"Although women did not begin performing in his plays until several decades after the playwright’s death, it is hardly surprising to encounter a quotation from an actress in a scholarly volume on Shakespeare. Ellen Terry conducted a lively debate with Shaw over her interpretations of various characters. Sarah Bernhardt was among the many women who have taken on the role of Hamlet, making up, after a fashion, for female forebears denied the chance to play even Rosalind or Viola or Lady M.
But you certainly don’t expect to hear from Ali MacGraw. I wouldn’t want to classify this placid movie star of the 1960s and ’70s as the very last actress I would expect to be offering insights on Shakespeare — Jessica Simpson would come a lot farther down the list — but still, the inclusion of a quotation from MacGraw in Marjorie Garber’s new book, “Shakespeare and Modern Culture,” drew a raised eyebrow.
But you certainly don’t expect to hear from Ali MacGraw. I wouldn’t want to classify this placid movie star of the 1960s and ’70s as the very last actress I would expect to be offering insights on Shakespeare — Jessica Simpson would come a lot farther down the list — but still, the inclusion of a quotation from MacGraw in Marjorie Garber’s new book, “Shakespeare and Modern Culture,” drew a raised eyebrow.
A smile, too. There is much heady scholarship in Garber’s wide-ranging survey of the ways in which “the timelessness of Shakespeare is achieved by his recurrent timeliness.” MacGraw, the “Love Story” star, is in the impressive company of gleamingly illustrious intellectual eminences like Freud and Marx, not to mention respected literary critics from Hazlitt to Foucault. But the book is as much about the uses (and abuses) to which Shakespeare has been put in the last few centuries, with a concentration on the one just past, as it is about the plays themselves. So Garber’s range of references encompasses a dizzyingly diverse cast of characters, from political pundits to gurus of the business world, from theoreticians known mostly to academics to the British rock band Dire Straits.
This capacious reach is actually the book’s signal achievement and its primary flaw. That’s a fat paradox, I know, but I’m playing Garber’s own game. “Shakespeare and Modern Culture” is founded on proving the truth of a mind-bending formulation, that “Shakespeare makes modern culture and modern culture makes Shakespeare.” The history of the plays as they have been performed and debated across the centuries is “the story of a set of mutual crossings and recrossings across genres, times and modes.” The book’s overarching idea derives from the rhetorical device known as chiasmus, or “crossing of words” — the theoretical two-way street illustrated by that phrase about Shakespeare both making and being made. “The structure of thinking exemplified by chiasmus,” Garber writes, “works both structurally and symbolically: the productive confusion between art and life, inside and outside, container and contained was essential to both the stability and the destabilization of Shakespearean theater.” Seemingly opposed ideas — or chronologically distant phenomena — are made to converse, and the conversation often brings forth bright streams of revelation, if also the occasional banality.
We seem to have strayed a long way from Ali MacGraw, but it should be emphasized that Garber — a Harvard literature professor and the author of “Shakespeare After All,” a big, terrific study of the whole canon, as well as several other books on varied subjects (real estate, transvestism, dogs) — writes mostly lucid, engaging prose that requires little recourse to a Glossary of Academic Literary Jargon. Following her along the many intellectual crosswalks of the book will pose no major obstacles for the general reader.
“Shakespeare and Modern Culture” is devoted to 10 major plays; the non-hilarious “Merchant of Venice” is the only comedy among them. I wish Garber had included at least one of the lighter comedies, or addressed the question of why none were deemed worthy of attention. I also wish the inappropriately dreary, subtitle-ish title had been appended to something more pithy: “Enter, Fleeing,” perhaps, a frequent Shakespearean stage direction that set Walter Benjamin musing profitably, as Garber notes.
Each chapter explores a single play and various cultural responses to it over the years — in particular, how it relates to one of “the central concepts and topics of literary and cultural investigation for the past hundred-plus years.” “Hamlet” is discussed in concert with changing ideas about “character,” both literary and personal. “Macbeth,” with its fatally misleading prophecies, is investigated through the prism of “the necessity of interpretation.”
So far, so good. It is only when we come to the other major structural formula — linking each play not just with an idea but with at least one modern genre — that things occasionally go awry. When Garber examines the plays through their impact on intrinsically interesting samples of 20th-century culture, the reading is wonderful in its depth of insight and flexible toggling between the Shakespeare texts and the later works. When it is viewed in the light of less rich fare — the pep-speak of business-advice books, or glib media coverage of politicians, sometimes even the movie versions of the plays — the inspiration dries up.
The culminating chapter, titled “ ‘King Lear’: The Dream of Sublimity,” displays Garber at her best, and brings the book to an aptly sublime conclusion. She fruitfully traces the play’s rise to the top spot in the canon during the course of the 20th century, as a work that seemed both to prefigure the horrors of that blood-soaked era and to offer endless stimulation to the thinkers and writers born into it. Garber discusses Samuel Beckett and Jan Kott (who linked Beckett’s “Endgame” and “Lear” in his seminal book “Shakespeare Our Contemporary”) and offers provocative digressions about Albert Camus and many others. Her elucidation of the relationship between zero and nothingness is occasionally marked by “leaps” — to use a term she also dissects brilliantly — that don’t land her anywhere much. The intellectual hopscotching, though, is ultimately an example of lit-crit patternmaking that has the beauty and intricacy of fine lace.
But when Garber spends a few pages of her chapter on “Henry V” analyzing the many ways in which Shakespeare’s characters, especially that rousing leader of the battle-waging “band of brothers,” have been stripped of their ambiguity to serve as exemplars of leadership qualities and modern management techniques, the mind shuts down. As she herself writes at the conclusion of this section: “This kind of work is not useful in illuminating, analyzing or interpreting Shakespeare. It uses Shakespeare, but the use is not commutative. It does not go both ways.” Precisely. So why not spare us?
The paradox I referred to above — the book’s inclusivity as both an asset and a problem — derives from the issue Garber cogently describes here. I can’t argue with her when she includes a list of occasions on which comparisons to Lady Macbeth have been used to demonize women politicians. But the point will be obvious to anybody paying attention to the currents of popular culture. Similarly, in the chapter about “Richard III,” centered on the elusiveness of “fact,” Garber provides a long list of recent examples of “the temptations to rewrite history”: the weapons of mass destruction argument for waging war on Iraq, the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman stories, and (yawn) even James Frey. These digressions are time wasters, and have a Google-searchy quality that detracts from the far more edifying work Garber does elsewhere in exploring Shakespeare’s impact on modern art and thought. (She’s particularly astute on Freud.)
In the end, the nourishing material far outweighs the thinner gruel. And Garber’s aim, to encourage a deep engagement with the plays by emphasizing their ubiquity in modern culture, is so exemplary that the book’s occasional descent from the stimulating to the trite is forgivable. A fierce devotion to Shakespeare shines forth from every page. And, really, to corrupt a phrase made famous by Ali MacGraw, loving Shakespeare means never having to say you’re sorry."
SHAKESPEARE AND MODERN CULTURE
By Marjorie Garber
Illustrated. 326 pp. Pantheon Books. $30
