all it is to Caliban” (lines 5, 6). Even when dead, the speaker still has a voice and at the end of the poem, he gives a final message to the proletarian readership:
Aware that in the doom of our time
There is the key to doom and end of doom,
Of murder, resurrection and the dream
That opens every gate toward the sun. (lines 11-14)
Through one worker’s death, others’ lives may be resurrected and continue to battle in the class war. We do not know why the speaker chose to deify Caliban; we only know that Caliban turned on him. If we subscribe to the Leftist viewpoint of Freeman, we might suppose that the promises of capitalism ultimately failed the speaker.
Ariel’s role in the poem is also compelling. From a spirit of the island in The
Tempest to the spirit of the working class in “Sonnet 219,” Ariel once again faces the fate of imprisonment. In the poem, he is representative of the non-accommodated proletariat:
161
While Ariel, blinded, begs to be immured
And knows his fate is now the fate of all,
All of him is dead except the mind,
And this examines self and world anew, (lines 7-10).
By having the “fate of all,” Ariel represents the “we” that we have seen in other proletarian literary texts. The fate for Ariel is imprisonment, presumably imprisoned by capitalists. While all physical parts of Ariel are dead, he still has his mind. This is the one quality that the non-accommodated proletariat maintains—needed to build a proletarian class consciousness.
At the Crossroads
Bloom makes a strong point which I am a bit reluctant to accept. He argues that
Gold is aware that “Shakespeare…is a perennial focal point for the cultural contestation and an unavoidable battleground for American Kulturkampf contestants.”60 It is difficult for me to agree with such an explicit claim because, even though there are plenty of proletarian texts in which Shakespeare appears, Shakespeare is alluded to in only a small portion of these American Leftist works. However, Shakespeare is central in the development of literary theory and a figure who is critical when defining the proletarian class in opposition to both popular and bourgeois cultures. I am prepared to make the argument that Shakespeare is a perennial focal point, but I do not think it is always the
American Left’s deliberate goal to wrest him from elite culture. I think he is a focal point in that his cultural authority traverses classes, cultures, nations, and media. Therefore, he is a figure who constantly needs to be addressed.
60 Bloom, Left Letters 51. 162
On the other hand, when I see writers appropriate Shakespeare’s characters and fundamentally speak through the voice of Shakespeare, I am inclined to concede that the
American Left is to a degree wresting Shakespeare from elite culture. Furthermore, they do it successfully by changing the narratives of the play texts. But a distinction needs to be made between essays and reportage texts and fiction and poetry. It is in the nonfiction texts that American proletarian writers seek to denigrate Shakespeare. The characters embody Shakespeare’s bourgeois affiliation and individualist sympathies. In effect, the characters whose names have been referenced—Macbeths, Hamlets, Othellos—make a point that Shakespeare and those who relate to these specific characters are not fit for the revolutionary movement. They are the embodiments of the bourgeois writer, the fellow- traveler, and the unprepared. American proletarian writers are not only appropriating parts of Shakespeare’s texts; they are appropriating Shakespeare’s voice as well. By appropriating his characters, they get to rewrite Shakespeare’s stories. These writers join together as a collective group of Leftist Shakespeares.
Finally, it is interesting that the American Left gives so much attention to The
Tempest. Despite the claims of Wald and Bloom, I do not think that we can come to any definite conclusions as to why the American Left is drawn to The Tempest. We can, however, make a case for building on post-colonialist readings of The Tempest. There are ways to make post-communist readings of The Tempest fit with post-colonialist discourse. I am not proposing that we turn to Marxist interpretations in their current cultural state. I suggest that one reads The Tempest alongside these proletarian poems.
We can engage with the texts in new ways—not simply by recognizing Caliban as
163 rebellious or colonized, but as assimilated into the economic world in The Tempest and contained by the hegemony of the social and political systems.
We can acknowledge Caliban or Ariel as a non-accommodated proletariat who is unable to escape social politics due in large part to the economic system. Lear and
Timon, commonly observed as unaccommodated men, self-efface themselves to seclude themselves from the political and economic systems that have led to their downfall—the same political and economic systems that they took advantage of and misused. They elect to take on the essence of the human in its basest form to feel alive. The non- accommodated proletariat has not even been provided with that luxury. There is no escape for him because he is property. The only thing left for him to do is fight the system, to revolt against it. This is how he is portrayed through Shakespeare’s characters in American proletarian literature. The Calibans and Ariels voice the Marxist-Leninist program to the readers in order to help them consciously realize their place in the world of capitalist oppression and corruption.
