Preface

The image on the cover of this book is taken from a book of photographs of tears, taken through an optical microscope. The artist, Rose-Lynn Fisher, titled the tear in the cover photograph “Grief and Gratitude.” She was inspired to take it when she heard of the death of a friend who had helped her in a time of pain and trouble earlier in her life. She had recently been in touch with this kind man after a distance of years.

Each tear in Rose-Lynn Fisher's amazing book of photographs, The Topography of Tears, is unique.¹ Some of them are crystalline like snowflakes, some are like bits of ice lost from an iceberg, some like the rails viewed from a station platform, telegraph wires, or palm trees. They seem at once natural and artificial. There are tears of nervous exhaustion, of overwhelming, of hope and possibility, and joy; there are brief tears and the long tears of the unconsoled. One is called “Last tear I ever cry for you.” Fisher's up-close tears are a map of the naturalness of responses to life's troubles, a memory and a marking of each occasion which called them forth.

In the tragedies I write about in this book, men try—with desperation, with unnatural discipline, with a telling effort of suppression—not to cry. Sometimes they call their tears “sweat” as if they are labor. Sometimes they say they would rather break into a thousand pieces than weep. Yet tragedies elicit our tears and depend on the naturalness of pity as a form of acknowledgment of the pain of others.

I titled this book Shakespeare and Loss. Over the long course of writing it, a kind of companion to Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness, I experienced myriad losses (of the kind all flesh is heir to). I lost a dear friend, Liz Clarke; I lost my father and he, a few years before his death, lost his capacity for speech; I lost my stepmother and stepfather; and I lost my mother-in-law. And I lost all the fellow nonhuman creatures with whom I had shared a house. I learned what Elizabeth Bishop called the art of losing, which is—though inevitable—(write it!) hard to master.

Grief is a response to the loss of loved ones, but other forms of loss are also important in this book. You can lose your glasses or your watch, but you can also lose your way, or your sense of personhood and self. You can clearly lose your senses, as when we might exclaim in frustration, horror, or dismay: Have you completely lost your senses? So the losses involved here are not the kinds of losses that can be restored by a stable ritual or nostalgic retrieval. I lose my way not yours. The losses involved in this book, as I indicate in my introduction, are losses of such things as we cannot help but know.

This book has taken me a long time to write. It was a difficult book to write. The arduousness was not the result of tricky and detailed research—that usually generates its own pleasures and satisfactions. Nor was it solely the result of life's rude interruptions, or that familiar and self-interrupting fear of having nothing to say about works that so many great writers and critics have addressed so lucidly and well. The hardness was in staying true to my responses to these devastating plays, to my reading and watching experiences, and to my growth (such as it is) in the conceptual reach of love, gratitude, and grief, as well as in the concepts of doing and acting, of giving and receiving, and of judging, that are explored in these plays. I had to think about my responses to the plays’ invitations and solicitations and how to articulate them, the role of these particular words in my life with them, in short, how I loved, grieved, or encountered or evaded my responsibilities in speaking. That is what was hard.

We are notoriously living in a time when political actors and technological innovations are creating a world in which it is hard to distinguish between the fake and the real. This is not possible without an abuse of language. Shakespeare's tragedies of exile depend on the idea that their central protagonists do not mean what they say because they do not know what they are saying, or because they are blinding themselves to the implications of what they are saying (Macbeth) or refusing the commitments and cares and specificities of language in staking out positions in relation to each other (Timon). This linguistic exile is a central idea in this book. Often through a tyrannous use of language such men might fantasize that it emerges from them unilaterally as if they were authors of themselves and that public language is merely an extension of their private wills. This is always tragic because in so doing they are losing their grip on reality, which happens because they cannot mean what they say, and so they become unintelligible to themselves and others. A loss of reality happens when we become unintelligible to each other, when we cannot find our feet with each other, as Ludwig Wittgenstein says.

Sandra Laugier has brilliantly pointed out that J. L. Austin and Stanley Cavell's Austin understood that truth is not merely empirically understood as a correct or incorrect reference, but rather it is extended across almost every dimension of language to accommodate what is fitting, what is appropriate, and what is the right thing to say and do. This is why finding just the right words can open up a way of understanding ourselves and others. But of course we have to consent to become intelligible to others because the necessity involved in meaning what we say is a condition of intelligibility. Each of these tragedies enacts a refusal of publicness; each of them then shows us how we might recover language and the real with it.

