Author Archives: Jeet Heer

Shakespeare Hatred: An Underground Literary Tradition

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Editor’s Note: This post first appeared on Jeet Heer’s blog Sans Everything. Jeet graciously suggested we reprint it here as coda to our hatefest, just as a reminder that everything should be hated, not just comics.
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Shaw:No Lover of Shakespeare He

Over at Crooked Timber, they are having a lively discussion  provoked by George Bernard Shaw’s scorn for Shakespeare. On many occasions Shaw expressed extreme distain for the Bard of Avon. In a 1906 letter Shaw wrote “I have striven hard to open English eyes to the emptiness of Shakespeare’s philosophy, to the superficiality and second-handedness of his morality, to his weakness and incoherence as a thinker, to his snobbery, his vulgar prejudices, his ignorance, his disqualifications of all sorts for the philosophic eminence claimed for him.”

Shaw’s opinions are easy to dismiss, but it is often forgotten that there is a long and venerable tradition of Shakespeare-hatred, a critical tradition that includes not just crank and reflexive contrarians but also some very great writers. Aside from Shaw, Voltaire and Leo Tolstoy were also vociferously hostile to Stratford’s favourite son. Voltaire actually started off as a champion of Shakespeare but turned against the English writer’s plays. More recently the novelist Joyce Carol Oates (in her collection Contraries) and mad-dog essayist Marvin Mudrick have taken aim at Shakespeare.

Below I’ve assembled a mini-anthology of Shakespeare-bashing. Although I myself am rather fond of Shakespeare, I have to say I think this tradition of attacking the dramatist is actually quite valuable. Unlike most of the thousands of volumes given over to bardolatry, the anti-Shakespeare brigade doesn’t assume that every jot and titter that flowed out of the playwright’s quill pen is pure gold. The hostile critics tend to be close readers, alert to the texture of the words and the logic of the plots. They pay Shakespeare the respect of careful scrutiny. The opponents of Shakespeare treat him as a living writer, one whose choices can be argued with, not as a marble statue commemorating universal and immemorial truths. Tolstoy in particular was a very astute critic and his long essay (or short book) on Shakespeare deserves more attention than it’s received.

So here is an anthology of Shakespeare-hatred.

Tolstoy:

I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful esthetic pleasure, but having read, one after the other, works regarded as his best: “King Lear,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Hamlet” and “Macbeth,” not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium, and doubted as to whether I was senseless in feeling works regarded as the summit of perfection by the whole of the civilized world to be trivial and positively bad, or whether the significance which this civilized world attributes to the works of Shakespeare was itself senseless. My consternation was increased by the fact that I always keenly felt the beauties of poetry in every form; then why should artistic works recognized by the whole world as those of a genius,—the works of Shakespeare,—not only fail to please me, but be disagreeable to me? For a long time I could not believe in myself, and during fifty years, in order to test myself, I several times recommenced reading Shakespeare in every possible form, in Russian, in English, in German and in Schlegel’s translation, as I was advised. Several times I read the dramas and the comedies and historical plays, and I invariably underwent the same feelings: repulsion, weariness, and bewilderment. At the present time, before writing this preface, being desirous once more to test myself, I have, as an old man of seventy-five, again read the whole of Shakespeare, including the historical plays, the “Henrys,” “Troilus and Cressida,” the “Tempest,” “Cymbeline,” and I have felt, with even greater force, the same feelings,—this time, however, not of bewilderment, but of firm, indubitable conviction that the unquestionable glory of a great genius which Shakespeare enjoys, and which compels writers of our time to imitate him and readers and spectators to discover in him non-existent merits,—thereby distorting their esthetic and ethical understanding,—is a great evil, as is every untruth.

George Bernard Shaw:

Search [in Shakespeare] for statesmanship, or even citizenship, or any sense of the commonwealth, material or spiritual, and you will not find the making of a decent vestryman or curate in the whole horde. As to faith, hope, courage, conviction, or any of the true heroic qualities, you find nothing but death made sensational, despair made stage-sublime, sex made romantic, and barrenness covered up by sentimentality and the mechanical lilt of blank verse.

All that you miss in Shakespeare you find in Bunyan, to whom the true heroic came quite obviously and naturally. The world was to him a more terrible place than it was to Shakespeare; but he saw through it a path at the end of which a man might look not only forward to the Celestial City, but back on his life and say: ‘Tho’ with great difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get them.’ The heart vibrates like a bell to such utterances as this; to turn from it to ‘Out, out, brief candle,’ and ‘The rest is silence,’ and ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded by a sleep’ is to turn from life, strength, resolution, morning air and eternal youth, to the terrors of a drunken nightmare.

