Sky Gilbert’s Shakespeare Beyond Science: When Poetry was the World is a festival of unexpected insight for any literary thinker who wants to understand how the rhetorical tradition shaped Shakespeare’s consciousness and craft.
The Amazon summary explains that “Sky Gilbert’s radical new research locates Shakespeare as a disciple of the 2nd c. C.E. Greek rhetorician Hermogenes, and a student of the Neo-Platonist Johannes Sturm,” and the book is “not just another ‘interpretation’ of the meaning of Shakespeare’s work. Instead, a radical approach to Shakespeare as magician and rhetorician.”
“In the end Shakespeare was a post-structuralist, more concerned with form than content, and confident of the dangerous magical power of words not only to persuade but to construct our consciousness.”
The Dangerous Magic of Words
After more than thirty years studying the marginal annotations of the Edward de Vere Geneva Bible I find this description – especially the emphasis on “the dangerous magical power of words” – to be not only provocative but prescient.
I’ve known the author, Professor Sky Gilbert at the University of Guelph, for a good part of my thirty years studying Shakespeare and the authorship question. I’ve learned from his erudite and insightful lectures, read and even helped to publish some of his essays, and known him as a loyal friend who is not afraid to speak truth to power.
Given this experience, I was not entirely surprised that Gilbert would produce a book of this enduring significance and insight, but I was gratified anew by the clarity and keen sense of relevance that Gilbert brings to the task of reconstructing the theoretical influences that contributed to the development of Shakespearean style and consciousness.
Many students of early modern literature are still brought up on the parochial Ciceronian classification of rhetoric into the three branches of “high” (most formal), “medium” (average), and “low” (vulgar or vernacular).
Hermogenes instead divides style into seven parts (clarity, grandeur, beauty, rapidity, ethos, and gravity and then further subdivides these into several subcategories (for example, grandeur is subdivided into solemnity, brilliance, amplification, asperity, vehemence, and florescence; ethos into simplicity, sweetness, subtlety, and modesty)).
Such a nuanced schema is, it would seem, a much more useful approach to rhetoric for a dramatist who is using speech acts to create character and advance a symphonic plot. Shakespeare, in fact, applies the criteria of subtlety as artfully as any literary writer has in his linguistic craft.
In 16th century Europe the most famous expert on Hermogenes was the Protestant theologian Johannes Sturmius, who corresponded with Lord Burleigh and was so impressed with the 17th Earl of Oxford.
The Dangerous Magic of Words and the de Vere Geneva Bible
Gilbert’s point about Shakespeare’s investment in the concept of the “dangerous magical power of words” assumes a renewed relevance in light of the de Vere Bible annotations, quite a number of which focus on verses involving some aspect of language or linguistics.
Perhaps the most striking illustration of de Vere’s fascination with the potency of words is the note at Wisdom 18.21, which originally read “[The We]apon of [the] Godly is Praier” (Figure 1).
A good example of the author’s steadfast faith in the power of linguistic action to convey truth is the large number of de Vere word jokes and puns in the plays, puns aiming “not not only to persuade but to construct our consciousness.” This is not the place to rehearse any detailed discussion of these, and many have already been discussed at length, for example by Ian Haste (“The Name within the Ring”), Richard Whalen (“The Queen’s Worm”) or myself (“Smallest Things in Measure for Measure“).
The real Shakespeare saw his works as his redemption in history, persevering in the belief that his puns would eventually penetrate our thick skulls and echo to the reverberate hills. Truth, Gilbert writes, “was his motto, and his last name.”
If you really want to understand Shakespeare, this book should go to the top of your reading list.
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