164
Conclusion: Go Left, Young Scholars!
Is There Anybody Out There?
“The liberals have become disheartened and demoralized under the strain of
American prosperity. Are there any liberals left in America?”1 In 1929, a few months after he had become editor of the New Masses, Mike Gold wrote these words to question the status of political commitment amongst writers. In his article “Go Left, Young
Writers!” Gold asks difficult questions and supplies unpopular answers. He claims,
“There isn’t a centrist liberal party in our politics any more, or in our literature. There is an immense overwhelming, right wing which accepts the American religion of
‘prosperity.’ The conservatives accept it joyfully, the liberals ‘soulfully.’ But both accept it [sic].”2 On the other side, there is an extreme Left. As Gold criticizes the liberals for siding with the right-wing, he asks if the Left, in its current state, has any chance against the right: “Can there be a battle between such unequal forces? Will it not rather be a massacre of a lion carelessly crushing the rabbit that has crossed his path?”3
Gold maintains that the proletarian movement could make an impact on literature, culture, and economics if the young writers who have “the vigor and the guts” go
“leftward.”4
I present a similar entreaty in my dissertation. I want to reinforce my position in response to the current state of politics in Shakespeare studies and Marxism. When Gold said “go leftward,” he did not mean “the temperamental bohemian left, the stale old Paris
1 Mike Gold, “Go Left, Young Writers!” Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, ed. Michael Folsom (New York: International Publishers, 1972) 186. 2 Ibid 187. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid 188. 165 posing, the professional poetizing, etc. No, the real thing; a knowledge of working-class life in America gained from first-hand contacts, and a hard precise philosophy of 1929 based on economics, not verbalisms.”5 Instead of personal expression, he asked for literary content that supported the proletarian class consciousness. It might be extreme to apply Gold’s assessment to the state of literature today, but I believe that we too have a problem in that there is not a clear Leftist political discourse in literary studies. When I say “go leftward,” I am not promoting a move toward a new-age liberal left that has chosen to boycott politics altogether as the best option for change. Nor do I mean the erudite cultural Marxist Left; rather, I am focused on the Left that researches the current working-class experience, reads working-class texts, and teaches about proletarian movements and class consciousness. I am referring to the Left that takes political commitment seriously and is not afraid to accept responsibility for its position—a Left that seeks to challenge all cases of social discrimination by considering economic class politics.
It is my hope that “Recovering and Reconstructing Leftist Shakespeares” will reopen political discourses surrounding class polemics in Shakespeare studies. The emergent, residual, and dominant effects of Shakespeare’s cultural authority allow him to be a focal point of discussions about class and art. By examining his role in the
American proletarian movement, we see that Shakespeare’s history among the Left is complicated. Shakespeare was both resisted and accepted, both rejected and embraced.
No matter the case, he was the center of important literary debates surrounding the development of proletarian culture, and Leftists did not turn to Shakespeare without scrutinizing his value. Even if the American Left came across as didactic, its approaches
5 Ibid. 166 to Shakespeare were not as monolithic as one may think. As I have shown, members of the Leftist movement did not always agree on topics that included Shakespeare. Leftists made Shakespeare into a polemic within a tradition that asked questions and provided answers that were not always consistent with one another. These inconsistencies have given us more material to work with when looking at Shakespeare in terms of Leftist politics. But this means we must understand the political debates surrounding
Shakespeare and Marxism.
Marxism’s role in academia and Shakespeare studies is as complex as
Shakespeare’s role in the American proletarian movement. In American academia, scholars have set Marx in a precarious position. Like Shakespeare among the Left, Marx has been resisted and accepted, rejected and embraced in academia. More importantly, he has been re-formed. Sharon O’Dair explains that in North America, Marxism is a symbol “that has become almost infinitely malleable.”6 Ultimately, Marx has been appropriated and molded to fit the wants of his users. Scholars have done well to transform Marxism into a discourse that supports gender and race equality, but they have gotten away from traditional Marxism that privileges class. They are reluctant to ask serious questions about class and art. O’Dair states, “The reluctance of contemporary
Shakespeareans to ‘ask questions about relations of class and art’ does not, however, prevent them from wishing to be perceived as progressives; they want to believe and have others believe that their scholarly work benefits the greater good.”7 I am not quite as cynical as O’Dair. I believe that current race and gender scholars are progressives and
6 Sharon O’Dair, “Marx Manqué: A Brief History of Marxist Shakespeare Criticism in North America, ca. 1980-ca. 2000,” Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism, eds. Irena R. Makaryk and Joseph G. Price (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006) 355. 7 Ibid 351. 167 have done excellent work that benefits the greater good. Like O’Dair, however, I think many liberal scholars have made Marx a flexible signifier; and I think Marxism-Leninism can bring progressive scholars together.
