Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare

by Harry Berger Jr.

This collection of essays includes some of the most recent work of a master critic at the height of his powers. Of the fourteen essays, written from the late 1970's to the present, three have never before been published; the essays' appearance in a single volume makes available for the first time the full scope of Berger's unique approach to ethical discourses in Shakespeare's plays. The sequence of essays displays both the continuity and the revisionary development that mark his critical practice since the early work on The Tempest , Troilus and Cressida , and the Elizabethan theater.
When one compares Berger's earlier work from the 1960's with the writing from the 1980's and 1990's in the present collection, one sees that the difference stems primarily from the impact on the later work of his encounters with the whole range of structuralist and poststructuralist theory. Much of the excitement and vitality of Berger's current work comes from his efforts to incorporate new methodological influences into his previous system. Because he comes to poststructuralism as a mature critic whose larger interpretive framework is already in place, his response is not simply to immerse himself in the new theoretical modes and adopt them wholesale, but rather to make them his own.
Among the plays discussed are The Merchant of Venice , Much Ado About Nothing , King Lear , Macbeth , 2 Henry IV , Richard II ―and, in two of the new essays, 1 Henry IV and Measure for Measure . Also new is Berger's retrospective account of his critical development in the extensive opening "Acknowledgments."

Genres: Literary Criticism

528 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1997

Reviews

[tiana wentworth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ladies and gentleman, here is the passage that altered my outlook on Shakespeare's wonderful work:

My analysis of these discourses is governed by the related premise that speakers are the effects rather than the causes both of the language assigned to their names and of the interpretations we give that language. This premise is strictly methodological in intent and implies no attitude toward agency. That is, its purpose is not to reduce speakers to mere passive sites of discursive activity but to establish the principle that the analysis of language should precede the analysis of its cognitive or psychological relation to its speaker —that the semiotic and psychological dimensions of textual analysis should be kept distinct, as in practice they often are. It is a common
occurrence for readers to agree on the meaning of a particular passage but subsequently to disagree as to its psychological disposition.

Berger's premise gets even more interesting when you consider the physical prints of the play texts themselves. An amazing article, "The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text," (by Margareta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass) outlines this wonderfully in the following passages:

A long tradition beginning with Pope, peaking in A.C. Bradley, and continuing into this century particularly through Freudian psychoanalytic criticism has understood character to precede language. Characters are imagined as having developed prior to and independent of the plays in which they appear and as speaking a language that reflects this experiential and psychological history. Berger reverses this relation, arguing that dramatic character is subsequent to and dependent upon language: ‘speakers as characters are the effects rather than the causes of their language…’ For the critic this reversal has important methodological implications: semiotic analysis must precede psychoanalysis, or, more specifically, ‘Speakers don’t have childhoods unless and until they mention them.’ Berger’s critique derives from Lacan’s emphasis on the construction of subjectivity in discourse, but it might have been grounded in less theoretical matters.

In a modern edition of a play, the list of dramatis personae precedes the play, suggesting that characters preexist their speeches. Shakespeare’s first readers, however, received no such suggestion, for none of the quartos published in his lifetime feature lists of characters; the Folio includes lists for only seven out of thirty-six plays, and in every case the list appears after rather than before the play. Readers had to arbitrate for themselves the boundaries of identity, constructing (or failing to construct, or refusing to construct) “individual” characters in the process of reading.

I have started to analyze Shakespeare in terms of book + theatre history, and I have found these modes of analysis to be incredibly fulfilling. I truly think that there is a lot missed when these essential and foundational aspects of Shakespeare's canon are ignored. So, with that being said, Berger's work has excited an intellectual fervour in me--I am so excited to step into the world of Shakespearean Scholarship and do William Shakespeare justice.

[Carly Weber]

I think (?) I read all of these for class. Anyways this man def has mommy issues and an oral fixation

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nuanced readings of Shakespeare’s histories, tragedies, and problem plays. The psychological depths proffered in these readings strip away surface level or performative interpretations and go to the dark sides of Shakespeare’s characters, especially many of his seemingly benevolent ones. I found Berger’s explanations to be insightful, articulate, rich, and profound, especially in the manner by which characters are the product of their own utterances that both implicate and exculpate their responsibilities in their respective dramas. Freudian indeed!