Stanley Cavell's American Dream: Shakespeare, Philosophy, and Hollywood Movies (review)

Surely it's reasonable to hope that the only person to have composed both a major reading of Shakespeare and a seminal text for film studies (and a moving book in response to Walden, and a monumental thesis wrestling with Wittgenstein, and other significant studies of Emerson, Nietzsche, Heidegger, J. L. Austin—simply commencing such a list is daunting . . .)—surely it's somewhat reasonable to want this singular person to address Shakespeare on film? In face of the plenitude of what Stanley Cavell has produced, this desire admittedly verges on ingratitude, even insolence; but it's a desire that persists for me nonetheless. Cavell's work on Shakespeare and film has thus far attended to what might be termed cinema's "inheritance" of Shakespeare. Thus Pursuits of Happiness (1981) draws on Shakespearean comedy and romance to articulate its genre of "Hollywood comedies of remarriage;" an essay on North by Northwest from that same year considers how Hitchcock's film might be said to "compete" with Hamlet; and more recent pieces (on Bergman and Rohmer) reflect on A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Winter's Tale. Cavell invariably traces provocative filiations, and scholars of Shakespeare on film would do well to return to these meditations, which delineate a mode of Shakespearean reference far more nuanced than overt allusion. Yet, somewhat startlingly, there is, to my knowledge, no instance where he directly addresses a cinematic adaptation of a Shakespearean play.¹ (Although there are those who have taken up such projects in his name—see Poague and Crowl.) Given that so many of these Shakespearean adaptations emerged in the last three decades, and given that Cavell's rendezvous with film initially concentrated on a personal canon of pre-1960 productions, perhaps this should not be surprising. For whatever reason, Cavell has not preoccupied himself with what it means to screen an adaptation of a theatrical play, and I am left wondering what we are to make of what appears to be something of a reticence on his part.²

It was with some of this same greediness in mind—wanting more when you've already received so much—that I approached Lawrence Rhu's new book, Stanley Cavell's American Dream: Shakespeare, Philosophy, and Hollywood Movies, which appears alongside a cluster of recent collections aiming to stake a claim for Cavell's significance in the fields described by Rhu's subtitle, as well as political theory. For those who find the autobiographical inclination grating in Cavell (and even more pointedly manifest in his latest work³ ), Rhu's book might similarly strike them as overly confessional at moments. Rhu describes being overwhelmed by Cavell's writings while in graduate literary study, some years before Rhu discovered ways in which he could own up to this admiration. As Rhu recollects on the first page:

My enthusiasm for Stanley Cavell's work proved impossible to resist despite what seemed the dictates of prudence and professionalism. One day I found myself writing an essay about Ariosto as a source in Much Ado about Nothing, where honesty required me to acknowledge in the footnotes repeated debts to Cavell's writings about Hollywood movies. What is going on here? I wondered to myself, and I was pretty much lost after that . . . . This book is my response to that moment and many others enough like it for me finally to learn how to acknowledge at least their family resemblance, the cycles of lostness and recovery that have moved me to think and write about Stanley Cavell.

(xi)

This is not the first time a writer has used a book's Acknowledgments as an opportunity to acknowledge Stanley Cavell (and his work on acknowledging)—his former philosophy students have done so, as have others from literary studies (e.g. Guillory ix–x; Berger x–xiv). But you can catch in Rhu's early words...