I do not suggest that race and gender are mutually exclusive from class, and I understand that placing all of the emphasis on class might seem reductive. Marxism-
Leninism does not prohibit conversations about race and gender; it merely makes class politics the central issue. Thus, race, gender, and sexuality discourses have a place in class polemics. The problem occurs when Marx is framed to fit cultural studies but not political studies. In an attempt to free Marxism from a malleable state, O’Dair claims,
“What makes Marxism distinctive is not just its commitment to economic determination and class struggle as the motor force of history but also its commitment to political activism and radical social change.”8 This is precisely what Marxism-Leninism does—it insists on commitment to political activism and radical social change. From the viewpoint of class relations, Marxism-Leninism supports all political activism. Lenin gives us the chance to return to a more political Marxism based on commitment to social change. And it is through a Marxist-Leninist lens that we must examine Shakespeare and the American Left.
The American Leftist movement illustrates ways that Shakespeare has been incorporated into political activism. It does this by stressing Shakespeare’s cultural authority rather than by deeply analyzing his texts. This is a point of difference between
Marxist-Leninist approaches to literature and academic Marxism, which usually includes deep literary analysis. And while the ways of the Left might be unattractive because they do not always emphasize Shakespeare’s great literary accomplishments, I ask which
8 Ibid 363. 168 method is more effective if we want to legitimately challenge the current social order.
O’Dair applauds scholars who have used Marxism to promote democratized culture for groups—namely women and racial minorities—that have not received enough attention.
On the other hand, she says,
But in pursuing these goals while ignoring the goal of understanding,
much less ameliorating, the effects of social class in art, the profession, or
society, Shakespeareans and literary critics more generally have made of
‘Marxism’ both something and nothing at all: ‘Marxism’ became a site for
appropriating a ‘sweet’ legacy of oppositionality within modern cultures
and states.9
The American Left did something by turning to Lenin. It made Marxism a polemical site within class struggles. This is why the American proletarian moment provides us with such a valuable model to emulate, or at least to acknowledge, if we want to recharge
Leftist politics in Shakespeare studies without being “massacred by the lion.”
A Vision of the Past for the Future
To an extent, I am endorsing a message that Joseph Freeman made two decades after the American Left dissipated. In 1958, Freeman delivered a speech entitled “Vision of the Thirties” to American Studies majors at Smith University. In the speech, he protested the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Freeman wanted to rally the “uncommitted generation” to engage with politically radical art and literature that had been silenced by the “Terror of the Fifties” manifested through the “Great
9 Ibid 351. 169
Persecution” of McCarthyism.10 In essence, Freeman retold Gold’s story and asked the students to “go leftward.” McCarthyism, according to Freeman, was less about individuals’ political positions in the 1950s and more about the Leftism of the 1930s. For him, to “go leftward” meant not only challenging this “Terror of the Fifties,” but also supporting the progress toward social change that occurred during the 1930s. Freeman began his speech speaking generally about the 1930s. Defending the political radicalism of the 1930s, he described the decade as “the age of ‘social consciousness’ in the arts, of political radicalism among writers and artists, of ‘proletarian literature.’” It was the decade when American writers and artists “went Left” and were bound “together in comradeship by a common faith, a common basic, a vision which fired their creative powers.”11
Near the end of his speech, in a moment of meta-theatricality, Freeman put on a satirical skit called Waiting for Candide—fusing Voltaire’s Candide and Clifford Odets’ play Waiting for Lefty. He once again turned art into a form of political protest. He showed that politics and art do not have to be excluded from one another. Mocking the
HUAC trials, Freeman placed Candide on the stand where he was then questioned about his political position during the 1930s. Unlike Voltaire’s naïve character who never formulates his own opinions, Freeman’s Candide was well-informed, articulate, and blunt in his responses. More importantly, Freeman’s Candide used his knowledge of literature to support his firm political position. With a powerful allusion to a frequently cited line from Hamlet, Candide declared, “Today something is rotten not only in the state of
10 Joseph Freeman, “The Vision of the Thirties,” 1958, Joseph Freeman Papers, ca. 1920-1965, box 8, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York. 11 Ibid. 170
Denmark but in every state on the face of the earth without exception.”12 By not isolating the decay of society to only one nation, Freeman supported the internationalist proletarian spirit. In this instance, Freeman presented an unlikely candidate in that of Candide to speak as a member of the Leftist vanguard. He politicized art in an effort to recharge
Marxist-Leninist political commitment. Additionally, Freeman’s Candide appropriated
Shakespeare, a cultural icon, to reinforce the idea that even high art can be used as a tool to create a proletarian political class consciousness.
