Shakespeare as Executioner
1300N2
By C. B. COX
SHAKESPEARE as Punch and Judy showman, homosexual and hangman—it's not surpris- ing that Wyndham Lewis's The Lion and the Fox, first published in 1927, has not commended itself to scholars. Shakespeare becomes a per- sona for Lewis himself, like the artist-hero in his novel Tan of 1918,- demonstrating how the genius (Lewis himself) separates himself from the herd. Add to this that only four years later Lewis's anti-democratic principles resulted in a sympathetic portrait of Hitler, and it might seem that his polemical works of this period are best forgotten. Lewis saw through Mussolini ea noisy ice-cream agitator,' `the actoranindl, but his tolerance of Fascist anti-Semitism was not aban- doned until 1939. Throughout his life, his aggres- sive, combative essays on literature, art, philo- sophy and politics involved him in a mass of contradiction : his admiration for the artist, for the painter's eye, conflicted with his disgust for life. Is Lewis, as Stephen Marcus called him, 'a highbrow know-nothing,' or, as another reviewer said, a 'man of genius who possessed no talents'? Is there any point in this new edition of The Lion and the Fox?*
The answer is undoubtedly yes, as long as the wilder portions are not taken too seriously. Lewis's arguments for Shakespeare's homo- sexuality don't prove very satisfactory as a means of interpreting the plays. In Antony and Cleo- patra, Shakespeare is In love with Antony,' and Cleopatra's suicide represents 'a female self- immolation to the man-god of whom she has made a cult.' Lewis quotes the sonnets, refers to the evidences for homosexuality in Marlowe, and contrasts Shakespeare's so-called distaste for the life of action (like that of Hamlet) with the masculine ambitions of Machiavelli. These sec- tions are amusing, but this is cloud-cuckoo-land. Hamlet, if acted properly, has a masculinity in striking contrast to the effeminacy of Richard II. But, in spite of such eccentricities, and the almost total neglect of contemporary theatrical con- ditions, Lewis's wide-ranging imagination illumin- ates the startlingly exotic quality of Elizabethan drama: 'The dumb, clumsy and cold [all these predicates meant relatively] English nature, re- pressed by climate—distant from the source of life, culture and light—vented itself in mimic violence, in "passionate southern love," gascon- ades, terrible revenges, marvellous intricacies of "policy," in its fifty years of dramatic dreaming.'
For Lewis, the violent splendours of the Elizabethan stage depended much on Italian in- fluences. The Italian Renaissance was the flower of European civilisation, producing a new type of robust and concrete physiology. Raphael's Madonnas are 'healthy massive country girls,' Titian's Venuses are 'very opulent animals indeed,' and 'Michelangelo's, Mantegna's or Tintoretto's people are superb types of Aryan heavyweights.' These healthy, physically success- ful types have 'little of the French or Stuart
* THE LION AND THE Fox. By Percy Wyndham Lewis. (Methuen ; University Paperbacks, 15s.) fineness and fastidious grace or the dreamy blue pallor of Gainsborough's delicate oligarchs.' Italian art, combining exuberant physical vitality with a love of science and learning, dominated England in the sixteenth century, but in a less civilised atmosphere became more savage and primitive. So we have Shakespeare, apparently a gentle, quiet man, inventing titans like Othello, Coriolanus, Antony, and then killing them off ritualistically before his admiring audi- ence (Shakespeare as executioner is the title of one of Lewis's chapters).
Lewis brings out the savage energy of the tragedies, making much contemporary academic criticism, with its search for moral values, appear cold and tired. Writing in the 1920s, Lewis had good reason to argue that academic criticism dilutes the reckless vigour of Shakespeare: 'That large class of able middle-class men, domiciled in universities, of the type of the correct and snobbish family solicitor, usually ending life with a few irrelevant honours, is responsible as a rule for Shakespeare criticism.' What impresses Lewis is the vitality of Shakespeare's titans, so different from the gloomy romanticism of Byron's heroes or Bernard Shaw's so-called supermen. When Shaw translated Nietzschean frenzy into drama, he produced a superman who was 'dressed in Jaeger underclothing and ate nuts, instead of a blond beast, its jaws dripping with human blood.' St Joan has a 'strangely unreal geniality and playfulness'; the work 'seems written to be played by a cast of elderly Anglican curates.'
