Review of Richard Strier’s Shakespearean Issues – Agency, Skepticism and Other Puzzles

The Wittgensteinian motto “Don’t think, but look,” which underpins Resistant Structures, also drives Richard Strier’s recent book, Shakespearean Issues – Agency, Skepticism and Other Puzzles (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023). Questioning once again the merits of both formalism and new historicism, Strier shows how it is through close-reading that we gain a new understanding of not only Shakespeare’s characters and plots, but also of the broader social and philosophical issues that intrigued him. In the tradition of Stanley Cavell, Strier persuasively advocates for what has been called “ordinary language criticism,” by suggesting we should pay the same attention to texts as we do to people on a daily basis, not being overly suspicious of them but being able to think about their intentions when choosing certain courses of action. The result is a wide-ranging, acute and provocative book, in which Strier demonstrates through detailed and complicated close readings how our knowledge about Shakespeare’s religious and epistemological beliefs might be amiss.

Shakespearean Issues is argument-driven, moving smoothly from a particular scene to its function in the whole play and from individual plays to Shakespeare’s work more broadly. The book is divided into three parts – Individuals, Systems and Beliefs – which question the idea that Shakespeare did not hold positions in the plays. Part I, “Individuals,” is divided into three chapters, which problematize the topic of moral agency in Shakespeare. Looking into the relationship between characters and their actions allows Strier to argue that Shakespeare aims to complicate our thinking about agency and motives. Chapter 1, “Excuses, bepissing and non-being,” considers how “Shakespeare thought that persons have an oblique and complex relationship even to their sincere utterances” (19). Hamlet, for example, seems to take little responsibility for his actions while judging others severely. We suddenly realize, in one of the book’s best chapters, that Hamlet was once a happy prince and that Rosencrantz and Guilderstern might be undeserving of their tragic faith (chapter 2, “Happy Hamlet”). Chapter 3, “Resisting Complicity,” critiques both Harry Berger Jr and Stanley Cavell’s readings of King Lear.

Part II addresses “Systems.” Chapter 4, “Shakespeare and Legal Systems: The Better the Worse (but Not Vice Versa)” argues that “One of the things that he [Shakespeare] seemed consistently unable to imagine was a reasonably attractive and well-functioning legal system” (89). The chapter focuses on Henry V to show how Shakespeare appeared to think that the “triumph of impartial justice is hardly to be celebrated” (99), but also on Measure for Measure in order to sustain that when the play ends the judicial system is worse “than it was at the beginning” (106), ending with a reading of The Merchant of Venice to show how we are given a picture of a legal system which “either acts truly impartially and allows monstrosities as legal, or acts partially—to protect a ruling elite” (111). Chapter 5, “King Lear and Human Needs,” moves persuasively to the topic of poverty as a social condition in the play and discusses a “system that truly allows for each person to have enough” (130). The three chapters which conclude part II are dedicated to The Tempest, each to a particular topic in the play. Chapter 6, ”The Tempest (I): Power” returns to Strier’s important ideas on service and “virtuous disobedience” that he discussed in Resistant Structures, but focuses on Ariel and Caliban. The idea that the model that Shakespeare employs for the island stems from Spanish colonizers (I would add the Portuguese to this infamous list) makes sense: “he seems to have neither built, planted, not ‘set’ anything on the island,” (140) and “he appears to be a governor more than a planter” (140). It also makes sense to think about Caliban and Ariel as lower and upper servants and to associate Caliban’s dreams of usurpation to Antonio’s. Strier concluding claim in the chapter—“Yet, the deepest fear of The Tempest seems to be not that England’s struggling colonial ventures would fail, but that they would succeed” (155)—seems appealing to those who, like myself, like to think the best about Shakespeare, even if it is, perhaps, an overstretch.

Chapter 7, “The Tempest (II): Labour,” turns to Montaigne to a rich discussion labor and on Shakespeare’s word “foison”—natural fertility or “abundance without sweat or endeavour” (157)—to reflect on how The Tempest never idealizes labour. Everything is work, even, as Prospero will realize, pardoning (170). Finally, in chapter 8, “The Tempest (III): Humanism,” Strier argues that Prospero purposefully kept Miranda ignorant, which leads to the understanding that “Prospero’s condescension to Miranda flowed from the same source as did his domineering over Caliban and Ariel: the perverse pleasure of misusing both power and authority.” (185). We realize that teachers and tyrants share similar power, and that as Antonio and Caliban could not resist their natures so, too, Prospero appears to share the perverse power of colonial administrators.

Part three, divided in three chapters, is dedicated to beliefs and explores Shakespeare’s relation with skepticism. Chapter 9, “Skepticism (I)” discusses religion and its relation to beliefs in witches, fairies, mock-devils and mock-miracles with readings of Comedy of Errors, Macbeth and King Lear to argue that “what Shakespeare does (…) is to create a thoroughly secular world” (209). In Shakespeare, “theological mysteries point not to theological mysteries but to human ones” (209). Chapter 10, “Shakespeare and Skepticism (2),” argues that Shakespeare was an epistemological realist and a pre-Cartesian skeptic, “one who believed that the senses, corrected as necessary by reason and judgment, are reliable, and that our minds can know the world and—to at least the same extent that we can know ourselves—other people. Chapter 11 focuses on The Winter’s Tale and considers it a celebration of “dear creating nature,” as Paulina would put it (248).

By the time we reach the book’s ending, we realize Strier has devised an elaborate system of knowledge and belief for Shakespeare’s world. Certain conclusions in Shakespearean Issues might be puzzling, such as “it would seem by the time he wrote The Tempest, Shakespeare may have come to see writing and staging plays as work, and as coercive, morally dubious work at that” (170). Nonetheless, the book makes an important contribution to the understanding of Shakespeare, and it will be difficult to reimagine certain plays without considering Strier’s acute, rigorous close-readings.