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Instructions for close reading (ENG 210: Shakespeare)Hi there! So-called “close reading” is THE basic skill used in literary analysis. If you take more advanced literature courses, you will be taught a more advanced toolkit including historical research methods and philosophical theories of literary interpretation; however, even these advanced tools utilize and build upon close reading. In other words, no matter what direction your study of literature may take, you will?always?need to be a good close reader and you will return to that skill again and again. Moreover, insofar as close reading concerns the analysis of texts, it is applicable to non-literary texts as well, such as historical documents, theological or philosophical treatises, scientific articles, journalism, films, advertisements, political speech, and so on. Thus, by becoming a good close reader, you will massively increase your critical thinking ability as you study other subjects or even as you just live your life amid many diverse texts.So what exactly is close reading? The phrase “close reading” emerged from a school of thought called “New Criticism” at American universities in the early 20th century, and it became a mainstay of American high school and college literature courses mid-century. New Criticism, in turn, owed a lot to a type of 19th-century French school exercise called the “explication de texte.” I won’t bore you with the critical taxonomies used by New Criticism (the “pathetic fallacy” and “seven types of ambiguity” and all that), because I don’t think these are essential. What’s essential is that you grasp the?spirit?of close reading.The spirit of close reading is exactly that: reading closely. For most of us, the normal, natural way to read a work of literature is quickly. We read for comprehension or for plot development, and we rapidly move on. Yet by reading this way we miss countless details. When Shakespeare wrote any given passage, he had to think about his every choice of word: what each word sounded like, how it contributed to rhetorical effects impacting the audience’s response, how it affected character development, how it contributed to a play’s thematic structure, how it developed or subverted a play’s genre, how it might be performed by an actor in dramatic context, and on and on. Furthermore, the best literary art, including Shakespeare’s, presents qualities that the author probably didn’t consciously intend–even that weren’t thinkable in his or her place and time. Great art is endlessly reinterpretable and renews itself with every fresh interpretation. The goal of close reading, then, is to?notice as much as you can about any given passage of text.I’ll give an example. Consider the speech delivered by Helena at the end of Act 1, Scene 1 of?A Midsummer Night’s Dream?(lines 226-251). Here is the speech:How happy some o'er other some can be! 226Through Athens I am thought as fair as she.But what of that? Demetrius thinks not so;He will not know what all but he do know.And as he errs, doting on Hermia's eyes, 230So I, admiring of his qualities.Things base and vile, holding no quantity,Love can transpose to form and dignity.Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind. 235Nor hath Love's mind of any judgment taste:Wings, and no eyes, figure unheedy haste.And therefore is Love said to be a child,Because in choice he is so oft beguiled.As waggish boys in game themselves forswear, 240So the boy Love is perjured everywhere.For ere Demetrius looked on Hermia's eyne,He hailed down oaths that he was only mine;And when this hail some heat from Hermia felt,So he dissolved, and show'rs of oaths did melt. 245I will go tell him of fair Hermia's flight.Then to the wood will he tomorrow nightPursue her; and for this intelligenceIf I have thanks, it is a dear expense.But herein mean I to enrich my pain, 250to have his sight hither and back again.If you’re just reading?Midsummer?quickly for basic comprehension and plot, then this speech doesn’t have much to offer. For most of it, Helena is just going on about how badly in love she is with Demetrius, and we knew this already. From a plot standpoint, the only new piece of information in this speech is line 246, “I will go tell him of fair Hermia’s flight”: Helena is going to betray Hermia and Lysander’s confidence by telling Demetrius of their secret plan to elope. The rest of the speech just seems like baroque flourish and filler.If you read the speech?closely, however, here are some things you might notice:–For starters, this entire speech is written in rhymed couplets. (That is, every two lines rhyme with each other, a technique also known as “heroic couplets.”) The rest of 1.1 is not. (The rest of 1.1 is written in blank verse, i.e. unrhymed verse.) In general, the more structured and artificial verse is, the more formal it sounds. Thus, giving this speech a rhyme scheme adds a hint of extra formality to it, making it an appropriate?final?speech intended to bring closure to 1.1. You will notice that Shakespeare often uses rhymed couplets to achieve a sense of finality at the end of scenes, acts, plays, and individual poems. Each of Shakespeare’s sonnets, for example, ends with a rhymed couplet.–This speech contains a lot of internal repetition. Helena repeats words (“some…some” [226]; “Love” [passim.]; “he…he” [229]), homophones (“eyes…I” [230-31]), and consonant sounds (“hail…heat” [244]; “fair…flight” [246]). All this repetition adds to the highly structured, hence relatively formal and final-sounding, composition of this speech. Additionally, however, Helena’s repetitions add subtle emphasis to the thoughts most important to her at this point in the play, namely,?love,?Demetrius, and?how she measures up against Hermia.