Review of Periodicals (55.4 Winter 2005/2006)

Aussie King Lears

One thing the American Revolution gave its heirs was the right not to apologize for liking Shakespeare. A citizen of the U.S. notices this when reading Canadian, East Indian, or Australian reports on Shakespeare in the theater that judge the actors’ and directors’ successes at “claim[ing] Shakespeare for their nation . . . against a history of Britishness.” Since 1776 freed some (not all) in the U.S. to enjoy a Shakespeare who was not foisted upon them — at least not by the English — anti-British Shakespeare, or the genre of criticism that views its native theater that way, is to most Americans a foreign subject (pun intentional). I noticed with fascination that what I would describe as a terrible production of King Lear in Sydney in 1837, in which the actors didn’t know their lines, was for Australian scholar Philippa Kelly a post-colonial critical opportunity to transform “an unfortunate moment in Australia’s performance history . . . to one of glorious insubordination.” Aussie oi! Indeed, many Australian Lear productions which have ranged, judging from Kelly’s description of them, from the provocative to the awful may be brought to join the effort “proleptically [to] challeng[e] the cultural predominance that Shakespeare’s plays have enjoyed in Australia for almost two centuries.” Why not just discard Shakespeare, methinks? The answer might be that the producers, directors, and actors were not necessarily thinking along the same lines as Kelly is here when they chose plays and performance strategies. They may have wanted not to defy Shakespeare, that “cunningly-contrived tool manipulated by cultural power-brokers” (a phrase which Kelly, to her credit, utters in a manner that’s tongue-in-cheek), but simply to stage his plays. Kelly herself notes that “the frequency of Shakespeare’s staging in our theatres has a lot to do with the guarantee his name provides at the box office.” Right! People like him. In fact, Kelly offers little evidence that the productions she describes were designed to be more saucily Australian than oppressively British or than something else. Her comment about Geoffrey Rush’s Fool in a 1988 Australian production is a representative example of her critical overreaching: through Rush’s antics director Gale Edwards “approached the task of dismantling the king’s centrality . . . through irreverent humor, a quality some might see as quintessentially Australian.” Some Australians might. Kelly is on surer ground when she slides from the discussion of “Australian” Lears to that of feminist Lears, partly because she then quotes directors who are explicitly in accord with her interpretations of their intentions. A 2003 Sydney Lear, in which the daughters began the play in Kabuki-like makeup and gradually shed their masks as the play continued, bodied forth director Gary Dooley’s fascination with “[t]he women in King Lear,” who are unfortunately “often played in a one-dimensional way.” Great photographs of different productions accompany Kelly’s essay, as well as interesting notes, though any article in which footnotes take up one-half to two-thirds of every page suffers from a design flaw. Footnotes treat us to fascinating accounts of Kelly’s ancestors’ separate journeys to Australia, a summary of feminist criticism of Shakespeare, and an analysis of an Australian school syllabus; these constitute separate mini-essays (Where were her editors?). On the page-tops rests her main essay, which, though logically flawed in some of its arguments, is yet well worth reading for its illuminating survey of interesting Australian King Lears.

[Performing Australian Identity: Gendering King Lear,” Theatre Journal 57 (2005): 205-227]