 

Marvin Mudrick: Known as the Dirty Harry of Literary Criticism

 
Marvin Mudrick’s Nobody Here But Us Chickens – arguably the most eccentric book of literary criticism ever written by a sane writer – is long out of print. So I’ve scanned in one chapter (“The Unstrung Zero”) dealing with Hamlet. Mudrick write about Shakespeare elsewhere in the book, sometime appreciatively, but here he is at his most tart. (The rest of the book, with discussions of everyone from Lady Murasaki to Leon Trotsky, is very much worth reading).


 

 

 

#2: Krazy Kat, George Herriman

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George Herriman’s Krazy Kat has been, from the time I first encountered it as a teenager, among my favourite comics and remains so today. The pleasures of Krazy Kat—Herriman’s antic doodles, his constant innovations in background and layout, the exuberance of his dialogue, and the surpassing (arguably illimitable) richness of his characters—have been much celebrated by an array of fine writers ranging from Gilbert Seldes to e.e. cummings to Bill Watterson, but a few fresh points might be worth making.

Firstly, if Herriman is, as he’s often called, the poet laureate of comics, then like the best poetry his work needs to be read slowly and in small doses. This is especially true of the full-page strips. Don’t race through a Krazy Kat collection as you would a graphic novel. Rather, take the time to savour the words and art. After you get to the bottom of the page, return to the top and start reading again. This process can be repeated many times with renewed pleasure.

Secondly, it is worth tracking Herriman’s changes: the earliest full-page strips from 1916 to the mid-1920s are dense reads, each one a little short story. During this period, the daily strips are quick jokes. Then there is a slow transition as the Sunday pages become quicker, while Herriman’s narrative interest shifts to the daily strip. This shift is quite evident by the mid-1930s when Herriman is allowed to have color on the full page. Each one becomes like a painting, while the dailies start featuring longer narratives, notably the famous “Tiger Tea” saga of the mid-1930s.

Thirdly and finally, Herriman was one of the very few cartoonists to express spiritual interest in his work. In many ways, the complexity of the love triangle is a critique of any easy use of terms like sin. And the repetition of the plot, day in and day out, is not unrelated to Herriman’s interest in reincarnation. To be fully tuned to Herriman’s special frequency we must have our spiritual receptivity open, as we do with a very few other cartoonists (such as Charles Schulz and Jim Woodring).

This article is a revised version of an essay that was originally published in the benefit anthology Favorites.

Jeet Heer is a Toronto-based editor and journalist. He is the co-editor, with Kent Worcester, of A Comics Studies Reader and Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium. With Chris Ware and Chris Oliveros, he is co-editing the Walt & Skeezix reprint collections of Frank King’s Gasoline Alley newspaper strip. Four volumes have been published to date. His articles on the arts and culture have appeared in the Toronto Globe & Mail, the Boston Globe, and many other publications. He has previously written on Krazy Kat in his introductions to the Krazy & Ignatz reprint collections for the years 1935-1936 and 1939-1940.

NOTES

Krazy Kat, by George Herriman, received 46 votes.

The poll participants who included it in their top-ten lists are: Max Andersson, Derik Badman, Alex Buchet, Jeffrey Chapman, Brian Codagnone, Dave Coverly, Warren Craghead, Corey Creekmur, Francis DiMenno, Paul Dwyer, Austin English, Jackie Estrada, Andrew Farago, Larry Feign, Richard Gehr, Larry Gonick, Jenny Gonzalez-Blitz, Geoff Grogan, Jeet Heer, Sam Henderson, Illogical Volume, Bill Kartalopoulos, Molly Kiely, T. J. Kirsch, Carol Lay, Matt Madden, Chris Mautner, Joe McCulloch, Jason Michelitch, Gary Spencer Millidge, Pedro Moura, Mark Newgarden, Jason Overby, John Porcellino, Oliver Ristau, Matt Seneca, Mahendra Singh, Kenneth Smith, Matteo Stefanelli, Tom Stiglich, Tucker Stone, Mark Tonra, Mack White, Karl Wills, Matthias Wivel, and Douglas Wolk.

Matt Madden specifically voted for the works of George Herriman.

George Herriman’s Krazy Kat was a daily newspaper strip that began publishing October 28, 1913. The final strip was published June 25, 1944, two months after Herriman’s death on April 25.

As the strip is in the public domain, there have been many book collections published over the years. A complete, chronological 13-volume collection, titled Krazy & Ignatz, is currently in print.

For those looking for a reasonably priced one-volume introduction to the strip, the best choice is probably Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman, by Patrick McDonnell, Georgia Riley de Havenon, and Karen O’Connell. A hardcover edition retails for $18.00 on the Barnes & Noble website. Click here to go to its product page. One can also find it in many public libraries.

–Robert Stanley Martin

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