Shakespeare Reproduced

The text in history and ideology

Jean E Howard, Marion F O'Connor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136566646
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1987. The essays in Shakespeare Reproduced offer a political critique of Shakespeare's writings and the uses to which those writings are put Some of the essays focus on Shakespeare in his own time and consider how his plays can be seen to reproduce or subvert the cultural orthodoxies and the power relations of the late Renaissance. Others examine the forces which have produced an overtly political criticism of Shakespeare and of his use in culture. Contributors include: Jean E Howard and Marion O'Connor, Walter Cohen, Don E Wayne, Thomas Cartelli, Peter Erickson, Karen Newman, Thomas Moisan, Michael D Bristol, Thomas Sorge, Jonathan Goldberg, Robert Weimann, Margaret Ferguson.

1

Political criticism of
Shakespeare¹

Walter Cohen

WALTER COHEN teaches comparative literature at Cornell University. He is the author of Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1985).

Ideological criticism has finally had an impact on traditional areas of literary research in North America, nowhere more so, perhaps, than on Shakespeare studies. This essay concludes with a chronological list of political accounts of the playwright published in the 1980s (pp. 44–6), a list that is long and growing rapidly as the decade progresses. Fewer items might turn up in a similar compilation covering the entire first thirty-five postwar years. A comprehensive survey of recent Shakespearean scholarship would undoubtedly reveal that the majority of publications do not engage in ideological critique. Nonetheless, political interpretation has become central to work on Shakespeare; in North America this process of politicization occurred earlier than in most other fields; and the concerns and methods often pioneered in discussions of Renaissance writers and especially of Shakespeare have increasingly spread across the discipline – to the point where political approaches arguably form the cutting edge of academic criticism in the United States. The question facing sympathizers with these trends may be less how to defend a beleaguered position in an age of reaction than how to turn potentially hegemonic status within the discipline to useful political account. The following review of the causes, nature, and significance of the new writing on Shakespeare aims to begin answering that question.

A brief sketch of recent American criticism will help clarify the current situation. The dominance of New Criticism depended in part on the pervasive upper-class anti-Communist offensive often localized as McCarthyism. The conjunction of the resulting theoretical vacuum with the crises of the 1960s raised the question of what sort of criticism would inherit the academy. And the answer was theory, but at least initially not a theory growing out of the politics of the 1960s, and for a very simple reason: university activists were just too young to have an immediate, decisive impact. With some distortion the deconstructive criticism developed by Paul de Man may be considered the central movement of the 1970s. Its emergence in the United States was related to the rise of a grudging internationalism – really limited to France and West Germany – bound up with both the decline of American imperial power and, in the previous decade, the expansion of foreign-language and comparative literature programs. Perhaps one can also detect an émigré biographical imprint in the work of de Man and Geoffrey Hartman – a rejection of European political conflict in favor of the stability of American society. The result in any case was a powerful theoretical position that combined radical philosophical inquiry with ambivalence about political engagement.

Why does deconstruction now seem like only one of several lively forces in American criticism? Both university expansion and campus political activism in the 1960s potentially opened scholarly organizations as well as literary curricula to new interests. In addition the generation of the 1960s gradually came to academic prominence, a process partly evident in the emergence of the political concerns of younger deconstructive critics. Finally the New Right’s considerable gains during the Reagan administration have disturbed radicals and more importantly liberals, with the result that politics has acquired an urgency often absent in the late 1970s.

This is the context in which to view the new directions in Shakespeare studies. The 1980 point of departure adopted here is obviously arbitrary and would seem still more so if the bibliography also included articles, many of which date from the late 1970s. Yet books often have far greater institutional impact than essays. To this extent the beginning of the new decade marked a real shift, particularly in the United States, with the publication of the inaugural feminist (Lenz, Greene, and Neely, 1980b) and new historicist (Greenblatt, 1980) volumes on Shakespeare. In England, where leftist cultural criticism developed earlier, 1980 nonetheless represented a significant point of demarcation, with an intensified radical response to the recent victory of Thatcher, the extension of this work to Renaissance literature, and the publication of an important Marxist study of Middleton (Heinemann, 1980). The three approaches just mentioned – feminism and new historicism in the United States and Marxism in England – dominate current political work in the field. In the following pages little attention is accordingly given to psychoanalysis and to deconstruction except as methodological resources of more explicitly political theories. Third World and ethnic studies are regrettably relegated to the same subordinate role despite their obviously political thrust: a contemporary, full-length account of Shakespeare from the perspective of race and imperialism remains to be written (but see Tokson, 1982; E. Hill, 1984; Cartelli in this volume).