The Marlowe Industry

To broaden a suggestion made by Michael P. Jensen in SNL’s last issue, everyone should read everything Lukas Eme writes. Marlovians and Shakespeareans especially should read this award-winning essay, in which young Swiss Eme challenges every one of our received notions about who Christopher Marlowe was by exposing the paucity of proofs underlying them. He begins with the picture, reminding us that there is no evidence, beyond scholars’ wish for an image of Marlowe, that the portrait of the baby-faced cutie featured on the covers of many editions of Marlowe’s plays is really him. From thence he proceeds to a rigorous exposure of the faulty logic that has been used conclusively to identify “[t]he commodity called Marlowe” as an “atheist,” a “homosexual,” and a playwright whose own ambitions were closely aligned with those of his main tragic characters. The idea that Marlowe was gay has perhaps a bit more to support it than Eme allows, though he is right to call the evidence too slight to support a firm conclusion: it is true that the only written evidence “the biographical record to support such a view is Marlowe’s flippant statement, according to the Baines note, ‘that all they that loue not Tobacco & Boies were fooles’” (my emphasis), but to be yet unmarried at 29 was not typical for an Elizabethan man of any class, and is suggestive. Still, Erne effectively undermines the general credibility of the Baines note, which charges Marlowe with “blasphemous remarks” that Baines himself confessed to having made in the early 1580s; and of Thomas Kyd’s charge that an “atheistical tract” found in his room was Marlowe’s, since Kyd had been tortured and had much to gain from such an accusation. As for the now gospelish notion that Marlowe was assassinated, Eme, citing Paul E. J. Hammer, shows that “[o]n inspection, the elaborate construction that sets Marlowe’s death in the context of court intrigue and intelligence service collapses like a house of cards.” Since we like cloak-and-dagger stories, however, “pseudobiographical investigations in which historical evidence happily mixes with fanciful invention” abound, “supplemented by explicitly fictional treatments,” which he catalogues. (In a recent article, the
imaginative Stephen Greenblatt, welcoming Riggs’s suggestion that Queen Elizabeth herself wanted Marlowe silenced, provides a probable  reason: she found his plays disturbing.’) Erne’s essay is best in its critique of our insistent coupling of Marlowe’s own character with the protagonists of his tragedies. He demonstrates that only our imposition on Tamburlaine’s prologue of a post-Renaissance image of Marlowe as poetic and philosophical revolutionary suggests the conventional reading, by which the “jigging veins of rhyming mother wits/ And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay” belong to inferior plays which Marlowe intends to surpass. Instead, Erne shows, these lines announce the coming play, which will start clownishly and then proceed to Tamburlaine’s “stately tent of War.” This essay will lead us all to cast a fresh eye on Marlowe, and to consider a revelation that lurks in the essay’s shadow: that many of its statements about the commercial romanticizing of Marlowe apply also to the “Who Was Shakespeare?” industry, which attempts to substitute someone we think we can know (Bacon, Oxford; a Will in the world — ironically, even Marlowe) for William Shakespeare, whom we can’t.

[“Biography, Mythography, and Criticism: The Life and Works of Christopher Marlowe,” Modern Philology 103:1 (August 2005): 28-50]

Universal Shylockery

Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy bring Nietzsche and Shakespeare together to propose that the roots of capitalism, or “Shylockery,” are dramatized in The Merchant of Venice. There are good things and bad in their essay. Its opening is terrific — “How do we breed an animal with the right to make promises?” — and its subsequent text is often this eloquent, yet the prose of the whole is as frequently muddied by horrible diction like this here: “Saint Paul’s sense of the essential self-division of the Christian subject, a subject constituted by the guilt that divides it — ‘for the good that I would, I do not, but the evil that I would not, that I do’ — lies in a fundamentally contractual relationship, Vertragsverhdltnis.” Anybody can see that the best part of that sentence is the middle (what would the Geneva translators have made of “the essential self-division of the Christian subject”?). Also, the authors are annoyingly in love with their own cute word play and quippish literary quotations (in Merchant “[p]ersonality is pursonality”; the “commercial orb” is like the “urb” of Venice; “Shylock does the police in different voices” — shouldn’t that be “do”? — and so on). The authors do transcend their own verbal mishaps to make their point, though that’s mostly unoriginal: that “merciful” Christians in Merchant are as motivated by desire for payoffs as is Shylock, and that this is seen in the play’s pervasive mercantile imagery. What is original in the essay are the matching of ideas found in Merchant to philosophy later propounded by Nietzsche and an interesting reading of Antonio’s melancholy as a condition auguring a world-shift into capitalism. This last is worth quoting: “Antonio .. . is sad. . . as though manifesting the symptoms of a trauma brought on by a disaster that has not yet happened, or has not yet (as Beckett would say) taken its course, .. . The Antonian melancholy that frames The Merchant of Venice is the anticipation of a system of universal Shylockery: the world as a market regulated .. . by a credit rating.” These excellent sentences do not, of course, describe the whole world Merchant presents (or the whole of our own world), and I dispute the authors’ definition of “credit rating” as a gauge of “the nature and extent of one’s debt” (they are similarly slippery with an etymology of the word “mercy” which inverts the meaning of that word as it’s used both generally and in the play). A postscript states that one of the authors, newly resident in New York, “has been unable to get a credit card… . [bJecause he does not have a credit history, a history of debt,” and has been told that to get one he has to “get in debt.” That’s amusing, but wrong, since credit card companies don’t want records of debts but assurances that applicants pay them. As Shylock might ask, are you “good” for it?
[Universal Shylockery’”: Money and Morality in The Merchant of Venice,” Diacritics 34.1: 3-17 (Spring 2004): 3-17]

