Shakespeare and Marx (review)

It is unlikely that a short book devoted to apparent commonalities between an important political thinker and a major playwright would be able to advance our knowledge of either figure much. It seems less likely still that partisan devotion to one or the other of its figures would help the author construct a useful introduction to a diverse range of works in various genres and disciplines. This book, which by and large sees Shakespeare's works as anticipating Marx's social insights, takes an unexpected, even idiosyncratic, approach to its primary subject. So where a review typically details and evaluates the useful things a book does, the limitations of Shakespeare and Marx make it necessary to point out what it does not do.

Shakespeare and Marx does not explore the role of Shakespeare's works in the writings of Marx. It does not provide anything like a competent survey of (or an adequate list of further readings regarding) the large body of Marxist criticism of Shakespeare. Save for occasional quarrels with critical works from the past two decades, in fact, it chooses not to enter into a meaningful conversation with those in Shakespeare studies who practice materialist criticism. Thus, it does not acknowledge the intellectual efforts of many who have labored, however differently from the author of this monograph, to understand Shakespeare in the wake of Marx. Finally, it gives the reader little if any impression of either the constraints of literary criticism under Marxist governments or the much larger wrongs that such governments inflicted on their own people in the service of the ideology this book promotes.

Following a brief introduction in which he quite persuasively observes that "Marxist thinking about culture underlies" much of our teaching and critical theory (1), Egan begins his study with a chapter, "Shakespeare, Marx, Production, and the World of Ideas," that sets out some of the basic concepts of Marxism: the base/superstructure relation, ideology, reification, commodity fetishism, and alienation. Egan's Marxism is upbeat and cheerful: "My conviction is that Marx's view of determination is optimistic and liberating and that it has been misapplied (where it has not simply been misunderstood), with effects quite contrary to Marx's intentions" (11–12). Egan attempts to demonstrate the utility of some of these concepts in a brief examination of Richard II in which "the character of York provides a study of the personal conflicts created when a man tries to suture the ideological rift created by epochal change" (43). As this quotation suggests, it is sometimes difficult to construct a sensitive analysis when there is so much disparity of scale between one's intellectual apparatus (ideology, epochs) and the specifics of dramatic writing (a character in Richard II).

The middle of Egan's work consists of two chapters: "Marx's Influence on Shakespeare Studies to 1968" and "Marx's Influence on Shakespeare Studies since 1968." Egan commences the former with George Bernard Shaw, whose Marxism was too soft, and continues on to Bertolt Brecht, whose Marxism was just right. Discussion of Christopher Caudwell, Alick West, and Ralph Fox's criticism from 1937 follows and is joined by a few stimulating pages—perhaps the best in the book—recuperating E.M.W. Tillyard, whose study of the "intellectual equipment with which one might make sense of a rapidly changing, confusing early modern world" (66) constitutes, in Egan's view, a useful mapping of Elizabethan ideology (3). The post-1968 chapter should actually be labeled "1968–1985," for to Egan's mind "there is little to say about the period after the mid-1980s" (70). To Egan, the wonderful blooming of 1968 reached a kind of false apogee with Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980), a work that is good largely because its author had the opportunity to study with Raymond Williams. Greenblatt went wrong in taking up Clifford Geertz, and the antiessentialism of much criticism since that cultural turn has, in Egan's view, been deeply regrettable. British cultural materialists are...