In this essay the “political” thus carries both a broader and a narrower sense than the one conveyed by traditional definitions of the term. On the one hand and for lack of a better word, it refers not only to government power but also to matters of race, class, and gender. On the other hand the political here polemically designates only critical or oppositional work. The vast majority of recent political writing on Shakespeare has sided with the victims of state power, class hierarchy, patriarchy, racism, and imperialism, a partisanship, it is worth asserting, not only compatible with but also necessary to a commitment to objectivity in scholarship. The narrow construal here of political criticism of Shakespeare is defined not only by the focus on oppositional work, but also by the nearly exclusive attention to feminism, new historicism, and Marxism. There are at least three justifications for these choices. Critics working from these perspectives tend most often to make political claims for their work; further, these theoretical positions do have connections with ongoing political practice; finally, and partly for this latter reason, such positions are most likely to have political efficacy. Undoubtedly this formulation indicates the subjectivity and arbitrariness unavoidable today in tracing the boundaries of the political. Yet one can concede as much and more while continuing to defend both the value of the category of political criticism and the appropriateness to contemporary Shakespearean criticism of the specific outlines of that category traced above.

A concern with political approaches to Shakespeare involves still other delimitations. Most obvious is the exclusive emphasis on Shakespeare and indeed on Shakespeare’s plays, an emphasis that may have local pragmatic uses but that is difficult to justify on theoretical grounds. The inclusion of works on English Renaissance drama that do not discuss Shakespeare (e.g. Heinemann, 1980; Renaissance Drama, 1982; Shepherd, 1986) would not significantly change the main lines of the argument, however. Probably more important is the omission of political criticism of Shakespeare produced outside the English-language world. Among recent specimens of this work readily available in English one might mention the studies undertaken from the perspective of semiotics in Italy (Serpieri, 1985), and of Marxism in Italy (Moretti, 1982) and the German Democratic Republic (Weimann, 1985, 1986; and the essays by Sorge and Weimann in this collection). Their exclusion makes it possible to highlight the institutional shift towards political criticism in Anglo-American Shakespearean studies.

This focus requires qualification, however. Although scholarship from both sides of the Atlantic receives extended treatment, the sociological reflections concentrate on the United States – only one index of the autobiographical orientation of the essay. On the other hand interaction between British and American criticism of Shakespeare is so pervasive as to preclude any strict separation. The mutual influence of these two traditions also seems certain to grow in the coming years. More generally, political readings of Shakespeare in the United States and England belong together as part of larger ideological and social trends – not only the prominent position of both countries in the international development of feminism, but also the belated emergence on the same terrain of a substantive body of socialist, often explicitly Marxist thought. At the very time that Marxism has gone into profound crisis in the Latin countries of Western Europe and apparently lost some of its freshness in the Federal Republic of Germany, it has come into its own, as an intellectual though not as a political paradigm, in the English-speaking world, where its previous influence was far less noteworthy (Anderson, 1984, 21–31).

Yet the differences between British and North American political approaches to Shakespeare are illuminating. Since Don E. Wayne addresses those distinctions at length in the next essay, only a few preliminary remarks will be necessary here. Many of the differences follow from the far greater weight of social class in England than in the United States. Thus the apparently fuller development of an autonomous feminism, and with it of an autonomous feminist criticism, may be correlated with the relative absence of class consciousness in the former colony; conversely, the pervasive connections between feminist and historical (especially Marxist) accounts of Shakespeare reveal the visible importance of class divisions in the former colonizer. One might also note the comparative insignificance of Marxist writing and the only recent emergence of new historicism in the United States, and in England the prominence of the Labour Party and of a socialist intellectual heritage.

The formalist legacy of New Criticism may have contributed to the characteristic tendencies in American political work on Shakespeare, and not only by encouraging the close readings one often finds in new historicist and even more in feminist discussions. The emotional distance between reader and text cultivated by New Criticism, and the national and geographical distance from Shakespeare are possible sources of the felt need for historical reconstruction. By contrast, English critics inherit not only the legacy of morally committed criticism associated with Leavis, but also the tradition of using Shakespeare as national icon of conservative continuity. These experiences have led in England, by way of reaction, to a far greater orientation toward the present and toward explicitly political concerns than one finds in the United States. Similarly, the hostility towards methodological and theoretical innovation typical of mainstream British academic criticism (but not of American literary study) has produced, again as an oppositional gesture, a more pronounced theoretical turn in English Shakespeare studies, at least as far as French theory goes. Given such distinct historical situations, it is not surprising that the British rather than the Americans consistently seek to recover a usable past, a potentially progressive Shakespeare. Such an enterprise has as a logical consequence a more intense concern with the performance of Shakespeare, a tendency no doubt reinforced by the far greater prominence of theater in England. Finally and perhaps surprisingly, British political Shakespeareans neglect popular culture more than their American counterparts do.

