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The same year the British National
Theatre presented Olivier acting Othello in West Indian accents.
Critics hailed a new Shakespeare and crowds thronged to see the
production in London. My family and I queued up a whole night
for tickets outside Aldwych theatre’s box-office.
With Jan Kott’s
"Shakespeare Our Contemporary" and Peter Brooks’s
production of Lear, Marxist readings were combined with the
perspective of the Theatre of the Absurd. A new generation of
critics such as Kenneth Tynan in Britain, Boris Smirnov in
Russia, Robert Weimann in East Germany and C.L.Barber in America
read the plays partly as folk theatre and partly as subversive
texts indicting Elizabethan power structures.
On the stage
Edward Bond and Tom Stoppard derived their own political
meanings from the plays. Bond’s "Lear" and Stoppard’s
"Rosencrantz and Guildernsten are Dead" are political
adaptations and reinventions of Shakespeare, the latter adding
an existentialist seam to the social meaning.
Though there
were many interpretations of the Shakespearean canon and many
stage and film adaptations, notably by Kurosawa ("Ran","Thrones
of Blood’" and Roland Polanski ("Macbeth"), all
of these were agreed on one basic point. All believed that
Shakespeare was the author of these plays and that he had a
singular grasp of human nature and his own society with all
their comprehensive reach and depth and, most importantly, that
he could render his times with uncanny skill not matched by his
contemporaries or since. They believed, as did early Marxist
critics, Arnold Kettle, T.A.Jackson ("Old Friends to
Keep") and most recently, Victor Kiernan, that ultimately
"the play is the thing". .
The very title
of the present collection, however, indicates a fundamental
shift in the reading and production of Shakespeare’s plays.
Post-structuralism and deconstruction spawned yet more radical
approaches. The text-based approach has now been fragmented into
approaches of difference and diversity. Shakespeare himself has
ceased to be regarded as the author of his texts. He has been
"interpellated" (to use an Althusserianism) into the
discourses of his contemporary culture.
Brian Vickers
sums up the fragmentation of Shakespearean interpretation in
these words: "Surely there must be something wrong with the
critical method that produces the same reading. It ‘reduces’
or dissolves its subject in the same way in which Dr Crippen…
dissolves his victim’s bodies". ("Appropriating
Shakespeare"). A pretty horrific way of reacting to the
"colonisation" of Shakespeare by literary theory’s
latest ram-raiders.
But I do not
think all the essays in the present collection are exercises in
dissolution though quite a few are. There are some valuable new
readings of "Measure for Measure" and of the
conventions of production, particularly in terms of Pierre
Bourdieu. What are most significant in this collection are two
readings of Marx and Derrida negotiated through
"Hamlet". The first two essays are truly enlightening.
Of this more later.
Before we
proceed to look at some of the essays it is worth asking what
justification has been offered for the title. The editors lean
on Stuart Hall’s well-known argument that since Marxism as a
grand narrative no longer suffices as a programme of action,
Marxists must come to terms with other critical discourses and
try and work through them.
The complex
relationships between power… is an easier term than
exploitation," Hall observes and goes on to add,
"These important central questions are what are meant by
working within shouting distance of Marxism, working on Marxism,
working against Marxism, working with it, working to try to
develop Marxism."
If we take Hall’s
statement as a methodological resource to be used in
understanding cultural artifacts like Shakespeare plays, then we
must speak of various Marxisms rather than of Marxist
Shakespeares. As this collection demonstrates, it is the same
Shakespeare that the critics address, but different variations
on Marxism provide the methodological tools.
The trouble
with these essays is their eclecticism, their forced marriage of
various discourses other than Marxism that operate on one single
historical entity, the Shakespeare play. The fragmentation of
these discourses is transferred to Shakespeare himself whose
work, in spite of diverse readings we bring to it, remains
indivisible.
With these
caveats entered, it is time now to look at the essays more
closely. As I said above, the really enlightening essays are by
Peter Stallybrass and Richard Halperin. They are enlightening
because they reflect on history through the vision of
Shakespeare’s "Hamlet".
Stallybrass
throws light on Karl Marx’s "Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte" by way of Marx’s invocation of Hamlet in the
essay (the other significant interpretation I have read is by
the art critic Clement Greenberg in the 70s.). ‘"Marx
pursues a double strategy … through the first strategy history
is represented as a catastrophic decline from Napoleon to Louis
Bonaparte…In the second strategy the effect of repetition is
to unsettle the status of the origin."