Prior to the performance, Freeman made a point that the HUAC trials were a form of persecution without concern about where an individual actually stands—as his or her fate had already been decided. The trials were more about where the friends, former friends, or acquaintances stood during the Thirties. Freeman stated, “If there was any
Candide naïve enough to think they really wanted to know where he stands, he was soon set right. They did not want to know where you stood in the Thirties or where you stand today.”13 Freeman’s Candide was by no means naïve, and he was clearly conscious of his diatribe against the “immemorial evils” manifested in society through “poverty, tyranny, ignorance, hatred, violence, and bloodshed.”14 Candide’s worldly experiences showed him that these evils are in every state in the world. He suggested that naïve optimism must be destroyed and be replaced by action. Ultimately, Freeman recovered and reconstructed a literary moment in the Marxist-Leninist tradition by alluding to
Hamlet and appropriating Candide to promote political commitment.
Although we live in a different time period than the Old American Left, there is still a place for Marxism-Leninism in political art and in Shakespeare studies. For this to
12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 171 materialize, scholars must partake in what I hope will be a new post-communist discourse led by a Leftist literary vanguard. The term “vanguard” is commonly accepted as a pejorative term denoting a disruptive group of elitists. Responding to negative reactions against Lenin and the terms “vanguard” and “party,” Terry Eagleton makes a strong noteworthy claim:
Leninism, to be sure, involves a great deal more than telling other people
what you judge to be the truth. But stereotyping and travestying of it has
been such—and absolutely no political current has been so mercilessly
caricatured in our time, largely by those piously opposed to stereotyping—
that it requires a gargantuan effort simply to surmount such vulgar
prejudices as these before moving on to more substantive matters. It is
well-nigh impossible to discuss the concept of political vanguardism…in a
cultural climate that can perceive no difference between the terms
“vanguard” and “elite.”15
It has been my intention to effectively communicate that the Leftist vanguard is radically different than elite culture and even different from a general populist movement.
Eagleton can reinforce my position: “[E]lites are self-perpetuating whereas vanguards are self-abolishing. Vanguards arise in conditions of uneven cultural and political development.”16 Vanguards may be considered elitists because they are comprised of self-appointed representatives. But they are self-abolishing in the sense that they compromise their advantageous position in society for the benefit of those seeking fair
15 Terry Eagleton, “Lenin the Postmodern Age,” Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth, eds. Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007) 47. 16 Ibid. 172 cultural and political development and representation. Vanguards do not initiate protest; rather, they respond to and provide support for embryonic political activism.
Even though academia is generally categorized as high culture, I think there is a place for a Leftist vanguard. It is no secret that Marxism-Leninism is not popular among scholars or in academia more generally. It has not been popular for several decades.
Louis Althusser explains,
[A]cademic philosophy cannot tolerate Lenin for two reasons, which are
really one and the same. On the one hand, it cannot bear the idea that it
might have something to learn from politics and from a politician. And on
the other hand, it cannot bear the idea that philosophy might be the object
of a theory, i.e. of an objective knowledge.17
According to Althusser, we owe it to Marx to counter those who “either stubbornly fight against Marx or cover him in academic honours while distorting him in bourgeois interpretations.”18 Because of the institutionalization of Marx, I agree that we owe it to him to engage in political theories that he directly influenced. This means engaging in
Marxism-Leninism. For academics with Leftist sympathies to give back to Marx, they need to take political responsibility and practice their partisanship in their scholarship.
This would extend access to politically committed ideologies that serve to challenge the oppressive, yet resolute, framework of capitalist disenfranchisement.
