A new book by professor Marjorie Garber of Harvard,
Shakespeare and Modern Culture, is coming out next month
to show us, according to the author, “that Shakespeare makes
modernity and that modernity makes Shakespeare.” Or to put it
another but equally paradoxical (or tautological) way, “the
timelessness of Shakespeare is achieved by his recurrent
timeliness.” If anyone can play this game, I would just like to add
that the most timeless thing about Shakespeare in the 40-odd years
since Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary has been the
conceit of his timeliness. Or do I mean that the most timely thing
has been the conceit of his timelessness? Either way, it does seem
odd that our postmodern era, usually so averse to fine-sounding,
even inspirational language like this about those once considered
the “great authors” of the past, should have stuck so stubbornly to
this quasi-scriptural approach to the writings of a 444-year-old
Warwickshire poacher. Professor Garber is taking up the torch
passed to her from Professor Harold Bloom of Yale, who 10 years ago
in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, seemed to have
offered the ne plus ultra of claims to the Bard’s
divinity.
Some artistic objects of worship are not even so old—a little
over a century now—as the religion of art itself. A new exhibition
of the works of Mark Rothko (d. 1970) at the Tate Modern in London,
for example, has led more than one British critic to view his work
as a kind of religious experience. Hailing him as “arguably, the
last great painter,” Mark Hudson writes in the Daily
Telegraph that “sitting among the paintings for the Four
Seasons restaurant, engulfed by the brooding ox-bloods and
burgundies of those enormous canvases, you do feel a sense of awe
appropriate to a place of worship.” I suppose that God (or
“something beyond the material”) must these days be acknowledged to
be—like the beauty with which Mr. Hudson appears to be identifying
Him—in the eye of the beholder. But if, like me, you are inclined
to resist the altar-call of the aesthete, whether it is for Rothko
or for Shakespeare, that may be because there is so often a
political subtext involved when the artifacts of the past are being
prized out of their historical contexts and set up as timeless
monuments of the human spirit.
Professor Nigel Smith of Princeton, for instance, offers a
variation on Professor Garber’s Kottish air when he asks, in the
title of his most recent book, “Is Milton better than Shakespeare?”
His conclusion is that, if Milton is not better than Shakespeare,
he is at least much more like us—or, rather, like our progressively
inclined Ivy League professors. This is true, I suppose, though it
relies on a definition of “better” to which few outside the Ivy
League itself would subscribe. But the professors are pedagogues,
and now that neither schoolmaster nor professor is any longer
licensed to beat a knowledge of the classics into his charges, such
people have to find ways of making the great works of the past
attractive, even “fun,” to the young—who are always more or less
resistant to education. The easiest way to do this is to pretend
that their authors were a lot like themselves and were attempting
to produce works of art or literature that are readily
comprehensible within the familiar, pop-cultural frame of
reference.
Only, of course, they weren’t. Most writers have something
“timeless” about them, and Shakespeare has more than most. But to
focus on that to the exclusion of the cultural context that gave
their words meaning to their contemporaries produces distortion and
misunderstanding. The danger of the Kott- Bloom-Garber approach is
that, in the effort to make education attractive, we make it into a
form of miseducation, which in turn gives rise to an entire culture
of literary and educational theory all directed to proving that
miseducation, in this sense, is just as good for tender minds as
proper education—or, actually, better, as it doesn’t leave them
with any false sense of security about knowing “the truth.” We of
the Conservative Tastes may have lost the culture war, as Irving
Kristol once observed, but we can still distinguish ourselves from
the victors by remaining true to the concept of truth.
LAST YEAR at about this time, I wrote (“Losing Sight of
History,” TAS, November 2007) of how those who package and market
the works of the past to today’s audiences so often take care to
demolish their historical context in the process. That took off
from a feminist and camp re-imagining of The Taming of the
Shrew at the Washington Shakespeare Theatre, and this year we
find the same outfit at it again with an all-male version of
Romeo and Juliet. Now I know that the idea of a
gender-bending approach to Shakespeare is as old as Shakespeare
himself. Elizabethan England was as shocked as the Taliban is today
by the idea of women on the stage, so all the female parts were
played by boys—not, by the way, men, as at the Shakespeare Theatre.
But beginning with the licentious Restoration period in 1660 and up
until only a generation ago, men’s parts were played by men and
women’s parts by women. I guess it must have seemed logical at the
time. Now it is merely an ideological tic for Shakespearean
directors to ignore that sort of patriarchal stereotyping.
One of the pioneers of the unisex approach to Shakespeare, Mark
Rylance, loved these interchangeable roles for men and women and
himself played Cleopatra on a famous occasion. I remember seeing in
London three years ago, in the last year of his directorship at the
Globe, a production of Troilus and Cressida—chiefly noted
at the time for its use of what it advertised as Elizabethan
pronunciation (it sounded like a combination of an Irish brogue and
a backwoods American accent)—in which those famed Homeric warriors
Aeneas, Agamemnon, Nestor, and Odysseus were played by women with
fake beards. This was particularly ridiculous when you consider
that Troilus and Cressida—like the Iliad, the
Odyssey, and other treatments of the legend of the Trojan
War—is all about masculine property rights in their women. The
casting, therefore, became not an elucidation of the play’s meaning
but an attack on it.
I never understood quite what, if any, purpose this allegedly
daring casting had beyond affirming the director’s own allegiance
to the neo-Marxian ideology that regards traditional gender roles
as a form of class oppression. (That, by the way, is also how the
personal became the political, something that in this
ever-entertaining election season we all have reason to be thankful
for.) But the birds with the beards certainly didn’t have anything
to do with Shakespeare as anything but a brand name. It is in this
cultural context that we should see the Shakespeare Theatre’s
casting for Romeo and Juliet—which went on to elicit an
equally silly, all-female version of the same play from Taffety
Punk, another local company, by way of answer. And why not? The
more the merrier! “The idealistic conceit that both versions seem
to embrace,” wrote Peter Marks in the Washington Post, “is
of a world slowly growing in enlightenment—one that more readily
accepts one’s own determination of how masculine or feminine, or
male or female, to be.”
Akiva Fox, the Shakespeare Theatre’s “Literary Associate,” took
a similar line, noting that “Juliet alone calls for an alternative
to the unending spiral of proving manliness” by calling on Romeo to
“refuse thy name.” Alas, “their world will not allow renaming; the
pressure to be a man and a Montague conquers all.” Note “their
world”—as if it were not the world but some alternative world that
could simply be rejected in favor of one more like our own: the one
Mr. Marks saw as “growing in enlightenment.” Such utopian thinking
Mr. Fox, too, attributes to “the thinkers of Shakespeare’s time”
who (he alleges) “were beginning to recognize the dangers of this
reckless drive to prove manliness.” Not a very hard thing to
recognize, really, but we have to make allowances for the primitive
ignorance in which such people lived. They were only waiting for
someone with the dazzling intelligence of Shakespeare to come along
and point out to them the folly of their way of life and all their
“gendered” assumptions about the world. If you believe that, then I
suppose it is but a short step to believing that Shakespeare is God
and Akiva is his prophet. But Shakespeare, I can be pretty
confident in saying, would not have agreed.
James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident
scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author
of Honor: A History and the new book Media Madness:
The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by
Encounter Books.
