The mystery of things : a Girardian reading of Shakespearean tragedy

Abstract

Amongst the many recent and conflicting approaches to Shakespeare's works which one critic has aptly characterized as the 'balkanization' of Shakespearean studies, the still though hardly small voice of Rene Girard and his approach to Shakespeare's works have largely and unfairly gone unnoticed. His own most extensive exploration of the plays, contained in the book A Theatre of Envy, has not been taken up and elaborated in mainstream Shakespearean scholarship and remains strangely neglected if not studiously ignored by most critics. Indeed Girard's self-styled 'neo-mimetic' approach to Shakespeare's texts, barring his own book, still remains a largely 'undiscovered country' which few have ventured into, much less returned from to celebrate or complain. There have been some isolated cases of critics like Harry Berger Jr., James Calderwood and Naomi Conn Liebler who have utilized Girardian insights in their meta-theatrical speculations about Shakespearean drama and their interpretation of individual plays, yet no one has so far attempted a rigorous and systematic application of the Girardian theoretical model to the plays, in particular to the major tragedies. Girard himself was self-confessedly selective in his choice of the plays he treated, claiming it was largely dictated by illustrative, utilitarian and logistic reasons: Another problem was choosing the plays and specific scenes that would illustrate my discussion. This was an embarrass de richesse. I selected not the richest texts necessarily, but the most straightforward for my purpose. As a rule they are the first dramatization of whichever mimetic configuration they illustrate. This mode of selection explains why the plays about which I say little or nothing are often located at the end of the period in which the author cultivated the particular genre to which they belong ...

In effect, except for a quite extensive treatment of Julius Caesar, a single chapter on Hamlet and a few scattered pages on some of the other tragedies, most of the tragedies are almost totally ignored. This is what inspired and gave impetus to the idea behind this thesis, which attempts to fill this lacuna in recent criticism by attempting to apply systematically and rigorously Girard's neo-mimetic approach to Shakespearean tragedy, focusing in particular on the classical four major ones: King Lear, Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth. Why tragedy and why these four? Aside from the more prosaic reason of limitations of length imposed by a doctoral thesis, there 1s their obvious 'canonical' status as being perhaps Shakespeare's supreme achievements in the genre conferred on them not just by Bradley but by most critics. Another strategically convenient explanation is that, with the exception of the single chapter on Hamlet, Girard himself has commented too briefly or not at all on the other three tragedies; they belong to the middle or_ 'the end of the period in which the author cultivated the particular genre' of tragedy that he programmatically underplayed. A more critically cogent reason is that the two major pillars of Girardian theory, namely mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism, together with the central role they play in the genesis and dynamics of human culture, arguably lend themselves more readily to the tragic genre, with its intense focus on the exploration of interpersonal and social conflicts and their devastating consequences that are often dramatically 'resolved' through some violent form of explicit or implicit victimage. A further reason is that in these later 'tragedies of consciousness' the arena of inwardness and subjectivity, starting with Hamlet, is infinitely richer and more complex and yields greater scope to the subtle exploration of mimetic desire and its conflictual aftermaths, within and around the hero, than in the earlier tragedies.