–Despite Helena’s extreme insecurity, in lines 227-29 (“Through Athens I am thought as fair as she/But what of that? Demetrius thinks not so;/He will not know what all but he do know”) she actually seems quite confident and secure in the knowledge that she is equally beautiful and equally desirable as Hermia. Perhaps this moment of self-esteem shows us that, buried beneath all of Helena’s immaturity and dysfunction, there is a mature, well-adjusted woman who just needs to be liberated. In other words, I read these lines as foreshadowing Helena’s transformation into a mature character later in the play.–The same lines, 227-29, also recall Lysander’s protest, a little earlier in 1.1, that he is equally desirable a husband as Demetrius: “I am, my lord, as well derived as he,/As well possessed; My love is more than his; My fortunes every way as fairly ranked/(If not with vantage) as Demetrius’ (1.1.99-102). The play seems to go out of its way to tell us that both the two young men and the two young ladies are equal, similar. If we add to this the observation that none of the four young lovers shows any unique character trait, personal history, or speaking style that would distinguish him or her from his or her counterpart, then we may say that?Midsummer?fosters a tension between the?vehemence?of love on the one hand and the?serendipity?of love on the other. That is to say, when someone falls in love, he or she perceives the object of his or her love to be absolutely unique, superlative, and irreplaceable: to Helena, Demetrius seems incomparably attractive and special, just as Lysander seems that way to Hermia. Yet to the outside observer, the same object of attraction can seem really ordinary and arbitrarily chosen. (Your best friend’s boyfriend seems?not that different?from her previous boyfriends or from any of the other guys you know.) The outside observer of?Midsummer‘s four young lovers sees two roughly equivalent, rather boring young women and two roughly equivalent, rather boring young men. Put differently,?Midsummer?satirizes love by exaggerating love’s arbitrariness and fortuitousness. It’s an edgy move for Shakespeare to make, since?Midsummer?was probably commissioned as entertainment at an aristocratic wedding. Would you want the play performed at your wedding to be all about how love is random and arbitrary?–In lines 230-31, when Helena says “as he errs…so I,” she displays confidence in a normative scenario of love: a gentleman?ought?to remain true to the woman he originally loved, while a lady?ought?to “admire…qualities” (231) in a gentleman that actually are admirable. Helena is aware that both she and Demetrius “err” from this norm–Demetrius by forsaking Helena for Hermia, and Helena by admiring Demetrius, who has shown himself unworthy of her admiration. In order for Helena and Demetrius to mature as comic protagonists, in order for them to earn the happy ending the comedy will give them, their behavior will need to be brought into alignment with this norm. Demetrius will have to go back to loving Helena, and Helena’s admiration for Demetrius will have to be deserved. In sum, even though Helena may be a train wreck in?Midsummer?1.1, she nonetheless has this very confident, effortless, correct certainty of what needs to happen in love. I would point out that Hermia also possesses this certainty: already in 1.1 she is absolutely certain that she and Lysander are destined to be together and is willing to risk her life to prove it. In?Midsummer, as in other Shakespearean comedies, it’s usually the women who know how to love from the outset, while the men need to learn.–In lines 232-23 (“Things base and vile, holding no quantity,/Love can transpose to form and dignity”), Helena counters the play’s satirical attitude towards love by giving us a reason to think of love as more than just a random, arbitrary phenomenon: love, in a truly magical, exalted way,?transforms?(“transposes”) ordinary, even ugly or worthless people (“Things base and vile, holding no quantity”) into luminous objects of affection (“form and dignity”). Helena here is describing a process that the early 19th-century French novelist Stendhal, in his treatise?De l’amour?(On Love), would call “crystalization.” When you meet your future love interest, he or she might seem completely ordinary, maybe even below average in looks and talent, and yet, as you fall in love with him or her, beauty and intelligence and mystery all “crystalize” around him or her. In extreme cases, someone, in your regard, can go from totally forgettable to?the most amazing person you’ve ever met?overnight! Helena is describing this same process in a Renaissance idiom. So maybe love isn’t so ridiculous after all–it has a magical power to transform us all into beautiful, ideal versions of ourselves.–Also in line 223, the word “transpose” resonates with “translate,” a word Helena uses when speaking to Hermia a little earlier in 1.1: “Were the world mine, Demetrius being bated,/The rest I’ll give to be to you translated” (1.1.190-91). Both “transpose” and “translate” in context mean “transform”: just as Helena talks about how love can transform (“transpose”) the ordinary into the beautiful, in the earlier scene she says she wants to be transformed (“translated”) into Hermia, because then Demetrius would love her. In this way?Midsummer?invites us to compare and contrast these different types of transformation. In my opinion,?transformation?