There is a method of education that justifies the use of bringing a Leftist stance to schools and scholarship. It is the methodology of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci, who in the
West is often distanced from his own Marxism-Leninism, clearly outlined his partisan
17 Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and other essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001) 17. 18 Ibid xv. 173 position in his Prison Notebooks. Like Lenin, Gramsci argued that a full spontaneous workers’ revolution is an illusion, and that class consciousness is ultimately a battle for hegemony (a term from Lenin popularized by Gramsci). And while Gramsci idealistically proposed that subaltern classes are able to organically form their own functionary “organic” intellectuals, he stressed the importance of education and pedagogy based on practice—which requires a vanguard leadership role. Even though Gramsci grounded his model on an autonomous education system, those whom he would call
“traditional intellectuals” play a significant vanguard-esque role in his estimation of the rise of the proletariat.19
Gramsci proposed “a common basic education, imparting a general, humanistic, formative culture; this would strike the right balance between development of the capacity for working manually (technically, industrially) and development of the capacities required for intellectual work.”20 Gramsci’s model for a new education included classical components, which require students to carefully scrutinize the totality of social conditions of the past and the present through general education classes. In other words, he was a supporter of the humanities—one who believed in a curriculum that includes an accurate history of social evolution. Gramsci endorsed the Marxist
19 In Antonio Gramsci, “The Intellectuals,” Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 2008) 3-23, Gramsci argues that everyone has intellectual capabilities, but not everyone is an intellectual functionary in society. He separates functionary intellectuals into two categories: “traditional intellectuals”—those ecclesiastics, philosophers, people of letters, artists, and intellectuals; and “organic intellectuals”—those forming organically from within the masses who function as intellectuals. He argues, “One of the most important characteristics of any group that is developing toward dominance is its struggle to assimilate and to conquer ‘ideologically’ the traditional intellectuals, but this assimilation and conquest is made quicker and more efficacious the more the group in question succeeds in simultaneously elaborating its own organic intellectuals” (10). However, he suggests schools are instruments through which various strata of intellectuals are created; and a school reform could benefit the creation of organic intellectuals. However, traditional intellectuals—who have ties to or sympathize with the subaltern classes—are going to have to play a role in this development. 20 Antonio Gramsci, “On Education,” Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, eds. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 2008) 27. 174
“educate the educator” philosophy and argued that the teacher’s function is to act as an instructor, and also a “friendly guide.”21 There is autonomy on both sides of the teacher/student dichotomy, but the advocacy for a guide, one who has ties to or sympathizes with subaltern classes, hints at the need for a vanguard if education is to help subaltern classes challenge capitalist hegemony.
In order to make more comparisons between Lenin and Gramsci, I want to note that their respective visions of a new school have many similarities. In “The Task of
Youth Leagues,” Lenin outlines his version of a new school. It is a bit more programmatic than Gramsci’s model, but Lenin’s school likewise presupposes the eradication of the old system of mechanical instruction. Similar to Gramsci, Lenin sought to
replace the old system of instruction, the old cramming and the old drill,
with an ability to acquire the sum total of human knowledge, and to
acquire it in such a way that communism shall not be something to be
learned by rote, but something that you yourselves have thought over,
something that will embody conclusions inevitable from the standpoint of
present-day education.22
For both Gramsci and Lenin, students should have autonomy to come to their own conclusions—although there is more emphasis on students to become “good communists” in Lenin’s school. Both schools have fundamental humanist elements. A big difference between the two is that Lenin wrote “The Tasks of the Youth Leagues” in
1922 in the Soviet Union, only five years removed from the Revolution; therefore, his
21 Ibid 33. 22 Vladimir Lenin, “The Tasks of the Youth Leagues,” The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1975) 666. 175 pedagogy functioned to maintain communist ethics. It may be surprising to learn that
Lenin, like Gramsci, was not anti-heritage. Although he certainly wanted to assimilate communists, Lenin believed that having a full understanding of history would allow students to make distinctions between the social conditions of capitalism and those of communism. This is something that Georg Lukács admired in Lenin and something that inspired his theories on literary realism.23
I am not suggesting that we inculcate our students with Marxism-Leninism.
Rather, I am suggesting that we offer them the opportunity to read corrective histories of
Marxism-Leninism. The revisionist histories of Lenin and communism have not permitted student engagement in such scholarship. And the neglected American proletarian tradition in Shakespeare studies has kept the Left out of American
Shakespeare criticism. Exposure will allow students to think critically about politics and come to their own opinions. But we must not leave out important parts of history that could change perspectives and potentially change society.
