Fated Sky: The Femina Furens in Shakespeare (review)

In his compact study of the Shakespearean afterlives of Seneca's plays, M. L. Stapleton notes that "comparativists," while acknowledging Antony's indebtedness to Hercules in Antony and Cleopatra, "inevitably ignore the Egyptian queen's similarities to Megaera, Deianira, and Juno" (98). Throughout his book it is Stapleton's task to show how the versions of these and other Senecan figures (Medea, Phaedra, Juno, and Clytemnestra), mediated to Shakespeare via the Elizabethan translations by Heywood, Studley, Newton, Nuce, and others collected in Seneca His Tenne Tragedies, Translated into Englysh (1581), are "reanimate[d]" (79) in and by both Cleopatra and any number of other feminae furentes in Shakespeare's plays. Stapleton's argument examines in turn figures that seem quite logical in this context, namely, Joan (1 Henry VI) and Tamora (Titus Andronicus) in the earlier chapters, and others that seem interestingly counter-intuitive, such as Helena (All's Well) and Imogen (Cymbeline) in later ones. Ultimately he argues that the "pattern of imitative development" moves from "close borrowing" of Senecan figures (Joan and Tamora) through their "comic transfiguration" (Katherine in Shrew and Portia in Merchant), passive-aggressive subsumption (Helena), and tragic transformation (Cleopatra), to their ultimate "exorcism" in the figures of Cymbeline's Imogen and the Queen (128).

Comparatists will be struck by Stapleton's critique of their oversights in a study that displays considerable comparatist credentials of its own. Indeed, Fated Sky invokes a number of theoretical paradigms that Renaissance scholars might associate with the first principles of comparatism and, in good comparatist fashion, relies on citations from both the Elizabethan translations and the original Latin of Seneca's plays. As tempting as it might be, then, to address Stapleton's polemical claim that his study of Shakespeare's angry women is "not a gender study per se" (13), it will be the question of comparatism in Fated Sky that I address in this review. What is a comparative approach to Shakespeare? And if Stapleton's book can itself be called comparative, what is its relationship to the recently much privileged methods of the new historicists and gender critics with whose claims some might say his learned method takes issue? If Fated Sky is more firmly located in, say, English Renaissance or in Shakespeare studies, what does it share with other modes of late-twentieth-century scholarship on Shakespeare from which it—to my mind, unsuccessfully—seeks to distinguish itself?

It is quite clear that the engine of Stapleton's critical machine is located in what he variously refers to as "intertextuality" and "imitation theory" (23 and 27). What such an approach amounts to is one version of comparatism, understood as a kind of side-by-side reading of "broad analogues of rhetoric and character" of three sets of texts (Latin Seneca, Seneca "Englyshed," and Shakespeare), in some cases, and "direct verbal echoes and allusions" in others (14). This is, however, precisely the comparative logic that René Wellek critiqued as a kind of "creditor and debtor calculus in matters of poetry."¹ In Fated Sky, Shakespeare "learn[s]" from (42), "inherits" from (92), and depends on his "literary predecessors" (41) in various ways but is finally the winner in the monodirectional narrative that Stapleton tells about the complex world of textual relations in Renaissance England. A different kind of comparatist might take Shakespeare's corpus as an opportunity to question such myths and the implicitly evolutionary logic on which such an argument relies.

Nevertheless, Fated Sky for the most part adopts this logic. Shakespeare "trans-figur[es]" (18), transposes (19), transmutes (23), "transfuses" (36), "transmogrif[ies]" (66), and in every other way always "competes with and defeats" (19) or "refutes" (95) both the ancients and their Newtonian contemporaries. Prior playwrights and texts may on occasion also "concatenate" in Shakespeare (20) in a way that suggests a more mongrelized (or, more popular among comparatists these days, "hybridized") and less teleological kind of textual mixing...