Summer 1999
Volume 25, Number 4

If, for the sake of a crowded audience you do wish to hold a lecture, your ambition is no laudable one, and at least avoid all citations from the poets, for to quote them argues feeble industry. -- Hippocrates, Precepts

The staffer who found this quotation apposite might have been inspired by Bolt's ardent preface, which explained the playwright's choice of hero: "A man takes an oath only when he wants to commit himself quite exceptionally to the statement, when he wants to make an identity between the truth of it and his own virtue; he offers himself as a guarantee. And it works. There is a special kind of shrug for a perjurer; we feel that the man has no self to commit, no guarantee to offer."3 But quoting Robert Bolt lacks the force--historical, religious, canonical--of quoting Sir, later Saint, Thomas More. Perhaps mindful of Robert Burton's famous declaration about quoting from the classics, "'A dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself,'"4 the tall, stooped Hyde craned across the ages, speaking to the future through a voice from the "past."

That I elect to stress the spuriousness of this past by enclosing the word in quotation marks will indicate, at the outset, one of the curious properties of these typographical signifiers. For in their present condition of use, they may indicate either authenticity or doubt. Make that "authenticity" or "doubt." This is a property to which we shall want to return. But let us continue, for a moment, with the impeachment hearings.

In quest of authority, congressman Hyde also, it is almost needless to say, quoted Shakespeare in his opening remarks. And here the author was so familiar that he did not need to be named. "Our cherished system of justice will never be the same after this," Hyde intoned. "Depending on what you decide, it will either be strengthened in its power to achieve justice, or it will go the way of so much of our moral infrastructure and become a mere convention full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" ("FC," p. A26).

It's probably unsportsmanlike to fault Hyde for wrenching this quotation out of context; both "sound and fury" and "signifying nothing" have long ago passed into the general wordhoard, having been borrowed by everyone from William Faulkner to Malcolm Evans.5 But MacbethÕs famous cry of despair on the meaninglessness of (his) life, uttered in response to the news of his wife's death, seems in a way singularly inappropriate for a political speech the entire point of which is to mark the meaningfulness of the moment. "Life," in Macbeth's formulation,

is
A poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.6

A scholar once wrote of Shakespeare that "to cite him in a lecture or an essay was to give lustre and prestige to the words and ideas that surrounded his magic name."9 But does that lustre attach itself to the speaker as readily as to the writer? Or does the "poor player" syndrome kick in, reminding the audience all too clearly that the speaker is not Shakespeare or, to cite another once-canonical text, "not Prince Hamlet," but rather an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--
Almost, at times, the Fool.10

Who is speaking when we speak in quotation? In the case of Hyde's address to the Senate, was it Hyde, More, or Robert Bolt? Hyde, Macbeth, Shakespeare--or J. Alfred Prufrock?

1. "Front and Center, Five Accusers,"Boston Globe, 15 Jan. 1999, p. A26; hereafter abbreviated "FC."

2. See Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons (New York, 1962), p. 140. Here is how the event was recorded by More's son-in-law and biographer, William Roper:

Whereas the oath confirming the Supremacy and matrimony was by the first statute in few words comprised, the Lord Chancellor and Master Secretary did of their own heads add more words to it, to make it appear unto the King's ears more pleasant and plausible. And that oath, so amplified, caused they to be ministered to Sir Thomas More and to all others throughout the realm. Which Sir Thomas More perceiving, said unto my wife: "I may tell thee, Meg, they that have committed me hither for refusing of this oath not agreeable with the statute, are not by their own law able to justify my imprisonment. And, surely, daughter, it is great pity that any Christian prince should by a flexible council ready to follow his affections, and by a weak clergy lacking grace constantly to stand to their learning, with flattery be so shamefully abused."

Marjorie Garber is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English and director of the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of three books on Shakespeare -- Dream in Shakespeare (1974), Coming of Age in Shakespeare (1981), and Shakespeare's Ghost Writers (1987) -- and of a number of books of cultural criticism and theory, including Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (1992), Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (1995), and Dog Love (1996). Her most recent book is Symptoms of Culture (1998).