A Corrective Future
Because the American Left has been neglected in Shakespeare studies, many theorists with Marxist-Leninist roots have been misrepresented. These include Bertolt
Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, and (to an extent) Theodor
Adorno. These politically active theorists are usually considered to be cultural Marxists,
23 In Georg Lukács, “Realism in the Balance,” Aesthetics in Politics, Theodor Adorno, et al. (London: Verso, 1977) 28-59, Lukács quotes Lenin in order to establish his theory on realism: “Marxism attained its world-historical importance as the ideology of the revolutionary proletariat by virtue of its refusal to reject the most valuable achievements of the bourgeois era. Instead, it appropriated and assimilated all that was valuable in a tradition of human thought and human culture stretching back over 2000 years” (55). This quote from Lenin reinforces Lukács’ literary realism, taking realistic approaches to the whole of society in context with its historical position. 176 when (with the possible exception of Adorno) they clearly better fit within the realm of
Marxism-Leninism. To revive Leftism in Shakespeare, it is imperative that these theorists receive recognition for the Marxist-Leninist sensibilities. I argue that in order to truly grasp and correctly incorporate their theories into Shakespeare studies, we must get to the core of their political sentiments, which lie in the roots of Marxism-Leninism, similar to the class politics incorporated into the American proletarian movement.
Interrogating the American Communist Party’s relationship with Shakespeare will help us recover a neglected literary history and help us reconstruct a politically committed literary theory by providing a revived history of political Marxism in the West.
I ultimately believe that literary criticism is a good starting point for Leftist approaches to Shakespeare. It provides us with a sphere in which we can politicize literature. And because Shakespeare maintains his global iconic status, he is a valuable resource to use when integrating Marxism-Leninism into literary theory. Let us recover this Leftist approach to Shakespeare—and use it as a step toward renewed, progressive political practices. As the emerging media in the 1920s and 1930s provided useful ways to disseminate messages to the public, today’s new media can be utilized in a similar fashion. New Shakespeare trends that include conversations about new cultural media do not always contemplate crucial political socioeconomic implications. Shakespeare appears on screen, on YouTube, in pornography, and current performances even utilize
Facebook and Twitter to enhance the interactive experience for the audience.
Additionally, Alternative Shapespeares 3 recognizes major advances in performance and media studies in which Shakespeare is perceived as an interdisciplinary
177 subject for a multimedia audience.24 A mildly radical analysis might explain these alternative forms as examples of Shakespeare being wrested from high culture and placed into the hands of the people. But I ask: what is the value in these approaches and whom does it really benefit? I am a proponent of public access, and these approaches certainly provide the opportunity to spread Shakespeare to a much larger population. They even offer the option to bring digital media into the classroom, protecting against the exclusion of Shakespeare and allowing a scholarly vanguard to address political implications.
However, if these new Shakespeares are not added to political dialogue with history, culture, and economics, they serve as mere entertainment in Adorno and Horkheimer’s
“culture industry” or reflect Kracauer’s “mass ornament,” distracting the masses from considering the socio-economic structure and material production.25
A historical component needs to be applied to create effective political interventions into these alternative Shakespeares. According to Richard Halpern, we cannot erase the past, so it becomes a historical allegory, part of the present because the representation of the past becomes part of the present (and of our interpretation of the present). The past comes to signify a separate, even if anachronistic, meaning.26 Douglas
Lanier similarly argues that anachronism with regard to theatre productions’ self- conscious dialogues between Shakespeare and contemporaneity is insistent on the temporal and cultural gaps they are negotiating. These theories communicate relevance between politico-literary cultures of the past and present: the American Communist
24 See Diana E. Henderson, Alternative Shakespeares 3 (London: Routledge, 2008). 25 See Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007) and Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 26 See Richard Halpern, Shakespeare among the Moderns (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). The introduction to the book provides a full delineation of historical allegory. 178
Party’s treatment of Shakespeare, Marxist theorists’ relationship with Shakespeare, and current political approaches to Shakespeare studies. By including historical and economic narratives, these “alternative” Shakespeares can be a useful site to bring
Marxism-Leninism into scholarly discussion and into the classroom.
The exposure of Shakespeare as a multimedia and interdisciplinary asset has great potential to bring a true Leftist politic into the alternative Shakespeare discussion. These alternative Shakespeares have resulted in the explosion of new scholarship on the role of media in pop culture. Accordingly, Marxist-Leninists Benjamin and Brecht should be added to the conversation. In Benjamin’s articles “Author as Producer” and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he argues that content revolutionizes with revolutionizing media. Hence, Benjamin’s views of photography and film are relevant to the production of new media. Benjamin believes that mass production of photography is a good thing because it gives access to more people; but his argument has been perverted to support capitalist production by arguing that the “aura” removed from mass-produced art is a bad thing. And scholars sometimes fail to acknowledge
Benjamin’s affiliation with the Communist Party and his partisan tactics. Katherine
Rowe’s essay on medium-specificity is particularly compelling in its acknowledgment of new media and new audiences, and it can work in accordance with Benjamin. More media means a larger audience, which means a greater population to disseminate politics to. Rowe allows for us to recall Benjamin to integrate political discourse into new media and for new audiences.
