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Article Excerpt
The Age of Shakespeare, by Frank Kermode (New York: Modern Library, 2004), 204 pp., $21.95.
Shakespeare, by Michael Wood (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 344 pp., $29.95.
Shakespeare: The Biography, by Peter Ackroyd (New York: Doubleday, 2005), xvi + 548 pp., $32.50.
Shakespeare: The Seven Ages of Human Experience, 2nd ed., by David Bevington (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), xi + 258 pp., $19.95 paperback.
Shakespeare After All, by Marjorie Garber (New York: Pantheon, 2004), xii + 906 pp., $40.00.
Shakespeare for All Time, by Stanley Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), xxi + 424 pp., $40.00.
Shakespeare's Face: Unraveling the Legend and History of Shakespeare's Mysterious Portrait, by Stephanie Nolen with Jonathan Bate, Tarnya Cooper, Marjorie Garber, Andrew Gurr, Alexander Leggatt, Robert Tittler, and Stanley Wells (New York: Free Press, 2002), xvii + 334 pp., $27.00.
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, by Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 2004), 390 pp., $26.95.
A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, 1599, by James Shapiro (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), xix + 376 pp., $27.95.
SITTING JUST A FEW INCHES under ye olde blacke beames in Hussain's Restaurant in Church Street, Stratford-upon-Avon, I once had the melancholy thought that the historical William Shakespeare (THWS), for all the omnivorous appreciation of human experience registered in his plays, and despite having gone to school (probably) just down the street, had most likely never tasted a good lamb vindaloo. Since then, however, I have come to associate "Shakespeare," if not THWS, with the smell of espresso. The books listed above have a lot to do with that association. Most of them have found a spot on the Drama or Literature shelves of Borders and Barnes & Noble, some of them cover-side out, a few of them cover-side out on a display table at the end of the aisle. Most readers of this journal will, I suspect, agree with the following responses to this phenomenon:
* Seeing the subject of one's professional expertise for sale in Borders and Barnes & Noble is like seeing a place you know well in a commercially successful movie. You feel validated.
* As a result of all those Foucault-inspired sessions at MLA and SAA in the 1970s and '80s you have to wonder what the commercial viability of these books (price: $19.90 to $40.00) means politically. What kind of "social work" are these books doing?
* At the same time, you can't help wondering why that person over there with the Prada shoulder bag--yes, him--is pausing at the Shakespeare table on his way to the Self-Help section.
* You're envious that no one has offered you a six-figure advance to write a book like one of these.
With these nine books it's probably fair to say that critical reception in academic journals has stood in inverse proportion to each book's commercial success. All nine principal authors have written for a "general" readership. It would be altogether hypocritical of me to follow the example of other academic reviewers, since, with respect to subjects other than early modern England ca. 1550-1700, I myself am just such a "general reader." As the sixty-year-old version of the child who would take to bed a volume of The World Book Encyclopedia, 1956 edition, I still maintain a general reader's interest in anthropology, art history, history, linguistics, musicology, philosophy, and psychology--this despite Prof. J. W. Johnson's warning in graduate school that I was a dilettante and would never get anywhere in this profession if I didn't settle down. The best way to keep up with these diverse fields, I've found, is not to wander aimlessly in the journals section of the university library but to read the reviews in the TLS, to which I've subscribed since 1972, the first year I could afford it, and use those reviews to choose books for sampling and, on rarer occasions than I'd like to admit, for cover-to-cover perusing. I am to anthropology what an anthropologist is to Shakespeare, and I've read these nine books with that fact in mind. Who or what is "Shakespeare" in each case? What kind of story does the author tell? To what ends? My angle here is, I suppose, narratology, but with awareness of political consequences (what kind of negotiation is this author making, or refusing to make, with the dire events of 2002-5) and psychological factors (why do readers want to encounter just this story?).