Marx recalls
both Hamlet’s advice to Yorrick’s skull and Robin Goodfellow
to burrow into bourgeois hypocrisies and to prepare for
revolution. Connecting literature with history offers a solid
homology between the two without compromising the uniqueness of
Shakespeare.
Neither Marx
nor Hamlet has been diminished in this mutual critique. Just as
Hamlet’s father unsettles the order in Denmark, Louis
Bonaparte’s presence in France threatens the powers that be.
Stallybrass’s perceived connections make many references clear
and shore up our faith in the genuine Marxist methodology of
connecting the text and the world.
Richard
Halperin makes a strategic manoeuvre through Hamlet to
deconstruct Derrida’s denigration of Marxism. In his
controversial "Spectres of Marx" Derrida turns largely
on Hamlet’s line "time is out of joint" and reads
the play as a ghost story in which the self-sufficiency of the
present is undone by the spectres of the past. (This is the
elder Hamlet’s role, according to Derrida).
As the lover of
verbal puns and pranks, Derrida celebrates the spectres, the
ghosts as "they survive the collapse of Communism".
But far from endorsing Marxism, Derrida denounces Marx’s own
meta-narrative as a "totalistic" programme. Halpern
sees the ruse and uncovers it. Derrida makes Marx into a hollow
messiah while he harnesses his "spectres" to his own
anti-Communist programme.
The other
essays are instances of the old New Historicism yet again. They
regard Shakespeare not as a representative writer of his age,
but as the expression of the discourse energy
"circulating" in the period and present in all
writers, major or minor, as well as in other social formations.
Marxism is not necessarily the guiding principle here, nor are
class interests the motivating energies. But debunking
Shakespeare is. Reducing the bard to a mere discourse is. These
essays are more Foucauldian than Marxist and to call them
Marxist is to stand Marxism on its head.
The essay on
Othello shows the method with all its possibilities and
limitations. The author takes a hard look at Desdemona’s
handkerchief and removes the veil of sentimentality surrounding
this object given as love-token by Othello to his wife. Research
reveals the handkerchief as a product of female labour, which
did not receive fair recompense from the contemporary
patriarchal order.
By transferring
a product of female labour to mere domesticity, Shakespeare is
accused of participating in the patriarchal discourse. I think
this a crude but ingenious way of marrying Marxism and feminism
with all the privileges reserved for the latter. It tells us a
lot about feminism’s agenda, but precious little about the
play, a chronic flaw in most feminist readings.
Similarly, the
essay on "Merry Wives of Windsor" uses the idea of the
male gaze to supervise female property, the wife. Here the
author celebrates the ways the merry wives bring down the male
predator in the manner of Lysistrata in Aristophanes’s comedy.
The essay on the management of mirth draws upon Bourdieu’s
ideas of class and distinction to understand the status of the
players in the Elizabethan theatre.
The essay on
the Globe theatre is a textbook account of the theatre house and
its hierarchical seating arrangements reflecting the hierarchy
of status in contemporary society. The essay on
"Shakespeare and Film" reveals the homogenising trends
of the American popular culture which pays lip service to
multiculturalism but is moved solely by the profit motive.
By far the most
appealing essay for me is on "Measure for Measure". I
think it respects the utopian element in Marxism by recalling
Herbert Marcuse’s statement in "The Aesthetic
Dimension" to the effect that art embodies futuristic
traits in its critique of the present. It also emphasises the
prophetic quality of Shakespeare’s genius in that it reveals
the hypocrisies inherent in the contemporary notion of justice.
"Measure for Measure" comes clean about its
implication in the structures of subjection it depicts, inciting
us "to be wary of art’s complicity with power".
This statement
is understood in relation with Shakespeare’s grasp of the
intricacies of domination practised by the Duke behind the masks
of mercy. It is the mask that reveals the realty, a paradox
Shakespeare revels in.
Marxism, as
Perry Anderson reminds us, grasps the relationship of capitalism
and culture in our times and its utopian element is valid in
spite of setbacks in Europe. Oscar Wilde believed that "the
map of the world without utopia is not worth looking at".
Marxism always keeps us orientated towards the future.
Perhaps this is
why Marx set so much store by Shakespeare and the Greek
tragedians. Shakespeare’s myriad-mindedness calls forth
similar resources of knowledge from his readers, and Marx
himself was a prodigious reader. So are the New Historicists (Greenblatt’s
recent "Hamlet in Purgatory" is an instance). But,
then, they read beyond Shakespeare into a different territory,
the bard being incidental to their extra-literary ambitions.
That, as the wheedling,
incorrigible but always lovable Falstaff would have said, is a
thousand pities!
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