(or?metamorphosis, to use a more period-appropriate word) is the master theme of?Midsummer, the play’s organizing concept. As we shall see in later acts,?Midsummer?is bursting with metamorphoses: people being substituted for other people, people transforming into animals, real people transforming into fictional people, fairies transforming into people and animals, objects transforming into other objects, and more.–In lines 234-41, Helena creates a?blazon?of Cupid, the Greco-Roman god of erotic desire. (Venus, Cupid’s mother, is the goddess of erotic possession, i.e. sex: this distinction is usually upheld in Renaissance poetry.) A literary blazon describes the visual, physical attributes of a subject, in this case Cupid. Helena follows Renaissance poetic convention in calling Cupid “Love,” with a capital “L.” Love is, according to Helena, “winged” (235), “blind” (i.e. blindfolded) (235), and “a child” (238). This closely adheres to depictions of Cupid in early modern visual art, such as this drawing by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo:–At the same time, the various statements that make up Helena’s blazon follow a definite logic: she reasons?from?love’s experiential qualities?to?the physical qualities of its personification. Because love is subjective, lacking the objectivity of vision (“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind” [234]), therefore Love must be blindfolded (“therefore is winged Cupid painted blind” [235]). Because love comes out of nowhere and acts fast, therefore Love must be able to fly (“Wings, and no eyes, figure unheedy haste” [237]). Because love often urges bad choices, as though it lacked mature reason and experience, therefore Love must be a child (“And therefore is Love said to be a child,/Because in choice he is so oft beguiled” [239]). Because love can be fickle–people like Demetrius fall in and out of love quickly–Love is that much more like a capricious child (“As waggish boys in game themselves forswear,/So the boy love is perjured everywhere” [240-41]). I would note that this logic is also used throughout Plato’s?Symposium, a treatise in which various speakers debate the qualities of love. By echoing the logic of the?Symposium, Helena signals that Plato is going to be a major reference in?Midsummer‘s treatment of love.–Although it follows a consistent logic, Helena’s blazon of Cupid also seems somewhat improvised and stream-of-consciousness. For example, after Helena says, “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,/And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind” (234-35), she seems attracted to the word “mind” and allows this to inspire her next thought: “Nor hath Love’s?mind?of any judgment taste” (236). She pauses again before formulating her next thought, again inspired by the preceding line: “Wings, and no eyes, figure unheedly haste” (237). Lots of speeches in Shakespeare’s plays from the mid-to-late 1590s (Midsummer?was written in 1595) similarly experiment with stream-of-consciousness writing. Shakespeare scholars often call this effort of the mid-to-late 1590s Shakespeare’s “project of consciousness” or “project of interiority,” since Shakespeare seems to be developing a distinctive way of representing the natural movement of thought. This project culminates in?Hamlet?(written ca. 1600), a play totally dominated by the interior thoughts of its main character.–In lines 243-45, Helena uses meteorological imagery: “hailed…hail” (243-44), “show’rs of oaths did melt” (245). Similar imagery is used elsewhere in?Midsummer, such as by Oberon and Titania during their confrontation in 2.1. This could be studied further. (“Meterological imagery in?A Midsummer Night’s Dream” might even be a viable paper topic, though you never know until you actually try to write the paper.)–In line 244, when Helena says, “And when this hail some heat from Hermia felt,” she is accusing Hermia of having led Demetrius on, thereby tempting him to abandon Helena. In other words, Helena is insinuating that Hermia stole her own best friend’s boyfriend, a pretty lousy thing to do. We have no way of knowing whether this insinuation is accurate, but even so, the?question?of its accuracy hugely impacts our interpretation of Hermia’s character. If Hermia?did?steal Demetrius from Helena (only to dump him for Lysander), then perhaps she isn’t the moral lodestar she appears to be in 1.1…or perhaps her true love for Lysander transformed her character for the better before the action of the play began. If Hermia?didn’t?steal Demetrius from Helena, then maybe Demetrius misrepresented Hermia’s conduct toward him, or maybe Helena is just being paranoid. Although these possibilities can’t be assessed on the basis of (nonexistent) textual evidence, they can be explored in performance. It’s something to watch for when you watch any stage or film production of?Midsummer.–Finally, in lines 246-251, Helena’s rationale explaining why she is going to betray Hermia and Lysander’s secret is astoundingly pathetic and desperate. Since she will be enabling Demetrius to snatch back his bride, he will, presumably, have to thank her for the tip, and Helena is so starved for any positive feedback from Demetrius that she will ruin her friends’ happiness just to get this small gratification (“for this intelligence/If I have thanks, it is a dear expense” [248-49]). Helena is also starved for Demetrius’ physical presence, and tipping him off about the elopement will give her an opportunity not only to visit him but to follow him into the forest in pursuit of Hermia, so this is another reason why she’s going to do it (“But herein mean I to enrich my pain,/To have his sight thither and back again” [250-51]). Although Helena’s love for Demetrius is true to the extent that it is constant, at this early stage of the play it falls short of being full-fledged?true love. Whenever Shakespeare portrays a