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Article Excerpt
Some man or other must present Wall; and let him have some plaster, or some loam, or some rough-cast about him, to signify wall; and let him hold his fingers thus, through that cranny shall Pyramus and Thisbe whisper.
Bottom, A Midsummer Night's Dream
To say that we must be as suspicious of the interests of intellectuals as we are of any other social interests is not to imply that we should or somehow could reject them. To the contrary: we can act in good faith only as long as we recognize that there is no escape from the consequences of possession of cultural capital, just as there is no way of getting outside the game of value judgment and the game of cultural distinction.
Frow, Cultural Studies and Cultural Value
Constructing concepts and ... "common names" is really an activity that combines the intelligence and action of the multitude, making them work together. Constructing projects means making exist in reality a project that is a community. There is no other way to construct concepts but to work in a common way.
Hardt and Negri, Empire
I
IF RECENT PUBLICATIONS are any indication, academic discourse in the United States about popular culture and Shakespeare constitutes a distinctive and potentially burgeoning subfield. That field is not wholly equivalent to work on Shakespeare films, although Roger Manvell, Jack Jorgens, and, more recently, Anthony Davies and Peter Donaldson, among many others, have contributed to the discourse around productions of Shakespeare in media other than print. (1) Still, each of the critics named generally reads the films as texts whose justification can be found in the self-contained and self-legitimated protocols of cinema studies, rather than as a subset of an alternative cultural formation focused on the pervasiveness of mass media, understood as standing in some contestatory relation to the cultural field for which Shakespeare is deemed metonymous. Although it has undoubtedly been influenced by the startling volume of Shakespeare-inflected films of the 1990s, and abetted by an efflorescence of references to Shakespeare on TV, in advertising, in business manuals, and other apparently exotic locations, a genealogy for pop Shakespeare would have to take into account two moments in American academia: the emergence of cultural studies as a university discipline in the United States on the one hand, and on the other, the publication of Lawrence Levine's historical account of Shakespeare's place in nineteenth-century popular culture, Highbrow-Lowbrow. (2)
A systematic treatment of the genesis of cultural studies lies beyond the purview of this essay. (3) Nevertheless, a few germane aspects of its history may be isolated. While cultural studies in the United States has sometimes been considered coextensive with work on identitarian formations concerning race, gender, and sexuality, the field of Shakespeare and popular culture has taken its agenda from an object rather than an identity; in this it reveals some affinity with the work of the so-called "Birmingham School." It was Raymond Williams who famously asserted the ordinariness of "culture"--that is, culture in the anthropological sense--as an antidote to education understood as an investiture in elite signifying practices, in Culture as validated by Arnoldian and Leavisite discourse. (4) In contradistinction to a Great Tradition of English literature or an equally sacerdotal discourse of art or classical music, Williams, Richard Hoggart, Paul Willis, and others acknowledged that a curriculum of rarefied texts was inextricable from political questions: if education is a matter of class reproduction, then high literacy is a method of gatekeeping and exclusion, and reading elite texts becomes a species of epistemic violence. (5) Rather than perpetuate an Oxbridge-inflected vestment in Culture, from which working-class subjects either felt themselves alienated or from which they were, in fact, debarred by educational tracks, many Birmingham scholars focused their critical and pedagogical attention on the practices of everyday working-class life, a shift that necessarily brought to the forefront the role of mass media in the production and maintenance of that life.
Although I have characterized this particular strain of cultural studies as founded on an object, for Birmingham critics, who saw pedagogy as a form of activism, that object was foremost a way to realize a historical inflection in social relations rather than an end in itself: the study of mass culture was, in other words, a strategic method, an engagement with the class struggle via the role education plays in social reproduction rather than with topicality for its own sake. The American academy, however, has generally been less concerned with questions of class politics; and insofar as "popular culture" is, like society, a recognizable institutional category, possessed of an eponymous academic association, work in Shakespeare and popular culture cannot be said to stand alone in thinking of both terms as effectively self-explanatory. Yet this hypostasizing eliminates all fungibility from the two presumptive registers it juxtaposes, ignoring both the elusiveness of the term "popular" as well as the essentialized and rarefied positioning of Shakespeare the juxtaposition subtends. There is good reason to reconsider the utility of the bimodal system within which work has proceeded: insofar as education--primary, secondary, and teriary--is increasingly under siege economically and ideologically, maintaining that Shakespeare represents a sort of royal road, a signifier of the elite status academia conveys, fails to recognize that received descriptions of how culture is segmented must be rethough at critical junctures.
