Shakespeare and Appropriation

Christy Desmet, Robert Sawyer, Christy Desmet, Robert Sawyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415207263
• eBook ISBN: 9781134622610
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The vitality of our culture is still often measured by the status Shakespeare has within it. Contemporary readers and writers continue to exploit Shakespeare's cultural afterlife in a vivid and creative way. This fascinating collection of original essays shows how writers' efforts to imitate, contradict, compete with, and reproduce Shakespeare keep him in the cultural conversation. The essays: * analyze the methods and motives of Shakespearean appropriation * investigate theoretically the return of the repressed author in discussions of Shakespeare's cultural function * put into dialogue theoretical and literary responses to Shakespeare's cultural authority * analyze works ranging from nineteenth century to the present, and genres ranging from poetry and the novel to Disney movies.

Part 1
Appropriation in theory

1
Alas, poor Shakespeare!
I knew him well

IVO KAMPS

Not all the water in the rough rude sea

Can wash the balm from an anointed king.

(William Shakespeare, Richard II)

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

(T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”)

Sometime in 1790, William Cowper composed his “Stanzas on the Late Indecent Liberties Taken with the Remains of the Great Milton.” “Ill fare the hands,” Cowper writes, “that heav’d the stones /Where Milton’s ashes lay! /That trembled not to grasp his bones, /And steal his dust away” (1926:399). A small stone in St. Giles, Cripplegate, still marks the spot where Milton was buried. But the poet’s body is no longer there:

In the eighteenth century, drunk after a party, some “gay young blades” dug up the body and pulled it to bits. Hair, teeth, fingers, ribs, and leg-bones were said to have been peddled by relicmongers. So, the last remains of [England’s most famous Puritan poet] suffered the fate of a Catholic saint.

(Wilson 1983:259)

Six years later, in 1796, a group of workmen dug a vault next to the grave of Shakespeare in Holy Trinity and reported that when they accidentally “opened one side of the poet’s tomb,” they “found nothing except a hollow space where the coffin may have lain” (Hamilton 1985:4).¹ Had Shakespeare fallen victim to grave robbers as well? “Cvrst be he that moves my bones”—so reads the playwright’s gravestone. Did he fear grave robbers and relic mongers, or was he trying to ward off the sexton, who would occasionally remove skeletons to the “bone house” to make room for fresh corpses? We may never know, but that Shakespeare was acutely aware of the ironic and violent fate a poet’s body might suffer is certain. In Julius Caesar, for instance, Cinna the Poet is torn to shreds by an angry mob, first because the crowd believes him to be one of the conspirators, but ultimately for his bad verses. In the current debate over critical appropriations of Shakespeare, the connection between the poet’s body and the reception of his verses is quite suggestive because the anxiety over the mutilation and destruction of the literal body has its corollary in today’s anxiety over the appropriation of the literary body.

In 1990, Alvin Kernan, a distinguished and widely respected Renaissance scholar, announced the death of literature in a book that received favorable reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times, and other publications with wide circulation. From the reactions to The Death of Literature, it appears that many share its author’s apprehension that literature, which was once the proud repository of much that was held sacred, valuable, and universal in society, has lost its viability in our present-day culture. Kernan points to several factors contributing to literature’s demise in the postmodern era—television, a crumbling educational system, rampant relativism, and multiculturalism, to name just a few—but he also holds the current generation of literary critics responsible for literature’s passing. The problem, as he sees it, is that structuralists, deconstructionists, cultural materialists, new historicists, Marxists, and feminists have “emptied out” literature “in the service of social and political causes that are considered more important than the texts themselves, to which the texts are, in fact, only means to a greater end” (Kernan 1990:212). Like Richard Levin, Brian Vickers, Edward Pechter, Graham Bradshaw, and others who have taken issue with recent critical developments, Kernan does not deny that literary texts contain traces of past cultures, such as the oppression of women and class inequality. But he finds it impossible to envision how literature, when “stripped of any positive value” and viewed as “the instrument of oppression, furthering imperialism and colonialism, establishing male hegemony, suppressing any movement toward freedom from authority,” can “be considered worth reading and interpreting” (213). Literature is dead, and all that is left are the type of “relic mongers” who sold Milton’s hair, bones, and teeth for profit, or, in the uplifting words of Kernan, a bunch of Marxists, feminists, and other radicals who “fight” over “the right to identify the smells arising from the literary corpse” (5).

