understanding allegory; from harry potter to shakespeare
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Article first published in the Clyde Fitch Report on the problems some people have in understanding allegory, and how they therefore misunderstand literary texts and the author's intention--from Harry Potter to Shakespeare. In the case of the Religious Right that misunderstanding led them to get the Potter books banned from libraries. In the case of the theater industry it leads to producing superficial Shakespeare performances that prevent the underlying allegorical meanings from being seen.TRANSCRIPT
8/7/09 7:49 PMHeretic’s Foundation IX: What Does Harry Potter Have to Do with Shakespeare? « Clyde Fitch Report
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Heretic’s Foundation IX: What Does Harry Potter Have to Do withShakespeare?Friday, August 7, 2009Heretic’s Foundation
By John [email protected] to the Clyde Fitch Report
Since J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series began, there has been major opposition from those who see satanicsubtexts in her world of witchcraft and magic. Opponent have made it their business to ban Rowling’sbooks from schools and libraries, making them some of the most controversial literature of the still-young
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21st century. There’s even an entire Wikipedia entry dedicated to the religious response to Harry Potter.However, those who see in them the instruments of Satan received a severe blow in October 2007 whenRowling herself clearly indicated she had written the books as a Christian allegory.
This really should not have been a surprise, for the allegorical content was blatantly obvious. Lisa Miller, inan article in Newsweek, found the clearest evidence in Harry walking voluntarily to his death, after which heencounters a father figure at King’s Cross, and then returns from death. In a long article for a website,Abigail BeauSeigneur argued that the great magician Harry Potter is an allegory for Christ, that “Rowling istelling an allegorical gospel.” Whereas the Christ figure is imagined as having a halo or nimbus, HarryPotter has a broomstick named nimbus. Whereas Jesus was supposedly holy, Harry Potter has a wand madeout of holly (and it repels evil). Harry Potter’s most powerful spell (“expecto patronum”) is Latin for “Ilook for a protector” and generates a stag, which as BeauSigneur notes is a traditional symbol of Christ.Like Christ, Harry Potter clearly fights against the powers of evil and demons/dementors. Both began inhumble circumstance — Harry Potter, in the first book, sleeps in a broom closet, equivalent to a stable.Jesus was born to Mary, who was associated with a lily, the symbol of the Annunciation; Harry Potter’smother’s name was Lily. Dumbledore — which comes from the Old English word for ‘bee’ — is, like thebee, a symbol of wisdom and possibly a symbol of the Holy Spirit.
I find it encouraging that the world’s most popular author uses allegorical religious symbolism. Even moreinteresting is that we have an extremely rich, living author who writes wildly popular allegorical books thatare utterly misread and not understood by her fans. As one article noted,
“If J.K. Rowling intends her Harry Potter books to be Christian allegories and to communicatebasic Christian messages to her readers, then the complaints of the Christian Right are about aswrong as they could be. One might be able to argue that Rowling isn’t doing a very good job atcommunicating Christian messages, such that she is too easily misunderstood.”
Yet the allegories are simple and straightforward. They are perfectly clear to anyone with a good knowledgeof English literature and the Bible, which 50 years ago, in England at least, could be taken for granted.Today, unfortunately, the general public does not have that knowledge, let alone an ability to engage inallegorical and intertextual reading. They cannot see an allegory when it stares them in the face because theyhave neither the background nor the skills to do so. Writing on one of the nation’s ultra-conservativewebsites in 2007, media personality Jerry Bowyer put his finger on it in an article titled “Harry Potter andthe Fire Breathing Fundamentalists”:
“so much of the religious right failed to see the Christianity in the Potter novels because itknows so little Christianity itself….the gospel stories themselves, the various metaphors andfigures….are largely unknown to vast swaths of American Christendom, including its leaders.”
And this brings us to Shakespeare. Here, too, we have a writer with a voluminous output who offers asurface that is brilliant, captivating and disguises a religious allegory underneath. However, the challenge ofunderstanding it is much worse. Not only is the author dead, but the texts were written in an archaic Englishmore than 400 years ago; the different plays do not tell a single coherent story with 30 or so characters, butcontain more than 1,000. Instead of being simple allegorical transpositions of the themes in the NewTestament, they are complex inversions, reversals and parodies. Instead of being written to covertly promoteChristianity, it appears they were written for the opposite reason — to covertly oppose it. Worse,institutional resistance from those who insist that the texts only contain surface meanings is not a decade oldbut as old as the texts themselves; their beliefs are entrenched in universities and in theaters that cannotunderstand Shakespearean allegory any more than the religious right can fathom Harry Potter — they
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simply don’t have the necessary background knowledge. In other words, as independent scholar JohnMcMichaels notes in his website, “We have lost sight of the notion of complex allegory.” It will probablynever come back.
I wrote my thesis on allegorical dramaturgy in Shakespeare at the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford-Upon-Avon. I am thus horrified by New York productions of Shakespeare that seem actor- and star-struck,concerned entirely with the entertaining surface and not about meaning. Consider, for example, As You LikeIt. I have seen no productions, other than my own, that show it to be a Biblical allegory from Paradise to theFlood and covering, in the process, two characters — one called Jakes (Elizabethan for toilet), and one whois an allegory for its inventor:
I have also seen several Hamlets, but none showing Ophelia as an allegory for the Virgin Mary or that thesewing and nunnery scenes are rewritings of the Annunciation.
The Dark Lady Players’ demonstration on the afternoon of Sept. 5 at Manhattan Theatre Source and inWashington Square Park will be the first. I have seen many productions of Romeo and Juliet, but never oneshowing the Nurse Angelica as the angel Gabriel who in the Nurse’s scene mentions Susan (I.iii.18-19)because this is from the Hebrew word Susannah, meaning lily, the symbol the Angel gives to Mary at theAnnunciation. I have seen many productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but never one revealing theallegorical nature of the characters, though over the last decade Professor Parker at Stanford has writtenseveral major articles such as ‘Murals and Morals; A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (1998) which set out theiridentities very clearly. Again, it was left to the Dark Lady Players to put on the world’s first productionillustrating this level of meaning. Next year, they will go to a college in Massachusetts to show why, inTwelfth Night, Orsino is melancholy, who Cesario and Sebastian really are, and why Malvolio is an allegoryfor the demoniac Legion at Gadara (Mark 5:1-20) and what exactly happens to everyone when he runs offat the end.
To perform the surface verse without a dramaturgy that shows what the verse actually means allegorically
8/7/09 7:49 PMHeretic’s Foundation IX: What Does Harry Potter Have to Do with Shakespeare? « Clyde Fitch Report
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risks treating the audience like dummies. They will be entranced by the beauty of the verse, like the mostuneducated members of Elizabethan theater, and will look no further. And that would do a great disserviceto them, to the plays and to their author.
John Hudson is a strategic consultant who specializes in new industry models and has helped createseveral telecoms and Internet companies. He has recently been consulting to a leading think tank on thefuture of the theater industry and is pioneering an innovative Shakespeare theory, as dramaturge to theDark Lady Players. This Fall he will be Artist in Residence at Eastern Connecticut State University. Hehas degrees in Theater and Shakespeare, in Management, and in Social Science.
The views expressed in Heretic’s Foundation are not necessarily those of The Clyde Fitch Report.
This entry was posted on Friday, August 7th, 2009 at 11:53 am and is filed under Heretic’s Foundation. You can follow any responsesto this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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