'The Genius of Shakespeare' by Jonathan Bate PDF

Preview

Summary

1240 Sixteenth Century Journal XLI/4 (2010) . SCJ The Genius of Shakespeare, 10th anniversary edition. Jonathan Bate. O x f o r d : O x f o r d University Press, 2008. 432 pp. $24.95. ISBN 978-0-19-537299-1. REVIEWED BY: John Tangney, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Jonathan Bate brings...

Description

1240

Sixteenth Century Journal XLI/4 (2010)

.

SCJ

The Genius of Shakespeare, 10th anniversary edition. Jonathan Bate. O x f o r d : O x f o r d University Press, 2008. 432 pp. $24.95. ISBN 978-0-19-537299-1. REVIEWED BY: John Tangney, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Jonathan Bate brings common sense to bear on a variety of questions exercising Shakespeareans both inside and outside of the academy. After defending his academic colleagues against a litany of anti-Stratfordian conspiracy theorists who have characterized them as bumbling lackwits, he goes on to argue with Harold Bloom’s excessively bardolatrous account of Shakespeare’s agon with Marlowe. He historicizes our contemporary bardolatrous tendencies by recounting the antipathy of eighteenth-century

Book Reviews

1241

French neoclassicism to Shakespearean values, and Shakespeare’s appropriation by the Romantics during whose ascendancy his characters became iconic types, separate from the plays in which they originated. This is a point that has been made by others in much more polemical ways in the last few years, and Bate’s account of it is refreshingly free of demystifying zeal. Ultimately, he agrees, at least in part, with almost everyone he engages, and his unexceptionable conclusion is that Shakespeare’s genius is the result of historical contingencies, but only insofar as those contingencies and the exceptional qualities of Shakespeare’s work were mutually reinforcing. For Bate, Shakespeare is the universal standard of literary excellence, but it did not have to be that way. Shakespeare had two Darwinian advantages that gave him the edge over his contemporaries. These advantages were his adaptability and availability. The adaptability stems from his myriad-mindedness, his ability to mean many things at once. It includes the fact that he wrote drama rather than novels and so avoided having a determinate subject position. But this advantage was also possessed by Spanish playwright Lope de Vega. Other English writers of the period did not become “Shakespeare” because their work is insufficiently complex or is in the wrong genre. The reason why Shakespeare and not de Vega became the genius of subsequent world literature is because of the former’s availability: the hegemony of the language in which he wrote and his translation into hundreds of minority languages meant that he could survive the decline of the British Empire, while de Vega’s chances were dashed by the early failure of the Spanish Empire. The intrinsic qualities that make Shakespeare so universally interesting were first articulated by Keats in the idea of “negative capability” and found a twentieth-century scientific counterpart in the uncertainty principle of Werner Heisenberg. Bate sees Shakespeare as coming into his own in an era hospitable to the idea that something could be both wave and particle, rather than simply either/or. The twentieth century was the period in which it became unnecessary to see the plays as products of a determinate biography, or of a specific ideology. Bate prefers Empson to Derrida as a thinker about Shakespeare’s polysemous fecundity. While conceding a certain amount to their insights, he resists what Bloom called “The School of Resentment” and what he, less combatively, calls “The New Iconoclasm.” Those who have turned Shakespeare’s genius into an evanescent nonentity produced by the play of signifiers, or into an instrument of imperialist oppression, are weak misreaders of Keats and more especially of the quantum revolution in physics. They do not understand that the theory of relativity still conceives of one “absolute”: the velocity of light. Bate thinks of Shakespeare’s genius as having become analogous to the velocity of light in our culture: something that measures the limits of our ability to think about what “genius” might mean. Shakespeare can only be performed, not theorized. In a politic move, Wittgenstein and the ordinary language philosophers are advanced in support of this argument rather than the embattled Harold Bloom. In a new afterword Bate tells us that the book did very well in Britain on first publication, but flopped in America. Since then a spate of movies has given the idea of Shakespeare’s genius a new lease on life in the American popular imagination. The book’s publication in a tenth anniversary edition also seems to coincide with a relaxation of attitudes towards dead white male authors among academic readers. Its scope is wider than the American culture wars, evincing a British concern with class rather than race or gender. It embraces those who think Shakespeare wasn’t aristocratic enough to be the author of the Shakespearean canon and those who deny that there is any such thing as an author, groups who are so far apart as to have nothing to say to each other, and whose only common ground is their attention to “Shakespeare.” Whether Bate’s approach represents a privileged indifference to the passions driving most Shakespearean commentary during the era in

1242

Sixteenth Century Journal XLI/4 (2010)

which it was written, or a rare kind of liberal tolerance, or both, might be debated. He distances himself from suspicious reading practices, not by polemical means, but performatively, and for that his book has gained widespread respect among public intellectuals, writers, and actors, as evidenced by the plaudits on its back cover. SCJ...