Chevron and Shakespeare (4/4/20)

On my self-isolating walk today in the Charlottesville neighborhood (beautiful), I listened to a podcast interview of Emma Smith, the author of This is Shakepeare.  The book is here; and importantly, the interview is Emma Smith on "This Is Shakespeare" or “That’s Not My Meaning” (Folger Shakespeare Library Podcast), here (with audio and transcript).  (I highly recommend the Folger site and its podcasts.)

The discussion in this podcast was evocative of of the Chevron phenomenon in administrative law that scholars obsess about and, although not a scholar, I have written much about.  Remember that, in summary, Chevron teaches that, when the text being interpreted is not clear (OK, if its clear, maybe there is no interpretation but I think determining that a text is clear requires interpretation), then the reader (court in the case of Chevron) must apply one of the reasonable interpretations (one or more reasonable interpretations are required to make the text not clear).  Chevron is often described as a method to fill in the "gaps" of ambiguity of statutory text.

What’s that got to do with Shakespeare?

Emma Smith tells us that Shakespeare is notoriously unclear, or ambiguous, often has more than one reasonable interpretation, and that choosing among those reasonable interpretations allows us in ongoing generations to view Shakespeare creatively and relevant to our time. Here are excerpts (Barbara Bogaev is the interviewer):

BARBARA BOGAEV: Emma, your thesis that Shakespeare's broad appeal across cultures and centuries hangs on a concept with a wonderful, made up word—maybe not so made up—but you call it, "gap-i-ness". What is "gap-i-ness?" 

EMMA SMITH: Well, “gappiness” is just all this breathing space that there is in Shakespeare: all the things that we don't know, the space there is for our creativity. So, I'm trying to say these plays are really incomplete, and the thing that they need to complete them is us and our sort of inventiveness, our world, our experience. So those gaps are not a negative. In fact, they're a really enabling positive. 

* * * * 

Just on the most basic level we don't know what characters look like. We very rarely know how old characters are. There's lots of elements of plot that we are not fully given. Sometimes things are described to us, but they're not shown, so there's a question mark about how they should be interpreted. Lots of actions in Shakespeare's plays are not scripted or there aren't stage directions telling us. 

And there are also some sort of more historical gaps that I think inform the way Shakespeare writes; a gap between an older form of understanding the world and some new things that are coming in, and that sense of being astride two world views. That's particular to perhaps the end of the 16th century, but it's actually been a situation that we've often felt we're in and that is a code in later ages, too. 

BOGAEV: Well, you ran through some categories of gaps. Can you give us some specific gaps in specific plays? 

SMITH: Sure. So, one of the examples of a thing that we don't see and so we don't know how to interpret it, comes right at the beginning of Julius Caesar. Offstage we can hear a crowd cheering. They're cheering because Julius Caesar has been offered the crown and we hear that he's rejected it. The whole plays turns on whether Caesar really means to reject the crown, or whether he has ambitions to be a king. But because we don't ever see that, we can't make up our minds of the whole question of what Caesar's ambitions might be; whether it's explicable or even justifiable for the conspirators to assassinate him. That gap at the beginning of the play structures the whole thing. 

* * * * 

[Emma Smith next reads from the first chapter of the book on Taming of the Shrew]: 

“The Taming of the Shrew centers on the courtships of the two daughters of the Paduan merchant Baptista: Katherine and Bianca. The elder, Katherine, is apparently the shrew of the title, a woman who, depending on how you look at it, is feisty and independent, lonely and misunderstood, or strident and anti-social. Her father—who, depending on how you look at it, is either a worried widower or a patriarchal tyrant—has decreed that Bianca—who, depending on how you look at it, is either beautiful, gentle and agreeable, or exactly the kind of annoyingly insipid, simpering arm candy who you, like her sister, would want to slap—cannot marry until her older sister gets hitched. The stage is set for the entrance of Petruchio who, depending on how you look at it, is a quirky and unorthodox guy who knows his own mind and wants a woman who knows hers, or a psychopathic bounty hunter with sadistic and misogynistic tendencies. 

“So, Katherine and Petruchio are paired off against Katherine's will, in a relationship which, depending on how you look at it, is crackling with mutual sexual tension along with a touch of shared S&M domination fantasy, or is cynical, loveless and enforced by a violently patriarchal society. He treats her in a way which...” 

And so forth, but I think the key point is that the Chevron interpretive strategy, at least as applied, opens up rather than closes up interpretation as we make the text relevant today.  I am reminded of my favorite Hebrew Bible scholar’s observation that we cannot know what interpretation the original author meant; rather we must interpret the text and make it relevant to ourselves, opening up the zone of ambiguity to our present circumstance.  Otherwise, we just have a bunch of old text written in Biblical Hebrew directed to readers or, usually, hearers thousand of years ago in a culture we can’t understand.  (This view obviously is not much compatible with notions of originalism (in any of its iterations) or plain meaning of text.)

At any rate, I encourage readers interested in the subject to listen to the podcast and, if wanting to pursue further, read the book.  The parallels are striking.