Shakespeare’s Freedom (review)

Under the author’s name on the elegant cover of this slim volume is the phrase “author of Will in the World.” Like that acclaimed biography of Shakespeare, this book aims for a crossover audience of well-educated people who aren’t academics, or at least not Shakespeare scholars, and its author’s name promises them a good read with intellectual substance. The book originated in two different lecture series, the Adorno Lectures at the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt and the Campbell Lectures at Rice University, and its chapters have the dynamic appeal of verbal performance for which Greenblatt is well known.

To be invited to deliver a series of endowed lectures is to enjoy a certain kind of freedom: the freedom to aim high for broad yet distinctive ideas that will catch the interest of a seasoned but nonspecialist audience, and the freedom from copious acknowledgments to other toilers in the field, tedious documentation, and intricate argumentation. Greenblatt excels at this sort of performance. The title hints at bardolatry, but the title is something of an irony, for though the first sentence declares with bravado, “Shakespeare as a writer is the embodiment of human freedom” (1), by the second paragraph, Greenblatt cautions that Shakespeare “embodied” limits that “served as the enabling condition of his particular freedom” (1). In an introduction and four chapters, the book circles around this and related paradoxes that the author considers to be at the core of Shakespeare’s artistry: imperfection as the hallmark of beauty, hatred as negation that also confers individuality, power that questions its own legitimacy, and autonomy that can exist only in the imagination and through the fictions it creates.

Though the argument is broad, it is Greenblatt’s cunning close readings that establish its grip and edge. He begins with a peculiar minor character in Measure for Measure: Barnardine, the drunken, “desperately mortal,” unrepentant murderer, nine years a prisoner, who doesn’t deny his guilt but “will not consent to die” when finally called to be executed. Lightly tracing the established interpretation of Barnardine as one of many figures of substitution in the play—the devious duke-disguised-as-friar seeks to put his severed head in place of the wrongly condemned Claudio’s—Greenblatt comes to rest on Barnardine “as an emblem of the freedom of the artist to remake the world” (13). For in refusing to die, Barnardine absurdly but successfully “disrupts the logic of substitution” (12). The duke considers it “damnable” to execute an unrepentant man, so the criminal is spared, another head is found, and substitution resumed. At the end, in a gesture echoing the previous reprieve, the duke first condemns Barnardine to death, then inexplicably pardons him. Greenblatt reads this pardon as both “an emblem of the power of the sovereign over the life and death of his subjects and, still more, as an emblem of the playwright’s power to suspend or alter all ordinary social rules” (14)—a power that stops at the playhouse door, however. Furthermore, Barnardine’s “insistent peculiarity and particularity” (14), says Greenblatt, epitomizes Shakespeare’s fashioning of characters as individuals who refuse or fail to fit “his culture’s cherished norms” (15). For more than ten pages, unpacking resonant images and ironic turns of phrase, telling the story of Barnardine and that of the duke who uses but then refuses his power over him, the author holds his readers rapt as he turns this minor character into a representative of his multifaceted argument.

Chapter 2, “Shakespeare’s Beauty Marks,” argues that Shakespeare’s representations of human beauty constitute a “great innovation” (42) in that he violates the prevailing cultural ideal of “the smooth, unblemished, radiantly fair, and essentially featureless face and body” (38). In the “dark ladies” of Love’s Labor’s Lost and Romeo and Juliet and in Cleopatra, he creates instead a non-normative beauty linked to “strange, idiosyncratic, imperfect” traits and “a quality of individuation that shatters the ideal of...