Hence the light this essay hopes to cast on the analytical consequences of two recent book-length studies on Shakespeare and popular culture, Douglas Lanier's Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture and Richard Burt's Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares; precisely because these studies aim to map out the terrain of the popular as each sees it, they represent exemplary engagements with topical analysis in the wake of cultural materialism, which during the 1980s and 1990s asserted that engaging with Shakespeare meant engaging with the political uses (generally conserative, generally dominative) to which his texts were put. (6) Each of the more recent books presents itself to academic audiences as a guide to what is in effect an underworld, one where Shakespeare appears in venues as diverse as pornography and literature for young adults as well as in films and television parodies. These popular migrations from the homeland of academia, each author avers, cannot but refract back on elite culture, and to have consequences for academics who are presumed to have sworn allegiance to it. Yet because Lanier and Burt tend to take as given, first, that describing culture as bifurcated is adequate, and that, second, only the popular side of the binary really needs consideration, the restrictive institutional fixity of elite Shakespeare that undergirds their studies threatens to obscure the very cultural problematic--which is, inevitably, a political one--they offer to introduce and explicate.
Thus the importance that might be accorded to Levine's study. I am not claiming it exerts a direct influence on the scholars with whose work I am concerned: Highbrow/Lowbrow is cited as foundational by neither Burt nor Lanier, who rather affiliate their work with an overtly (and post-Birmingham) cultural studies focus on popular formations as modeled by John Fiske, Michel de Certeau, and Andrew Ross, among others. Rather, Levine might be considered a determining feature of the discursive landscape of recent American culture work (particularly that on Shakespeare), or as exerting a peculiar gravitational influence regardless of intent. Although Levine has been justly criticized for "democratic nostalgia" in summoning forth a nineteenth century in which Shakespeare was common property (apparently irrespective of race or gender, since he mentions neither), for my purposes it is precisely his schematic and weakly political modeling of the field of culture into high and low, or, alternatively, elite and popular, that makes Levine a compass point. (7) It is as though his argument--that Shakespeare in the early twentieth century became the property of the educated--has shed whatever historical character it possessed, and has come to represent brute fact beyond which, apparently, there is no going. (8) The twentieth-century cultural hierarchy he describes as emergent has become fixed as the cultural topography of the twenty-first, an all-but-ineluctable feature of the discursive terrain. Hence the durable legacy of high and low that structures the two monographs I have named, and that belies the hybrid signifiers each critic deploys ("Shakespop" in the case of Lanier; "Shakesploi" or "ShaXXXspeare" for Burt). Rather than put that hybridity to the test and thereby summon into being the terms for a new discursive object, the main critical task now seems to be to map the terrain of popular Shakespeare, whether diachronically or syncronically, the better to know how it pays homage to, burlesques, appropriates, or (most starkly in the case of Burt) renders itself irrelevant to, elite Shakespeare. (9)
Yet is far from clear that Shakespeare has ever wholly been surrendered to elites, even at the moment of comparative cultural triumph Levine records. Alan Sinfield, for one, claims only a relative shift in emphasis was accomplished at the turn of the twentieth century, the cultural manifestation of a class struggle engendered by mass immigration and industrialization. And there would be still other ways to intervene in Levine's historical account, given the very different cuts considering race or gender would make across the cultural field extant at the time Levine describes as the heyday of Shakespearean popularity: little discussion has concerned Shakespearean formations early in the nineteenth century, before slavery was abolished; in segreated spaces in the postbellum South; or, for that matter, in discourses and institutions to which women had restricted access. (10) Just as important, it is also far from demonstrable now that elites--assuming for the moment that the term has an identifiable referent--have sole title to Shakespeare: the numerous examples Lanier and Butt adduce, for instance, seem to demand a greater cultural familiarity, and that on the part of a larger audience segment, than the claim of elite or academic location can tenably support.
Some of this is doubtless the effect of pre-tertiary school curricula; Shakespeare has become an all-but-mandatory locus of study over the course of...
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