The comments that follow seek to respect both the congruities and the divergences among the various strains of political criticism of Shakespeare. Discussion of individual writers is incidental to an elucidation of larger trends. Previous review essays, to which these remarks are considerably indebted, have treated feminism obliquely or not at all (Goldberg, 1982; Dollimore, 1985a; Howard, 1986; Montrose, 1986). But there are encouraging signs of a more inclusive understanding of politics – for example the seminar on “Gender and power in Shakespeare” at the 1986 World Shakespeare Congress and the essays prepared for this volume. The strategy here will be to juxtapose the different political approaches to Shakespeare, criticizing each for its failure adequately to incorporate the theories, methods, and findings of the others. The justification for the procedure might be called anticipatory totalization. Totalization is itself a controversial ideal, one that has recently been defended (Cohen, 1985a, 21–31) and criticized (Wells, 1985, 1–19) from a Marxist perspective. It is adopted here in the hope that the disparate currents of political approaches to Shakespeare will prove fundamentally compatible. Yet totalization must be anticipatory because a genuine synthesis has not been achieved and cannot possibly be achieved within the narrow confines of Shakespeare studies. Political accounts of Shakespeare can contribute to a larger totalizing enterprise, however, especially if they are undertaken with an eye for systematic connections.

1

A development out of the women’s movement that reemerged in the 1960s, feminist criticism is, with the exception of New Criticism, the most widely practiced approach to Shakespeare in the United States today. This is just a particular instance of the more general rule noted above: political activism of the 1960s lies behind the political criticism of the 1980s. In retrospect one can recognize the distortion in considering deconstruction the central theoretical movement of the 1970s in the United States. The crucial trend was not deconstruction but feminism. But the women who invented American feminist criticism were neither old enough nor established enough to reshape literary study immediately. Their individual and collective prominence dates primarily from the current decade.

Feminist accounts of Shakespeare have not drawn equally on all tendencies in American feminist criticism. The second wave of that criticism, which stresses the female literary tradition and which came to the fore after 1975, has little to offer feminist Shakespeareans. Their formation is to be located in the earlier era of feminist criticism (late 1960s to mid-1970s) concerned with images of women. Here is a summary statement from the introduction to The Woman’s Part, the basic collection of feminist essays on Shakespeare:

The critics in this volume liberate Shakespeare’s women from the stereotypes to which they have too often been confined; they examine women’s relations to each other; they analyze the nature and effects of patriarchal structures; and they explore the influence of genre on the portrayal of women.

(Lenz, Greene, and Neely, 1980a, 4)

These concerns have continued to dominate feminist criticism of Shakespeare in recent years.

But one can also register the secondary influence on that criticism of several other theoretical positions, all of them prominent by the 1960s if not earlier. One thinks, for example, of the importance of psychoanalysis for Coppélia Kahn’s Man’s Estate (1981) or of New Criticism for Carol Thomas Neely’s Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare’s Plays (1985). As the only major discourse other than feminism that accords women a central position, psychoanalysis has obvious relevance. Within the narrower confines of academic literary study, New Criticism, though no longer hegemonic, has influenced nearly all contemporary critics and may remain the most widely pra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Political Criticism of Shakespeare
• 2 Power, Politics, and the Shakespearean Text: Recent Criticism in England and the United States
• 3 Theatre of the Empire: “Shakespeare’s England” at Earl’s Court, 1912
• 4 Prospero in Africa: The Tempest as Colonialist Text and Pretext
• 5 The Order of the Garter, the Cult of Elizabeth, and Class–Gender Tension in The Merry Wives of Windsor
• 6 “And Wash the Ethiop White”: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello
• 7 Renaissance Antitheatricality and the Politics of Gender and Rank in Much Ado About Nothing
• 8 “Which is the Merchant Here? and Which the Jew?”: Subversion and Recuperation in The Merchant of Venice
• 9 Lenten Butchery: Legitimation Crisis in Coriolanus
• 10 The Failure of Orthodoxy in Coriolanus
• 11 Speculations: Macbeth and Source
• 12 Towards a Literary Theory of Ideology: Mimesis, Representation, Authority
• Afterword
• Index