Why do I talk of recovering the real as if it had been lost? As Austin and Wittgenstein show, the relation of language and the world is far more intimate than can be described by the word “between,” as in the relationship between language and the world. We precisely lose the world when we use language not simply falsely, but ineptly, imprecisely, inadequately, hastily, or inappropriately. If we call someone mad when they are in fact sad, for example, then only a recognition of sadness will bring the world and the person back into focus. Falseness does not exist merely in lies but also in the sheer complexity of a situation that may be hard to discern and that does not always come into focus. When we get the right words, the mot juste, we feel that the world is lit up for us, so we are grateful to writers who can find the fitting words to light up our world and let its myriad aspects dawn on us. A political regime is always sick and corrupt when it corrupts language. Tragedy is often about the terrible dawning of reality on someone who had missed it and missed something in themselves. That is why failure and inadequacy are central to both Austin's and Wittgenstein's understanding of language as Cavell so memorably brought out. Shakespearean tragedy brings back life and language into a “reciprocal interiority” as Cavell defines it in The Pursuits of Happiness.

At the moment, we are living in a time of increasing authoritarianism in which truth is bent to accommodate the so-called strong men or is buried in a welter of misinformation, and at a time when humanistic study is under attack from without and from within. Now more than ever we need a raid on the inarticulate of Shakespeare's kind and the frameworks in which to value it.

Cavell is the great philosopher of Shakespearean tragedy. But this means not the application of his philosophy to tragedy. Rather Shakes­pearean tragedy allowed him to reconceptualize his understanding of skepticism. Cavell has redefined skepticism as an intellectualization, a conversion of the task of living with others into a solvable (or unsolvable) problem, and this redefinition is far-reaching and radical. His influence is all-pervasive in this book. This does not mean that his readings of these plays save me the trouble of making my own. There are several excellent accounts of Cavell's readings of Shakespeare's plays, and this does not repeat that labor. Rather Cavell's way of doing philosophy has provoked and inspired me into this act of criticism and essay in ethics.

This book is in my voice, but as I say in this book, my voice is mine as a responsibility and task not a possession. I have been in dialogue and collaboration with others all along the way, sometimes realizing only later how formative those voices were in mine.

This book has taken some time to write and I would like to thank the chairs of my department at Duke University, Len Tennenhouse, Rob Mitchell, and Charlotte Sussman, and to the deans of humanities, Gennifer Weisenfeld and Richard Powell, and latterly to William A. Johnson for allowing me to be relieved from teaching responsibilities at crucial times of this book's conception and completion (2012–2013, 2018–2019, and 2023). I also thank most profoundly the National Humanities Center for again allowing me the fantastic opportunity to initiate this book: I was the holder of the M. Abrams Fellowship in 2012–2013 and what a wonderful time to be there. The 2012–2013 fellows were an exceptionally fun crowd. My colleagues Keren Gorodeisky and Arata Hamawaki were most stimulating companions, and I enjoyed rich conversations with them that have definitely found their way into the book. Gillam and Brad and Sis made it possible for me to take some time at Nag's Head while I was completing my chapter on King Lear, and my progress was enabled by a powerful nor’easter that made the beach impassable! How lucky am I in such friends. The Hacienda crowd—you know who you are–brought laughter and joy at crucial moments, and to the clan of Miller (and Lloyd/Parrish) in and out of Appalachia, THANK YOU.

My colleagues at Duke have been at my side in the beleaguered and ever more crucial work of humanistic studies in and out of the classroom. I particularly wish to thank Tom Ferraro, Thomas Pfau, and Corina Stan, for believing that a life of the mind is a life worth living and for exemplifying it in their life and work. Kathy Psomiades, Charlotte Sussman, and Rob Mitchell, have been incredible colleagues from whose humane patience and practice I have learned much. David Aers has once again been at my side encouraging my progress and has been the most loyal, generous, and attentive intellectual companion as I harped on. . . . He has an unerringly judicious ear and matches that with truthful kindness and efficiency. Toril Moi and I have worked together in satisfying and productive ways in our writing, intellectual activities, and programs such as Writing is Thinking, and now, since we began a new graduate course on philosophy and literature, in our teaching. Her own brilliant and inspiring work on the revolution of ordinary language philosophy opens so many exciting pathways for thinking about the task of reading as acknowledgment and for the exercise of judgment in literary studies after Ludwig Wittgenstein.

To the actors and directors of the many riveting productions of the late tragedies I have seen over the years—thank you for continuing to take on the risky, compelling work of theater. You understand the dimensions of speech as action so practically, intimately, and integrally. You know about doing things with words as well as gestures.

I have worked out what I think about Shakespeare's plays by teaching them as well as reading and watching them. Jonathan—we thought about tragedy together and you brought the students to their feet. To my undergraduates at Duke, thank you for your great passion and enthusiasm for Shakespeare, and for testing out and exploring so much of the canon with me. Graduate students in various versions of my classes on “Tragedy and Philosophy” came on the journey of these great plays and read The Claim of Reason (especially the exhilarating and demanding part 4) with me. To my students in “Commitments of Speech,” thank you for testing out J. L. Austin in my company and providing your trenchant and engaging insight along the way.

