Ophelia's rhetoric or partial to synecdoche - Renaissance plays and synecdoche

Criticism, Wntr, 1995 by Jonathan Baldo

Now when the first weeks life was almost spent, And this world built, and richly furnished; To store heav'ns courts, and steer earths regiment, He cast to frame an Isle, the heart and head Of all his works, compos'd with curious art; Which like an Index briefly should impart The summe of all; the whole, yet of the whole a part. . . .

- Phineas Fletcher, The Purple Island, 1.43

Galeatzo. Well, and what dost thou play? Balurdo. The part of all the world. Alberto. The part of all the world? What's that? Balurdo. The fool.

- John Marston, Antonia and Mellida (c. 1599)

It will be my contention in this essay that Renaissance plays, like Renaissance monarchs, owed a great deal of their power and claims to legitimacy to the trope of synecdoche. Renaissance tragedy's economy of representation reflects a similar economy in the system of absolutism, where the king was presumed to represent the body politic. In the era of the novel, where the economy and rules for representing a life drastically changed, the nature of political representation would similarly shift: MPs would be presumed to represent particular constituencies rather than, as during the Renaissance, the whole realm, and representation of the whole would become a matter of piecemeal representation of divergent constituencies and opinions.(1)

Confidence in the legitimacy of all sorts of part/whole substitutions underwrites Renaissance theatrical practices no less than Renaissance political rhetoric. The most fundamental and enabling synecdoche for Shakespearean tragedy may be the assumption that a life may be represented by a single sequence of events, an essential episode that may represent the whole. Georg Lukacs has pointed out modern drama's break with such an assumption, and consequently its departure from the genre of tragedy. In the modern drama, "The data, actions manifested in the external world, fail to account for the whole man, who in turn is not able to arrive at an action revelatory of his entire self."(2) Such challenges to the rule of synecdoche in drama, however, are already evident in Shakespearean tragedy at the top of its form. That's one reason why these plays seem like the culmination of their form. The vigor of Hamlet and its successors owes much to their energetically questioning their own structuring principles, including their dependency on various kinds of synecdoche. Hamlet seems to me pivotal among Shakespeare's tragedies in this respect: tropologically, it is a study in the obstructed synecdoche, the part/whole substitution that is either illegitimate like Claudius or ineffectual like Polonius. Obstructed synecdoches complicate the representation of Hamlet's life by means of the play no less than Hamlet's potential representativeness as a Renaissance prince. Since the play as a whole might be characterized as a study in the obstructed synecdoche, our recurring sense of the peculiar elusiveness of this play whose many parts are notoriously difficult to assimilate to a whole and integrated interpretation seems consistent with, and even predicted by, the rhetoric of the play. Our difficulties as interpreters are prefigured by Ophelia's anxieties about grasping the meaning of the whole of the inner play through the ordinarily synecdochic dumb show and prologue.

I will begin with the assumption that the concept of impartiality - whether of characters or playwrights, magistrates or sovereigns - is synecdochic, presupposing legitimate exchanges or substitutions between parts and wholes, wholes and parts. The impartiality of political outlook that Coleridge imputed to Shakespeare - though the imputation may spring more from Coleridge than from Shakespeare - seems consistent with the ascendancy of various other kinds of synecdoche helping to structure Shakespearean drama, both character and plot: an ascendancy that I believe is challenged by many of Shakespeare's so-called "mature" tragedies, and by none so pervasively as by Hamlet.(3)

Impartial playwrights, whole-hearted sovereigns

For the Lawes of Nature (as Justice, Equity, Modesty, Mercy, and (in summe) doing unto others, as wee would be done to,) of themselves, without the terror of some Power, to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our natural Passions, that carry us to Partiality, Pride, Revenge and the like.

- Hobbes(4)

The wonderful philosophic impartiality in Shakespeare's politics.

- Coleridge(5)

Much of the political rhetoric of Renaissance England seems to suggest that the perfect sovereign is also the perfect synecdoche: a part of the body politic that stands for, represents, or almost mystically makes present the whole; and an embodiment of the whole that will override party and faction and, because of his or her impartiality, be trusted to take the part of any of that body's wronged members. King James was especially concerned to present himself as impartial, given suspicions that he would be partial in his acts and decrees to the Scotsmen many English feared would impoverish their own country. Discussing the Union of the Kingdoms in a speech to Parliament in 1607, James declared that, as for "limitations and restrictions" on the naturalization of the Scottish, "you may assure your selues I will with indifferencie grant what is requisite without partiall respect of Scotland."(6) Of the English fear that the Scots "shall eate our commons bare, and make vs leane," James assured his audience, "By Law they cannot, and by my partialitie they shall not."(7) Such assertions would have been tacitly supported by the prevalent notion of the body politic, which James frequently invoked in his writings and speeches. Implying an already existing whole subdividable into parts, the organicist metaphor of the body politic tacitly supports claims to impartiality by the sovereign, the part (namely, the head) that stands for or re-presents the whole. In a speech to the Lords and Commons of 1610, James employed the organic analogy to suggest that the notion of a partial and injudicious king is illogical, since such a monarch could only be self-wounding and self-defeating: "And it were an idle head that would in place of physic so poison or phlebotomize the body as might breed a dangerous distemper or destruction thereof."(8)