179
A Response to Critics
I am aware that I may be criticized for my advocacy of a Marxist-Leninist intervention into Shakespeare studies. First, I expect backlash from classic conservationists such as the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). ACTA has lamented the loss of “Shakespeare for Shakespeare’s sake” in higher education for nearly 20 years. Members cringe at the idea of literature turning into an interdisciplinary phenomenon.27 The fact is that literature is inherently interdisciplinary in that it presupposes performativity, mediation, and disciplinary plasticity. In defense of
Shakespeare becoming “dumbed down” by his vanishing act or inclusion in other disciplines, ACTA argues, “Shakespeare has shaped our language and our culture. His works provide a common frame of reference that helps unite us into a single community of discourse.”28
ACTA is not wrong. Shakespeare has shaped our language and culture. This is what makes him interdisciplinary by nature and what has molded him into a model for language and culture. I am precisely interested in this description of Shakespeare’s cultural authority and his impact on language and culture in political discourse. The
American Left has shaped our language and culture as well, and Shakespeare played a role in the development of Leftist theory and literature. Therefore, “Leftist
Shakespeares” provides us with an entry point into evaluating past language and culture
27 See National Alumni Forum, What English Majors are Really Studying: A Report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (Washington, D.C.: American Council of Trustees and Alumni, December 1996) and American Council of Trustees and Alumni, The Vanishing Shakespeare: A Report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (Washington, D.C.: American Council of Trustees and Alumni, April 2007). ACTA criticizes the loss of Shakespeare in higher education, noting universities that have cut Shakespeare from their general education requirements and even from their core classes for English majors. They show concern for literature becoming interdisciplinary—arguing against its incorporation into sociology, political, and popular culture studies. 28 National Alumni Forum, What English Majors 10. 180 that has not received adequate attention. It also gives us the opportunity to assess politically committed rhetoric.
More liberal critics, such as gender and race scholars, may also criticize me for taking a reductive approach to class or argue that Marxism-Leninism is in itself reductive.
I would like us to rethink this. Eagleton claims, “Those who object to Leninism because it is blind to the contingent, aleatory nature of history should not be too implacably deterministic in their view of such matters.”29 While Marxism-Leninism seeks to create a front that contests all forms of discrimination, I think economic social class is the best starting point to tackle gender and race problems. With that said, I concede that I have not addressed race, sex, and religion as much as I would have liked. In Chapter 3, I touched on the Jewish population in the proletarian movement; however, there is much more to be done. Yiddish productions of Shakespeare (most notably King Lear) were performed in the 1930s and warrant further attention. Additionally, numerous African
American writers contributed to the proletarian movement and created literature that contains appropriations of Shakespeare. Langston Hughes’ Shakespeare in Harlem should be examined with regard to its relationship to the American proletarian movement. Because my project is an endorsement of a re-politicized Marxist discourse, I have chosen to privilege class.
Additionally, while honing in on the major figures in the American Leftist movement, I understand that I have yet to dig into deeper aspects of proletarian culture.
There is more to Shakespeare and the American left than allusions, appropriations, and adaptations. As early as 1935, Donald Morrow wrote an entire book dedicated to a historical analysis of Shakespeare’s position in the social climate of the English
29 Eagleton, “Lenin” 48. 181
Renaissance. Morrow’s project was a bit ambitious arguing that Shakespeare’s writings
“were altogether on the side of the commercial men” and that every Shakespeare text is
“a blow against feudal aspirations,” but every analysis Morrow makes pertains to the relationship between text and historical social conflict.30 The sociological approach to
Shakespeare is one that has been used frequently during the past few decades. A sociological method formed from within a legitimate political movement has authority that current political approaches may not have.
Despite Morrow’s limited scope, American Communist Party member Granville
Hicks discussed the positive aspects of Morrow’s work. In introduction to Where
Shakespeare Stood, Granville shows respect for Morrow’s unpretentious language. He states, “The dilettantism and academicism of bourgeois critics are almost as fatal to the growth and preservation of culture as the callousness and greedy stupidity of their capitalist masters.”31 Morrow’s contribution to Shakespeare studies, according to Hicks, is a fruitful Leftist evaluation in that it contains modest language characteristic of Hicks’ vision of proletarian literary criticism.
