Shakespeare and Appropriation (review)

A recent volume in Routledge's Accents on Shakespeare series, Shakespeare and Appropriation turns its focus away from historicist criticism's interest in the specificity and complexity of Shakespeare's originating contexts. Instead, the essays collected here are concerned with Shakespeare's afterlife.

Divided into two parts, "Appropriation in Theory" and "Appropriation in Practice," the volume draws on Michael Bristol's notion of "big-time" and "small-time" Shakespeare. The first section offers instances of cultural critique exploring how Shakespeare has functioned as a vehicle for accruing power, prestige, and cultural capital. This section includes essays by Ivo Kamps on contests among contemporary critics over the Shakespearean corpus, Terence Hawkes on the nostalgic longing for a lost Liberal England at work in Arthur Quiller-Couch's establishment of Shakespeare studies at Cambridge, Laurie Osborne on Shakespeare's frequent and contradictory appearances in contemporary romance novels, and Sudipto Chatterjee and Jyotsna Singh on how an 1848 performance of Othello in Calcutta participates in and disrupts Shakespeare as a means of cultural surveillance of colonial power relations. The second section, "Appropriation in Practice," offers pieces of literary criticism on localized, individual acts of revision that provide a forum for playing around with Shakespeare or for defying his cultural authority. These include essays by Caroline Cakebread on Jane Smiley's resistant appropriation of King Lear in A Thousand Acres, James Andreas Sr. on Gloria Naylor's Mama Day as an instance of the African-Americanization of the Bard, Georgianna Ziegler on nineteenth-century efforts to accommodate Lady Macbeth to Victorian notions of womanhood, Robert Sawyer on Robert Browning's efforts to borrow on Shakespeare's cultural authority for his own poetic status, Lisa S. Starks on recent film versions of Hamlet and their engagement with psychoanalytic traditions, and Richard Finkelstein on the use of Shakespeare in Disney films to authorize certain repressive models of development. The collection closes with an afterword by Gary Taylor arguing that, despite widespread circulation, Shakespeare's reputation is diminishing, as well as a helpfully annotated list of further reading by Matt Kozusko.

Appropriation takes a variety of forms in these discussions: casual citation or allusion, more sustained reworking of plots and characters, efforts to exploit or benefit from the cultural authority associated with the Bard, or efforts to resist that very authority, working against particular values or cultural narratives Shakespeare has come to authorize. Throughout the volume, we see how appropriation works to make Shakespeare serve the purposes of later cultural or historical moments.

In some instances there is something "in" Shakespeare that is potentially dangerous and hence must be neutralized or negotiated. Ziegler's reading of Victorian responses to Lady Macbeth in "Accommodating the Virago," for example, studies how Lady Macbeth is constructed as larger than life and thus safely distanced from the Victorian present, or is a figure "tamed" by being tied to a particular actress's performance or pictorial representation. Singh's and Chatterjee's study of the conflicted critical responses to the casting of a Bengali actor in the role of Othello in colonial India notes reviewers' anxious silence over the question of mixed-race coupling. They demonstrate how Bustomchurn Addy's Bengali performance collapses distinctions erected in European efforts to categorize gradations of race. Finkelstein addresses how Disney films reify concepts of natural order, effacing the contingency of appeals to these notions in Shakespeare's plays. Sawyer analyzes how Browning's institutionalization as the Victorian Bard, replacing Shakespeare even as he has drawn on Shakespeare's cultural authority, is in part an effort to deflect attention from the homoeroticism of the sonnets. Hawkes discusses how Quiller-Couch's gooey vision of an essentially English Arden clashes with the "foreign" intrusion of the Hymen material in his edition of As You Like It. Starks unpacks how Branagh's father-obsessed film version of Hamlet disavows the identification with the maternal, an identification that she sees at work...