Shakespeare's Feminine Endings: Disfiguring Death in the Tragedies (review)

Shakespeare's Feminine Endings: Disfiguring Death in the Tragedies. By Philippa Berry. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Pp. xiv + 197. Illus. $85.00 cloth, $24.99 paper.

Philippa Berry's meditation on the ends of the major Shakespearean tragedies recalls our attention to the contrarian relationship between Shakespearean rhetoric and the apparently relentless teleology of tragic action. In a series of close readings, Berry describes a pattern of feminizing bodily rhetoric that disrupts--Berry's preferred word is "differs" as in différer--the fixed categories of gender on which masculine heroic closure depends. Concentrating in particular on the obscene puns that cluster around the death of key female characters, Berry argues that these feminizing tropes "perform an allusive reweaving both of tragic teleology and of orthodox conceptions of death" (3). Reading against the grain of such orthodoxies, Shakespeare's Feminine Endings will provide a "feminist version of anamorphosis," reversing perspective to show how "a polymorphous and heterodox version of material vitality is concealed beneath the cultural facades of death" (8).

For Berry it is primarily the ritual, pre-modern, and folk underside of Shakespearean rhetoric that helps us to read generic orthodoxies "awry." Her vision might have been subtitled "Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy" for its interest in a Bakhtinian "lower stratum" of sedimented meanings (3). As she teases out the meanings of key puns over the course of several chapters, Berry recycles them through their diverse cultural contexts: neostoic philosophy, classical allusion, contemporary politics, religious rhetoric, nationalist myth, etc. (Considering her central themes, contemporary death-bed practices would have enriched this historical unpacking.) Seeking a common ethos that animates such allusive rhetoric, Berry finds it in vitalism, a late-Renaissance movement in natural history. The principal features of vitalism--its materialism, its concept of an undifferentiated, originary flux of time, matter, and spirit--inform the dynamic materialism of Shakespearean rhetoric. Thus familiar bawdies--puns on hairs/airs/heirs, compt/cunt, ars/arse, and the constellation of Os that conjure mourning, nothings, mouths, and anuses--partake of a wider humanist discourse of spiritualized nature, an anti-Great-Chain-of-Being in which "all seeming opposites, including the categories of death and birth, ultimately coincide" (13).

Arguments about the major tragedies thread through the six chapters of the book, with brief excursions into Titus Andronicus, Antony and Cleopatra, and the Sonnets. (But not the romances--Hermione would have been a welcome inclusion in a study of feminine rhetoric and tragic telos.) The different parts of Berry's meditation find their centers of gravity in specific plays. A chapter on "double dying" explores images of death not as end but as process and features Romeo and Juliet. Aural echoes in Othello and Hamlet reframe death as consolatory repetition. Shakespearean chiaroscuro, in Othello and the Sonnets, reveals supplementary, unfixable qualities of female sexuality that defy visual closure. Pre-modern conceptions of time, figured in the cycles of Fortuna, forestall eschatological closure in Macbeth. Lear questions all sovereign ends.

Advancing the alternative perspective of "feminist anamorphosis," Berry finds fruitful comparison between Shakespeare's feminizing rhetoric and the Kristevan "semiotic." Kristeva coins the term (le sémiotique) to describe somatic and aural qualities of language she associates with the maternal and with musical effects of poetry. This music of rhythm and tone breaks through the symbolic elements of language, introducing alterity and destabilizing the unified subject. Similar structures organize the dramatic rhetoric that interests Berry, where polysemy, homophony, obscenity, and cyclical sound effects work against the apparent consolidation of the tragic subject. Thus, Berry argues in chapter 2, the "echoic language" of Shakespeare's dying heroines effects an uncanny apotheosis of feminine difference--a dramatic translation of the Renaissance subject beyond immediate circumstance, political position, social demand, and other cultural ends. In the Willow songs, for example, "interwoven voices of the living, the dead, and the non-human make the vocal reverberations which were especially characteristic of complaint (in...