About What and in What These Nine Books Are
Why these nine books? Why now? The few documented facts about THWS are, after all, already well established. Almost all of these authors refer and defer to Sam Schoenbaum's William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (1975). The "Shakespeare appropriation" business is likewise well covered already. In addition to Schoenbaum's Shakespeare's Lives (1991), we have Michael Bristol's Shakespeare's America, America's Shakespeare (1990), the essays collected in Jean I. Marsden's Appropriating Shakespeare (1992), Michael Dobson's The Making of the National Poet (1992), Tom Cartelli's Repositioning Shakespeare (1999), Ania Loomba's Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (2002), not to mention a new electronic journal, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. As Alan Sinfield puts it in Faultlines (1992), "Shakespeare is a powerful cultural token, such that what you want to say has more authority if it seems to come through him." (1) Even readers outside the academy can't help being aware of the huge disparity between, on the one hand, the 218 documents reproduced in Schoenbaum's A Documentary Life and, on the other, your local rep theater's production of Love's Labor's Lost set on Mars in the year 2407, just before the planet is smashed by a meteor. "Shakespeare" is positioned somewhere in between Schoenbaum's historical documents and last night's stage production. It is to that vast space--"Shake-scene" in Robert Greene's coinage, "Shakespace" in Donald Hedrick and Bryan Reynolds's (2)--that these nine authors address themselves. What they find there and convey to their readers, their "general readers," gives a much better idea of the place of "Shakespeare" in public discourse than most academic books can manage. After all, the academic books are about "Shakespeare" in public discourse, not in it.
As apologists for the Earl of Oxford's authorship case are fond of pointing out, it is curious that early eyewitnesses to THWS's plays in performance do not mention the author by name. Thomas Platter, Simon Forman, Henry Jackson: in their brief jottings these witnesses to performances of Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and Othello during THWS's lifetime cut straight to the fictions they saw performed and the fictional persons who happened to strike them. Who wrote the scripts seems to have been unimportant to them. When THWS does figure in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century documents, he is only a name--a name that gradually emerges with more authority as time goes on. The name inscribed in ecclesiastical records in 1564 (birth), 1582 (marriage), 1583 (fatherhood), and 1585 (fatherhood) becomes: a factor in a lawsuit in 1589; the occasion for a punning sneer by Robert Greene in 1592; the signatory to dedicatory epistles (but not a title page author) with the publication of Venus and Adonis in 1593 and Lucrece in 1594; a payee in court financial accounts in 1595; the object of a peace-bond and the petitioner for a coat of arms on his father's behalf in 1596; the recorded purchaser of a prime piece of Stratford real estate in 1597; at last a title-page author with the publication of quartos of Richard II, Richard III, and Love's Labor's Lost in 1598; and finally, in 1623 (seven years post-obit), "Mr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE" in all caps on the title page to the First Folio. (3) The rest, as they say, is history. Who the subject of that history might be remains in doubt. What is Shakespeare? A word. What is in that word "Shakespeare"? What is that "Shakespeare"? Air. A trim reckoning! (4)
In addition to the two syllables, we might locate "Shakespeare" in the engraved face that stares at the viewer with two left eyes in Martin Droeshout's portrait in the 1623 folio or perhaps in the stout trunk, two arms, two hands, one neck, one head, two lips indifferent red, one nose, and two eyes with lids to them that compose the monument on the north wall of Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, or even in the bones that may or may not still lie under the stone inscribed "GOOD FREND FOR IESUS SAKE FOREBEAR TO DIG THE DUST ENCLOSED HERE." Beyond that, there is not much to go on. Greenblatt acknowledges as much. Near the beginning of his preface to Will in the World, Greenblatt announces that his aim is "to discover the actual person who wrote the most important body of imaginative literature of the last thousand years" (12, emphasis added); near the end, he confronts the impossibility of knowing for sure just which "Simon Hunt" in surviving written records was master of the Stratford grammar school when the "Gulielmus filius Iohannes Shakspere" of the parish register may or may not have been a pupil there and confesses, "in these details, as in so much else from Shakespeare's life, there is no absolute certainty" (19). One has to face the fact that THWS is a function of the system of words within which "Shakespeare" happens to figure at a given moment, in given circumstances. Different forms of discourse need a different "Shakespeare," and the nine books under review here deliver several.
Rather than examine each of the nine books individually--other reviewers, after all, have done that--I will ask eight questions and see what Peter Ackroyd, David Bevington, Marjorie Garber, Stephen Greenblatt, Frank Kermode, Stephanie Nolen, James Shapiro, Stanley Wells, and Michael Wood have to say for themselves, or rather, what they have to say for themselves to general readers about "Shakespeare." Here are the eight questions:
* Who is the protagonist?
* Who are the antagonists?
* What...
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