Then there are the colleagues and friends who created important opportunities to try out this work in progress. Thank you to all my interlocutors and gracious faculty and graduate student hosts at many inspiring occasions over the years: at Johns Hopkins University; Harvard University; University of Virginia; University of Chicago; the Center for Philosophy, Arts, and Literature at Duke University; University of Edinburgh; University of Waterloo (Stratford Campus) and the Stratford Festival Theatre, where I gave the Landy Lecture; University of North Carolina, Asheville; University of Tennessee, Chattanooga; University of Southern Florida; State University of New York, Buffalo; and University of California, Los Angeles. Michael Schoenfeldt and George Hoffman kindly invited me to Ann Arbor to test out my work on King Lear. Their comments and the comments of Richard Strier stayed with me for years as I completed the chapter. Paul Kottman invited me to join him to discuss Shakespeare and the Humanities at the Shakespeare Association of America along with David Schalkwyck, and I have enjoyed all of our collaborations and conversations. Julia Lupton's kind invitation to participate in the Clark Lectures at UCLA resulted in an “Acknowledgment.” Thanks for the stimulus and for continuing this dialogue.

My husband, Bart Ehrman, has been understanding, kind, and loving. He has always spared the time to hear the ideas in this book taking shape. He understands the cost of living this book and the cost of living in this book. His advice is pragmatic, sane, and attuned to the reader. I am immensely grateful for his companionship and love and steadfastness on this restless writing adventure.

I have dedicated this book to my friend Daniel Miller, whose artistry and conversation are a source of great delight. And to all the men in my life who cry and who don’t cry. To accept our tears as gifts is a particularly demanding and sometimes impossible task for generations of men brought up to believe that boys don’t cry. The redefinition of our understanding of courage is at the heart of this book.

Over the course of writing this book, I published a group of essays exploring literary studies in the wake of ordinary language philosophy. Occasionally I have repeated sentences or ideas from these essays in this book. Readers can find those essays here: “Reading for Our Lives: A Response to Rita Felski's The Limits of Critique,” PMLA 132, no. 2 (March 2017): 331–36; “Ethics, Truth and Reading,” an essay on Toril Moi's Revolution of the Ordinary, https://nonsite.org/revolution-of-the-ordinary-literary-studies-after-wittgenstein-austin-and-cavell; “Acknowledgment” in Entertaining the Idea: Shakespeare, Philosophy and Performance, ed. Lowell Gallagher, James Kearney, and Julia Lupton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021); “A Vision of Language for Literary Historians,” in Wittgenstein and Literary Studies, ed. Robert Chodat and John Gibson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022); “Tragic Implication,” in Cavell's “Must We Mean What We Say?” at 50, ed. Greg Chase, Juliet Floyd, and Sandra Laugier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022); “Enter the Child: A Scene of Reading from Stanley Cavell's The Claim of Reason,” Philosophy and Literature 46, no. 2 (2022): 251–62.

I also published “Hamlet's Ethics,” in Shakespeare's Hamlet: Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Tzachi Zamir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), but there is little overlap between that essay and the chapter on Hamlet in Shakespeare and Loss. I published an early version of the chapter on Macbeth in “Losing the Name of Action: Shakespeare, Macbeth, and Speech as Action,” in Judgment and Action, ed. Thomas Pfau and Vivasvan Soni (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017), 95–112. My analysis of King Lear appears in abbreviated form in “Tragic Implication.” Early versions of both the King Lear and the Macbeth chapter have been thoroughly revised, expanded and transformed. All other chapters appear here for the first time.

I gladly owe thanks to Larry Rhu and Mike Schoenfeldt for their immensely thoughtful engagements with this book. Larry led the way with his insightful, delightful book about Cavell and Shakespeare, Stanley Cavell's American Dream: Shakespeare, Philosophy, and Hollywood Movies (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006). Above all, it is a deep delight to feel understood, and I thank them for their superbly helpful comments, (nearly) all of which I have carefully attended to. All the flubs, mistakes and errors, alas, are on my head! I also wish to thank Mahinder Kingra for his meticulous and generous reading and excellent shepherding of this manuscript to print, as well as the team at Cornell who helped get my work into production. Maureen O’Driscoll was a tactful and savvy copy editor, Karen Hwa and Debbie Ryan oversaw aspects of the production with admirable courtesy and efficiency. I feel very lucky in the whole team at Cornell University Press. And thank you to Rose-Lynn Fisher for permission to use “Grief and Gratitude” for the cover. I am glad my work led me to yours.