Has literature been emptied out of meaning and “positive value,” only to be pressed into the service of what Graham Bradshaw demeaningly calls “ideological critique” (1993:6–7)? Are today’s critics irresponsible, self-absorbed “gay young blades” who pull the poet’s body to bits and sell the remains? These kinds of questions are misleading: they misconstrue the locus of literary value and modus operandi of educational institutions. But they are asked so often by influential people reaching large audiences that we do well to entertain them seriously.² An American pundit like George Will, for instance, gets to announce in Newsweek, a publication that reaches an audience far beyond the sphere of academia, that “[c]riticism displaces literature and critics displace authors as bestowers of meaning” (1991:72). The study of literature, Will promulgates, is reduced to sociology, and sociology “to mere ideological assertion.” The ultimate goal of the radicals, as he sees it, is to discredit “the books and ideas that gave birth” to “Western Civilization.” And because Will sees the ideas contained in literature as those that shape the “national mind” of the United States—what Will calls our nation’s “real Constitution”—it is easy for anxious minds to link the death of literature to total anarchy and the end of civilization as we know it. George Will’s panicked hyperbole goes so far as to announce that Lynne Cheney (then chairman of the National Endowment of the Humanities) had a more crucial role in our “domestic defense” than did her husband Dick Cheney, then Secretary of Defense. For, so says Will, the “foreign adversaries her husband, Dick, must keep at bay are less dangerous, in the long run, than the domestic forces with which she must deal” (72). What is more, this type of alarmist language is not unique to the far right. Harold Bloom, for instance, loudly echoed Will and, to a lesser extent, Kernan when he recently condemned political critics as “worse than the enemy [and as] desecraters of Shakespeare” (Bloom 1998a).

On the other hand, most of us would agree with George Will, and in fact insist, that there is an indisputable relationship between literature and society, and that critics and teachers play an integral role in the dynamic of that relationship. In the national mind, it seems that teachers and literary scholars are still revered. What is more, whatever respect accrues to those who teach against the critical and cultural grain is probably misplaced because much of it stems from university administrators and non-academics who still believe professors of literature to be time-honored guardians of transcendent wisdom and knowledge—they just do not know what we really do. But how long will even this misplaced trust continue if people start listening to Will, Kernan, Vickers, and like-minded voices who portray radical teachers as enemies of the people? Now it should be clear that Levin, Kernan, Pechter, and Bradshaw are well to the political left of Will. Their criticisms of the various new approaches are, for the most part, also more local, subtle, fair-minded, and sophisticated than Will’s uninformed, wholesale condemnation of seemingly all members of the Modern Language Association. But their work is highly receptive to appropriation by anyone with an ax to grind against “dangerous” critical approaches and the current trends in English departments and universities.³ For anxious minds, it is easy to (mis)read Richard Levin’s attack on certain aspects of feminist criticism as an attack on feminism in general.⁴ How big a step is it from there to Kernan’s death of literature and from there to Will’s decline of the national mind? A giant leap for some but only a teensy step for the George Wills, William Bennetts, and Allan Blooms—all of whom address vast audiences—of this world. How long will we last if we are portrayed as “killers of literature,” as “grave robbers,” and “desecraters of Shakespeare” in politically conservative election platforms? How long will literature last in institutions of higher education?

Depending on which conservative critics you read, radical critics are charged with interrogating, torturing, mutilating, and “distort[ing]” (Levin 1988:136; see also Will 1991; Vickers 1993: 415) texts until they yield meanings that confirm the critics’ political proclivities. In these accounts, enough violence is perpetrated to kill or, at the very least, to maim beyond recognition, the literary text of old. But that is of course only half the story. While Kernan brings to view literature’s death, Vickers, Bradshaw, Will, and Levin insist that when the radical critics are done butchering the text, they reanimate it, not with the original life with which the author first infused his creation but with a false, ideological life (see also Levin 1990:501 and 1997:533; Vickers 1993:415–16; Bradshaw 1993:34–124; Will 1991). The radical critic thus emerges not merely as the mutilator and relic monger of literary bodies, but as a literary Dr. Frankenstein who stitches the mangled body back together and resuscitates it with political lightning to produce a counterfeit life.