really ideal romantic love, such as Hermia’s love for Lysander, or Romeo and Juliet’s love for each other, he tends to contrast this love with other, inferior forms of love in the same play. One of those inferior forms is the “love” demanded by an arranged marriage: Egeus in?Midsummer?1.1 thinks he can order Hermia to love Demetrius, but love doesn’t work this way; this is not true love. The other inferior form of love frequently dramatized by Shakespeare is what he calls “dotage.” Dotage is what we might call unrequited infatuation: it’s an abject, humiliating, painful and unrewarding obsession with someone who has refused to love you back. Dotage strips the self of dignity; at the same time, since there’s no real relationship with the person who rebuffs you, dotage is also self-focused and self-indulgent, whereas true love is other-focused and mutual. Earlier in?Midsummer?1.1, Lysander informs us that Helena “dotes,/Devoutly dotes, dotes in idolatry,/Upon” Demetrius (1.1.109), and right before Helena’s speech that we’re reading Lysander reminds us: “Helena, adieu./As you on him, Demetrius dote on you” (1.1.224-25). So now that we’ve been told multiple times that Helena’s love for Demetrius is dotage, in this final part of her big speech she shows us what this means: it means she’s willing to sacrifice her conscience, her friends, and her dignity for a few short moments of low-quality interaction with Demetrius. Helena will need to grow out of this sort of behavior in order to earn her happy ending.Phew! That’s all I notice about this passage right now. (The amazing thing about reading great art closely, though, is that you can return to the same passage again and again and still find new things.) When you perform your own close readings for this course, try to do what I just did: choose a speech from the assigned reading (refer to the syllabus for the weekly schedule of reading assignments), and try to notice as much about it as you can. Read it closely, line by line, thought by thought, word by word. Notice if the verse has any noteworthy qualities, such as a rhyme scheme or meter different from the surrounding speeches. (Notice, too, if the speech is written in prose, not verse: Shakespeare often has lower-class characters speak in prose because they’re not classy enough to speak in verse.) Notice what the speech’s imagery is, and its dominant vocabulary. Notice the?sounds?of words. (Sound can be significant:?Macbeth, for instance, is composed mostly of English words of Germanic rather than French or Latin origin, since the play is supposed to take place before the Norman invasion of 1066, when Anglo-Saxon English was flooded with new French and Latin words. The guttural, often monosyllabic sounds of?Macbeth‘s Germanic idiom contribute greatly to that play’s harsh, primitive atmosphere.) Notice how your chosen speech affects character portrayal or character development within its play. Notice how your chosen speech introduces or develops themes within its play. Make as many connections as you can to other parts of the play, and, if you wish, to other Shakespeare plays. Read the footnotes attached to the speech: if they tell you anything about the speech’s historical context, classical or Biblical references, or any other sort of extra-textual information, try to speculate what difference this information makes. In sum,?notice as much as you can.Obviously, close reading Shakespeare gets easier the more you practice and the more you know about a play, about Shakespeare, about Renaissance English poetry and culture, etc. But even without having any outside knowledge whatsoever, you can notice a lot simply by being attentive to Shakespeare’s language! It’s harder than it looks. (Or rather, it’s like cooking Italian food: easy to do, but very, very hard to do well.) Don’t be discouraged if, at first, you struggle and don’t have much to say. I certainly don’t expect your close readings to be as long as my example above. Just do your best.?Your best will be enough!I’ll conclude by stating the obvious: what’s different and more challenging about college-level literary study relative to high-school literary study is that, in college, comprehension is the beginning, not the end, of the work to be done. If your high school was anything like mine, comprehending what was going on in Shakespeare plays despite the difficult language was basically an end in itself. We were tested on plot summary and on what Shakespearean words meant, and that was that. In college, by contrast, it’s more or less taken for granted that you can figure out how to understand Shakespeare’s language. (If you’re struggling with this, here are a few pointers: read the footnotes; look up unfamiliar words in a dictionary, preferably the?Oxford English Dictionary, which you can access online via Le Moyne’s library website; try reading difficult text out loud; watch the film first so that you’re more familiar with the play before you encounter the language; don’t get too bogged down in small details, but instead read for a general understanding and then go back for details as needed; budget enough time to read slowly; don’t be shy about asking me questions.) With basic understanding under your belt, you’re?then?ready to start thinking about everything that actually makes a Shakespeare play interesting: its artistic features, its implicit philosophy, its value as a cultural and historical artifact, its commentary on human nature, and so on. Close reading, the simple skill of reading attentively, is like the scaffolding that you build to support these higher-level subjects of inquiry. Try it, and try to enjoy it! ................
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