What is most striking about Hicks’ introduction is that he says, “Most critics seem unaware that the stirring events of Queen Elizabeth’s reign constituted a crucial episode in the conflict between capitalism and feudalism,” and “[i]f the literature of the past is to be kept alive so that the workers, when they are freed from the tyranny of the exploiters, can enjoy it, the responsibility lies with the Marxism critics.”32 This statement is similar to the “unfinished business” that Sinfield seeks to complete. Therefore, Leftists such as
30 Donald Morrow, Where Shakespeare Stood: His Part in the Crucial Struggles of His Day (Milwaukee: The Casanova Press, 1935) 15. 31 Granville Hicks, “Introduction,” Where Shakespeare Stood: His Part in the Crucial Struggles of His Day, Donald Morrow (Milwaukee: The Casanova Press, 1935) 3. 32 Ibid 1, 3. 182
Hicks could play an important role in revitalizing materialist approaches to Shakespeare, as well as strictly political approaches. The roots of cultural materialism may reside in
Marxism, but they evolve through the influence of Marxist-Leninists like Hicks.
Occupy Shakespeare
Many current theories and inquiries have links to Marxism-Leninism. We can gather many central aspects of Marxist-Leninist thought that are applicable to today’s political movements. First, Marxism-Leninism implies that a revolutionary movement must begin with the masses; some sort of backlash against the dominant rule precedes an organized front. The impact of the movement will be followed by theoretical contemplation, which ought to result in an organized front that represents the oppressed classes. If we look at recent trends in social movements, we can conclude that Lenin is pretty accurate with this formula: action, impact, theory, organization, revolution. For example, let us take a look at worker strikes and anarchist movements such as the Occupy movement.
Occupy was a spontaneous movement; however, the lack of organization to form a cohesive front restricted long-term success. The protesters got as far as what I conclude to be a “demonstration consciousness,” but the movement dissipated fairly quickly. The impact, however, has not. Occupy continues to be heavily theorized in books and at conferences, and it is the intellectuals, not the masses, who further pursue the theoretical implications and impacts of the Occupy movements.33 The intellectuals are taking efforts
33 A few examples of scholars theorizing the Occupy movements include: W.J.T. Mitchell, Bernard E. Harcourt, and Michael Taussig, Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Noam Chomsky, Occupy: Reflections on Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2012); Noam Chomsky, Making the Future: Occupations, Interventions, Empire and 183 to organize thoughts. For a movement of this magnitude to further materialize, intellectuals have taken the responsibility to lead.
The Occupy movements inspired a self-designed course that I recently taught called “Occupy Shakespeare: Performance, Politics, and the Popular.” Although I did not press the issue of Marxism-Leninism, I did ask students to engage in political theory and political inquiries. In the course, I asked students to consider current political movements and Shakespeare’s cultural authority. The students were encouraged to reflect on the questions “Who is Shakespeare?” versus “What is Shakespeare?” Shakespeare is not just a playwright, but also a historical and global phenomenon. The Bard’s cultural authority traverses temporality, national barriers, medium-specificity, and ideological confines.
In my course, students encountered Shakespeare in disparate contexts. We read
Shakespeare’s play-texts in their historical context and examined themes of occupying space, rank, gender, race, and wealth. But we also examined Shakespeare’s larger cultural impacts by investigating the ways he has been transhistorically and transnationally occupied—appropriated, adapted, employed, performed—for distinct artistic, social, and political purposes. This required students to identify the relationship between written text and performance in multiple forms of media and to analyze the social function(s) of Shakespeare within various cultural realms. This is one way that
Shakespeare may be used to approach current day politics.
I hope “Leftist Shakespeares” will inspire other scholars to take efforts to return
Marx to his political form by engaging in Marxist-Leninist theory. This means that scholars need to focus not only on class economics, but also class politics and ideologies.
Resistance (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2012); Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012); and Richard D. Wolff and David Barsamian, Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2012). 184
Scholars that use theoretical discourses that take a stand for the representation of underrepresented groups will only become stronger by incorporating class-specific approaches to literature. Instead of just focusing on the material, we also need to focus on the ideological—more specifically, particular ideologies that embody partisan positions. Then, truth and partisanship may be applied to political reconstruction—and class consciousness put into practice to challenge the dominant ideologies.
185
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