Neither the grave-robber metaphor nor the Frankenstein metaphor is quite apt here because not even Kernan really believes that literature is teetering on the edge of the grave. (He is far too astute a scholar to waste his time on a corpse.)⁵ What is dying is a brand of literary interpretation that has installed literature as the record of the greatest accomplishments of Western civilization. Kernan, it is clear, uses his “death of literature” rhetoric to create a sense of alarm, a feeling that unless right-minded people do something about those radical critical approaches now, we will soon have to do without literature. George Will amplifies this point to absurdity when he dubs radical critics the new enemy within. Kernan, therefore, is not so much giving the literary corpse its last rites as he is prematurely eulogizing literature in order to re-appropriate it for an out-of-fashion critical sensibility.

In the context of critical appropriation, Shakespeare’s corpse/corpus therefore more closely resembles the corpse of philosopher and inventor Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) than it does the mutilated body of Milton or the patched-up creature of Frankenstein. Bentham’s bodily remains, which he donated to science when he died, are still on display in the foyer of University College, London (Bentham 1999a). The “skeleton is seated, wearing Bentham’s everyday clothes, his wide-brimmed straw hat upon his [stuffed] head, and the faithful Dapple in his hand” (Costigan 1967:25). He sits there, a stuffed and constant reminder of his own greatness and, by extension, of the greatness of the college that he helped found and that proudly displays him. What is more, according to one story, a video camera is permanently pointed at Bentham, so that every few minutes an image of his current state is posted on the World Wide Web. That Bentham’s body is lifeless and relatively unchanging apparently does not eliminate the need to make it continuously available for mass appropriation. Indeed, this appears to be the point of a Website about Bentham (Bentham 1999b), which notes the irony that the inventor of the panopticon (a glass prison that allows for the continuous and complete surveillance of the inmate) could himself be the most closely observed person in the world. Now the story goes that as a yearly prank, students from a rival college steal Bentham’s corpse, temporarily hide it, and claim it, and its cultural legacy, as their own. The body becomes temporarily unavailable. University College reclaims the body, which is returned in time, and so Bentham’s corpse and legacy are passed back and forth with definite regularity. This passing back and forth, this annual reappropriation of the corpse, though it may be partly apocryphal, is nonetheless an apt metaphor for the Left—Right debate over who owns Shakespeare. Leftist criticism may not actually be agreeable to returning the stolen Shakespearean body to the traditionalists, nor may the traditionalists agree to the theft, but every time Jonathan Goldberg or Catherine Belsey goes after Levin, or Bradshaw goes after Greenblatt, or Levin goes after feminists, or Pechter goes after the Left and the Right, or Vickers goes after everybody, the Shakespearean body is circulated—is passed around freely—among the most fierce rival critics. Such circulation constitutes literary life.

Traditionalists could not be further off the mark when they accuse radical critics of killing Shakespeare, but it could make some sense if they were right. It requires no explanation why Shakespeare, who has been the property of a conservative intellectual elite for most of this century, should attract traditional scholars. But we may wonder why critics dedicated to profound social change would waste their time on an author who, in the work of some new historicists, is portrayed as an extension of the state apparatus and reproducer of the socio-political status quo. Clearly, if ideology is the central concern, then bourgeois, patriarchal, authoritarian Shakespeare promotes the wrong values. What is more, as Terry Eagleton has conceded on several occasions, a new reading of a Shakespeare play—no matter how radical—is not going to bring about the revolution. Why, then, not remove Shakespeare from the curriculum and replace him with authors who better suit radical agendas?

The question is naive, and the answer is simple: because Shakespeare serves radical critics just as well as he serves conservative ones. Shakespeare has accrued so much cultural capital over the years that all sides have equal need of him—professionally, politically, and financially.⁶ To let conservatives “have” Shakespeare would be strategically stupid. A competent Marxist or feminist reading of his work instantly situates the critic at the heart of academic debate, in a place where not only Shakespeareans but literary scholars of all fields converge. Likewise, a conservative critic who wishes his or her views disseminated among the largest possible literary audience is most likely to achieve that aim with a study connected to Shakespeare, who remains the most widely read author. The list of scholars—radical and non-radical—who boast Shakespeare as the centerpiece of their career is long and growing longer every day. Shakespeare is where the “money” is—sometimes quite literally. When, as an ambitious graduate student, I edited Shakespeare Left and Right for Routledge Press, one of my professors was quite taken aback by the size of my advance. He wrote to Oxford University Press and asked why he was getting less for his new book on Oscar Wilde than his student was getting for a mere essay collection. I thought it was a good question. The Oxford editor answered simply: Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s centrality in our universities is, of course, partly driven by his centrality in our cul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• General editor’s preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART 1. Appropriation in theory
• PART 2. Appropriation in practice
• Further reading
• References
• Index