It may be that I’ve read too much Mark Twain to think of another term but “prospecting” is what I used to call it back in my teaching days. There were no shovels or pick-axes necessary, just a curious mind, one that could dig a little bit. If you brought something worth digging, of course.
The idea for me was by having my students read some great writing, it might inspire good, maybe even very good, writing from my students.
The process went like this: I would hand out famous passages from literature or analysis of literature, then ask my AP Literature or AP Language students to find something in that passage that seemed interesting enough for them to explore. To prospect, as it were.
Since these passages had to be written about under test conditions - that is, under deadline - giving them short, densely written paragraphs seemed like the best way to go. There might only be a handful of sentences to dissect but they were weighty, ones that made them think. And, once the passage sunk in, it was time to put pen to paper and see what they could come up with. It took practice.
On Saturday afternoon, I was sitting at one of the area’s terrific independent bookstores, The Bookshelf in Thomasville, Ga. (Hi, Annie!) reading a passage from a book that collected letters, interviews, reviews from the famous Russian writer Vladmir Nabokov, author of “Lolita.”
In a review he wrote of another’s book on Shakespeare, I came upon this passage and sat there for a while thinking about it.
“But would Shakespeare really be pleased with Prof. Harbage’s notion of him?” Nabokov wrote. “I doubt it. Hamlet’s quibbling (to take an instance from Dover Wilson’s “What Happens In Hamlet”) with its telescopic duplication and triplication of sense did not bother the groundlings because there was enough action in the play to keep them spellbound: the nimblest-witted apprentice boy took the quibbles as the gushing nonsense that a madman might be supposed to utter; but the very existence of these inner landscapes of the mind in Shakespeare’s greatest play “proves that he could count upon a section of the audience…capable of apprehending any subtlety he cared to put them to and moreover armed like Hamlet himself with tables to set down matters they could not as once understand or wished especially to remember.” (Dover Wilson). By all means have a cake for the general, but cram it with plums for the judicious - this seems to have been - whether Prof. Harbage likes it or not - Shakespeare’s method.”
The excerpt from the Nabokov review that intrigued me.
As I read it, Nabokov raises the question of how much Shakespeare cared or intended or expected or anticipated his audience at the Globe Theater would understand the deeper he went. Which with “Hamlet” was pretty darn deep. What would sink in?
“The groundlings,” Harbage’s term for those who perhaps eschewed the deeper plunges of the play to focus exclusively on the action, were still entertained. But there were still deeper places to go - if you wanted to. How did Shakespeare do that?
This is a helluva question to ponder. As a writer, are there times when you are so deep into a subject, your creation, your writing that you have outrun or outflanked your reader? Or do you just write whatever the muse provides, try to hew it as close to the artistic bone as you can and not worry about interpretation? Or re-interpretation.
For a James Joyce, a William Faulkner, how their work would be read, perceived, understood seemed to be the least of their concerns. (Three tries at Faulkner’s “The Sound And The Fury” convinced me of that.) But Joyce and Faulkner weren’t thinking of how an audience would respond. As a playwright, Shakespeare had to.
So were there elements in “Hamlet” that Shakespeare included specifically to keep the audiences interested, the “cake” that Nabokov speaks of, while throwing in “the plums” those deep philosophical soul-searching soliloquys (“To be or not to be” or “If it be now, 'tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all” for the “judicious”? Those who wanted, needed to go deeper.
These are heavy thoughts to consider for someone standing in the audience at the Globe Theater in the 1600’s, wondering if they heard the precise words correctly, wondering, too, if they fully understood them. What audience was Shakespeare writing for? How many were literate? How many truly, deeply grasped his genius?
Some did, of course. That’s why we have the Folios, which weren’t compiled when the guy was still alive. Somebody recognized what they had seen and heard and said, ‘Damn, we need to hang on to these.” Lucky for us.
But that phrase that Nabokov chose - “the very existence of these inner landscapes of the mind in Shakespeare’s greatest play “proves that he could count upon a section of the audience…capable of apprehending any subtlety he cared to put them to…” shows that Shakespeare, at least in the opinion of Prof. Harbage, knew his audience, understood how to write for them, to write for the stage yet never to pander or simplify or dumb it down for cheap applause or audience satisfaction. He answered his muse, could we say that?
My teaching days are done, so reading that passage up in Thomasville, watching customers wander in and out, thinking about what my students would have thought about Nabokov’s - and Prof. Harbage’s observations - made me smile, take a snap shot of that paragraph and think about it all the way home. And think about sharing this with my distant friends and readers who kindly stop by just about every day.
What did Shakespeare think about his audience? Who was he writing for? Or did he just have to write it, he had no choice and whoever understood the depth of what he was doing, great. That there was enough action there, a plot that to carry you through the performance, whether you plumbed the depths of your soul through those soliloquys or not, that was one of his great gifts.
And you know, the “plums,” the mind that wrote “to be or not to be,” that was there for you, too.