Lewis's main contention is that Shakespeare was dominated by the Machiavellian obsessions of his time, but that he differs from Machiavelli in his attitude to the superman. Why, Lewis asks, should a prince seek power by combining the talents of the lion and the fox? If he succeeds, he may ride about on an immense white horse, like the young d'Annunzio, or live in a huge palace. But obviously power is pursued not for such ends, but for its own pleasures : 'The ex- citement of murdering ten of your most malicious friends, or six who fatigue you most with their stupidity, drowning them all in one bath. . . Machiavelli succumbs to such dreams of action, whereas Shakespeare, the artist, withdraws from the corruption of life into art. Shakespeare's dis- gust for life, his subversive, anarchic tempera- ment, find true expression in the words of Thersites.
Lewis uses Troilus and Cressida to belabour those who would transform Shakespeare into a benevolent Christian gentleman. This play was not a product of a temporary period of gloom and bitterness, for its nihilism is expressed in all the tragedies. Shakespeare admires his supermen, but, like a Punch and Judy showman with his puppets, he does not care very much what happens to them. He sweeps them off stage in the tradi- tional blood-bath: 'their tragedy is that they are involved in a real action, whereas they come from, and naturally inhabit, an ideal world.' Through the grandeur of his verse, through certain great speeches put into his heroes' mouth, Shake- speare's mind erupts into his plays, bitterly de- ploring the corruption and pain of life, finding truth only in the intellect of the artist: 'what is
generally forgotten is that Shakespeare himself is a greater hero than any of the figures he depicted.' The Lion and the Fox has had some influence— the chapter on Shakespeare and Chapman drew- praise from T. S. Eliot—but as a whole this picture of Shakespeare is too limited. As a dramatist, Shakespeare is not the artist aloof on his mountain, as Lewis would have us be- lieve. He is both detached and involved; the tragedies are filled with that compassion for humanity which is so noticeably lacking in Lewis's own fiction.
This fashioning of Shakespeare as the artist- ' enemy of life is related to the central themes - of Lewis's other polemical works of this period- -The Art of Being Ruled (1926), Time and Western Man (1927), Paleface (1929) and The Diabolical Principle and the Dithyrambic Spec- - tator (1929). In The Lion and the Fox, he com- pares the °respect for learning and the powers of ' the mind during the Italian Renaissance with the low place accorded to thcintellect in modern democracies. The difference between the Eliza- bethan and the modern community is that while both demonstrate the enslavement of the many by the few, today people are as manipulated as ever, but remain unaware that this is so: 'There have never been so many people entirely ignorant of what is happening to them.' Modern - Western man is asleep, an automaton, only worthy of the satiric contempt Lewis lavishes on the creatures of Bloomsbury in The Apes of God (1930). He admired Hitler partly because he openly acknowledged himself as leader, instead of submitting to the pretences by which democratic governments invariably enslave their people.
For Lewis, this 'sleep' of the twentieth cen- tury affects all classes and levels of intellect. He attacks Bergson, Proust, Virginia Woolf, be- cause for him Western man has accepted slavishly that he cannot escape from flux, that he can only know his own stream of conscious- ness. There is certainly some truth in his view that twentieth-century literature is predominantly dream-like—in The Waste Land, Jacob's Room or The Trial. But Lewis's longing for the detach- ment of classicism had to remain unsatisfied. His gift for invective, the gusto of his language, have brought many admirers for his novels, from Tarr to The Human Age, but he himself never achieved classical detachment. He detested the modern submission to the power of the sub- conscious, primitivism and sex, but in their place he offered only his own brand of emotive rhetoric.
Lewis himself believed that his static classical ideal was more easily expressed in painting than in literature. For him, literature was a second- class art, superior to music and inferior to painting and sculpture. There's not much doubt that in the future he w ill be remembered chiefly for his own work with the brush, particularly the great portraits of Pound, Eliot, Spender, etc. Hugh Kenner has said that these figures 'inhabit with Egyptian self-sufficiency a world which Wyndham Lewis has imagined,' yet also are 'calmly alight with unmistakable human vitality.' In this balance between the fixity of art and the warmth of humanity, he achieved a great- ness denied to him in literature, and, in contrast to the narrow views in The Lion and the Fox, came rather closer to the true genius of Shakespeare.
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