Tolstoy Cancels Shakespeare

Or, Why Shakespeare? (Part Three)

Can Tolstoy topple the king? Photo by GR Stocks on Unsplash

In Book Two of War and Peace, during the battle with the French at Schöngraben, young Nikolai Rostov has his horse shot out from under him. He sees the French soldiers approaching and is suddenly confronted by the idea of his own mortality—surprised, in particular, that they are coming to kill “me whom everyone is so fond of.”

It’s a perfect moment. By this point in the narrative, we know Nikolai intimately, and, as with Fred Vincy in Middlemarch, or Eugene Wrayburn in Our Mutual Friend, we love him despite his many flaws—his carelessness, his short-sightedness, his youthful self-conceit. We love him because he means well, and he is young, and we trust that he will grow up.

And now here he is, transported to this vast, historic context, one callow youth among a million like him, his self-centeredness such that he can’t fathom why an opposing army would want to kill such a popular fellow. It’s perfect because even though we laugh at the absurdity of such a thought, we can also understand it. We can understand that by nature all humans find themselves at the center of their own subjectivity, of their own universe, despite the relatively insignificant figure we may shape on the historical canvas.

What other writers can deliver such a psychologically astute episode? We might think of George Eliot or Jane Austen. We might think of Scott Fitzgerald or Henry James.

Or we might think of Shakespeare.

And at this moment in the essay, Tolstoy is spinning in his grave like a rotisserie chicken.

Here’s Tolstoy, not looking happy about having reread all of Shakespeare in his old age. There’s 200 hours he’ll never get back.

Why? Because Tolstoy hated Shakespeare. He wasn’t just ambivalent. He wasn’t just lukewarm. He despised the writer who gave us Hamlet, King Lear, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, Othello, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He detested the writer who brought into the world Macbeth, As You Like It, Anthony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, The Winter’s Tale, and Romeo and Juliet.

OK, you might say. Geniuses can have problematic opinions. Some quite smart people, for whatever ridiculous reason, may not like The Beatles or Rembrandt or Aretha Franklin.

However, such dislikes are generally throwaway opinions, more a matter of indifference than deep-seated enmity. But Tolstoy’s was not a casual opinion. It was longstanding, the product of extensive contemplation, to the point that he wrote a lengthy essay explaining it.

Over the last two weeks, we have considered the question “why Shakespeare?” from the respective perspectives of two critics from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Samuel Johnson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. While they may have disagreed about particulars, they agreed that Shakespeare deserved his position of eminence among English writers, an opinion that was developing into a consensus in their historical moments.

By the time Tolstoy wrote War and Peace in the 1860s, the consensus was nearly universal, and bardolatry made its way from England to Europe and the Americas and began to colonize most of the world. There were naysayers, of course, most of them pre-Johnson; Voltaire comes to mind, and Pope, though he edited Shakespeare, thought that his verse was too rough. Certain seventeenth and eighteenth-century writers felt the need to redact and correct Shakespeare to fit him to modern tastes (Dryden, Garrick).

But Tolstoy is singular not only in the intensity of his dislike, but also in the methodical manner in which he explains it.

So, in today’s post let’s take a look at Tolstoy’s explanation for his anti-bardolatry, and then, in Sunday’s post, we will see if we might formulate a response to it—assuming that we disagree with him (which perhaps is not necessarily a safe assumption).

Tolstoy wrote his essay on Shakespeare in 1908, which is forty years removed from his writing of War and Peace, so we might think that this is the older, curmudgeonly Tolstoy. (See the above picture: now that is a curmudgeon if I’ve ever seen one.) However, he claims that he has felt this way for decades, since he first read Shakespeare:

I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful aesthetic 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.

He goes on to explain that he has now reread the whole of Shakespeare’s works at the age of seventy-five, and he has reached the “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 aesthetic and ethical understanding,—is a great evil, as is every untruth.”

Not only is Shakespeare bad, but Tolstoy also claims that the widely held belief that he is good “is a great evil.”

So, what are his reasons?

Photo by Matt Riches on Unsplash

The short answer is that he thinks that Shakespeare’s characters are not psychologically realistic and that they all speak in the same style, that a speech in one play might easily be substituted for a speech in another play. We might imagine Hamlet giving Macbeth’s “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy, or we might imagine Coriolanus pondering that question of “to be or not to be.”

Tolstoy claims that Shakespeare’s characters are simply mouthpieces for Shakespeare himself. Hamlet, for example, is simply a “phonograph” for the views of Shakespeare. The old legend of Hamlet, Tolstoy asserts, is a compelling story,

[b]ut Shakespeare, putting into Hamlet's mouth speeches which he himself wishes to express, and making him commit actions which are necessary to the author in order to produce scenic effects, destroys all that constitutes the character of Hamlet and of the legend. During the whole of the drama, Hamlet is doing, not what he would really wish to do, but what is necessary for the author's plan. One moment he is awe-struck at his father's ghost, another moment he begins to chaff it, calling it "old mole"; one moment he loves Ophelia, another moment he teases her, and so forth. There is no possibility of finding any explanation whatever of Hamlet's actions or words, and therefore no possibility of attributing any character to him.

Tolstoy also goes on at great length about King Lear, providing a scene-by-scene summary that reveals, he thinks, the ludicrous nature of the play’s construction and, once again, that it is simply a vehicle for a series of speeches that are independent of the actual characters who speak them.

Finally, Tolstoy accuses Shakespeare of being a snob who despises commoners and elevates the aristocracy and nobility. Shakespeare’s characters who are supposedly noble in spirit are inevitably noble by birth, and his commoners are rude, crude, and without redeeming qualities.

The result of all of this Shakespeare worship, despite what for Tolstoy are these obvious failings, is that the very literary form of the drama has been debased, as other dramatists have been inspired by his example. This, ultimately, is a moral failure:

The subject of Shakespeare's pieces, as is seen from the demonstrations of his greatest admirers, is the lowest, most vulgar view of life, which regards the external elevation of the lords of the world as a genuine distinction, despises the crowd, i.e., the working classes—repudiates not only all religious, but also all humanitarian, strivings directed to the betterment of the existing order.

These are serious charges, and, considering Tolstoy’s significance as a writer and thinker, we should take them seriously on their own merits, putting aside the bardolatry that most of us probably adhere to.

But this post is getting long, so I’m going to leave my consideration of Tolstoy’s argument and my response to it to Sunday’s post. But that will give you a chance to respond before I do. What do you think? Does Tolstoy make a good case? What are its shortcomings? What are some counter-arguments? Why Shakespeare? Or why not Shakespeare?

I have my own strong opinions on the matter, but I would like to know yours first. Please comment.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

Photo by Edz Norton on Unsplash