Mutability and Division on Shakespeare's Stage (review)

The title of this engaging book is somewhat misleading. The term "division" refers not (as one might expect) to social and political divisions, but to the characters' "divided desires" (longings for incompatible things), and while Yu Jin Ko alludes to early modern stage conventions and to productions in which he has been involved, his focus is not on the stage or staging per se. Further, while he is concerned with "mutability," the abstract Spenserian term seems euphemistic compared, say, to Hamlet's earthy image of a king on a progress through the guts of a beggar. The working title of the manuscript (found on Ko's section of the Wellesley College website) is actually more helpful: "The Performance of Autonomy on Shakespeare's Stage."

Taking as his point of departure the neopragmatism of Richard Rorty, Ko accepts (with some modification) Rorty's claim that "at an irreducibly fundamental level, the private is, and must be, separated from the public" (12). Quoting philosopher Bernard Yack, Ko argues that historicists, materialists, and feminist critics all exhibit the longing that arises from the "(mistaken) conviction that the fullest 'realization of our humanity' can be achieved only when 'our autonomy is embodied in our institutions'" (11–12). While they nominally reject the absolute and the sublime, such critics create a "divinized version of the self as constituted by individuation" or a "sacramentalized community defined by a collective essence" (29). In rethinking the conflict between public and private, Ko says, hisgoal became to show not "how a philosophical approach . . . can illuminateShakespeare, but . . . how Shakespeare can illuminate it" (13). Further, since the plays dramatize "the enduring human needs that lead both to division and [to futile] attempts at integration," he suggests that they "offer a way of reading their critics with a measure of deep sympathy" (34). His introduction offers a case in point: Hamlet's desire at the play's end to "let be," to let "divinity" shape his end, and his contradictory impulse to control his individual and particular "story" and his plea to Horatio to stay alive to "tell" it (5.2.349). The six chapters of the book take up these themes in eight plays (Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Antony and Cleopatra, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, Hamlet, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest). While Ko sees characters' views of mortality as the key to their divided desires, the link was not always clear to me; however, his elegant readings of the plays were not therefore significantly diminished.

Ko is at his best when he reminds us of details that critics of a particular disposition (and directors) often overlook. His discussion of Twelfth Night begins with Viola's insistence that Sebastian "Embrace [her] not" until she has resumed her female garb. Ko reads this moment as an echo of the risen Christ's words to Mary Magdalen ("Noli me tangere"). Viola's prohibition — if observed in performance, which it often is not — poignantly postpones (until after the end of the play) both the joyous reunion of brother and sister and the visual reestablishment of Viola's female identity. It is thus of a piece with all the deferred and displaced longings in the play. Further, by preserving the ambiguous identity of Viola/Caesario and the boy-actor, this moment foregrounds all the "substituted" objects of desire (Viola/Caesario for Olivia's lost brother, Sebastian for Caesario, Caesario/Viola for Olivia in Orsino's affections, etc.) and prolongs, at least imaginatively, the freedom and the pain Viola (and perhaps the actor) have "enjoyed" in disguise. Indeed, Ko points out, though it is easy to "deride" the indulgence of romantic longing by Orsino and others, given that all satisfactions inevitably fall short of imagined fulfillments, the characters are "in fact enjoying the deepest satisfaction available" in a mutable world (57).

Ko also challenges readings of Twelfth Night that see romantic and worldly success as rationed strictly in...