A Tale of Bawdry, Or He Sleeps

In a penetrating essay which will turn readers into sniggering school children when they read anything, Eric Naiman explores Nabokov’s fascination with Shakespeare’s bawdy. His article is sophisticated and sophomoric at the same time. What makes it worth reading is not just its sophistication — its genuine, carefully-looked-for discoveries about the presence of Shakespeare and bawdy in Lolita — but its self-consciousness. Naiman shows us he is aware that the whole subject is a bit twisted, in a wonderful conclusion where he finds himself finding ribald pun everywhere, and admits that this can happen when language is forced “to lodge for a bit too long” in “perversion.” Some readers might be bored by the juvenile obsession with puns about sex tee hee! found in much contemporary literary criticism, but since Naiman shows conclusively— by quoting Nabokov’s private correspondence as well as closely reading Lolita — that exposing the obsession is “essential” to an understanding of the novel, we must allow it here. (“In Nabokov there is no poetry without this perversion,” he says.) The Shakespeare connection is carefully and convincingly forged not only ina summary of Nabokov’s known interest in Shakespeare and a catalogue of bawdy Shakespearean puns, but in Naiman’s noting of the general critical interest in Eric Partridge’s Shakespeare’s Bawdy, published only six years before Lolita. (He even ingeniously suggests that Clare Quilty, a character in Lolita who has written a faux-Elizabethan play, stands for Arthur Quiller-Couch, professor of Shakespeare at Cambridge when Nabokov was there.) Of course, as Naiman also notes, Nabokov didn’t need Partridge to find (and wasn’t kept by Quiller-Couch from finding) dirty puns in Shakespeare. His mind was a sufficiently twisted tool. Naiman shows that Lolita not only includes coded references to Shakespeare (like “WS 1564” and “SH 1616,” license plate numbers found in the register of a hotel visited by Humbert Humbert and Lolita) but is packed with Shakespearean bawdy puns, most of which begin with “c.” What’s the point? one might ask, but Naiman tells us: the novel is not just filled with bawdy but is about bawdy run amok, a perverse verbal idiom well-fitted to someone like first-person-narrator and dirty old man par excellence Humbert. Whether Nabokov was himself a victim of this “verbal venereal disease” the reader of this article — which quotes, as I said, from Nabokov’s personal writings — may judge.

[“A Filthy Look at Shakespeare’s Lolita,” Comparative Literature 58:1 (Winter 2006): 1-23]

Note

See Stephen Greenblatt, “Who Killed Christopher Marlowe?” New York Review of Books 53:6 (April 6, 2006): 46. For full disclosure I must admit I suggested the exact same thing in a novel (Will, 2004) before either Riggs’s biography or Greenblatt’s review was published. I never dreamed what I thought was fiction would soon be proposed as biography.